ABSTRACT
In a shift from “the lost world of municipal government” to the field now known as urban politics, several major figures in political science played large roles.1 Among them were such prominent scholars as Robert A. Dahl, Wallace S. Sayre, Herbert Kaufman, Edward C. Banfield, and James Q. Wilson.2 In the eyes of some observers, their work of the early 1960s was the golden age of urban political study. Yet the school of thought to which these works contributed so heavily, classic pluralism, was not the main foundation on which subsequent urban scholarship built. Hindsight tells us that the “golden age” bore little long-lasting fruit.
