ABSTRACT
The nature of the linkage between social value theory, corporate power, and political elites as the political spectrum is traversed from left to right is not self-evident. Even before the publication of Politics and Markets, both Dahl and Lindblom clearly had begun a fundamental reappraisal of their own earlier work on power in America. They also confessed to having been overly optimistic regarding the erection of successful planning mechanisms and the achievement of egalitarian social reform. That Politics and Markets was no aberration in the evolution of Lindblom's thought is fully evident in his presidential address to the American Polital Science Association in 1981. Nonetheless liberal-conservative critics in the center and libertarians on the right of the political spectrum have rejected much of Lindblom's analysis, viewing it as either exaggerated or simply wrong-headed, for they do not believe corporations have the political or economic power he attributes to them.
