ABSTRACT
The importance of political interest groups in the policy process was ably chronicled as early as 1908 by Arthur Bentley in his The Process of Government and later by David Truman in his The Governmental Process. The decade of the sixties saw the beginnings of the marked increase in groups intent on pursuing intangible, normative goals through sophisticated political techniques. The leitmotif of activist reform has been the emergence throughout the political grassroots of individuals whose dedication to a particular form of social justice has enabled escape from lives described by George Steiner as a “gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.” The effects of those interests questioning and opposing America’s involvement in Vietnam, for example, remain important limiting influences on this nation’s power in foreign policy. The liberal tradition and its relationship to the question of governmental authority will be examined through chronological analysis of what might be termed “political ideas.”
