ABSTRACT
The focus of pluralism is the game of politics and its rules. In so far as pluralist theory contains an image of the state it is an image of a weak, decentralized and fragmented state. It is true that postwar welfare states in Europe and America grew to control the allocation of vast expenditures. State bureaucracies sometimes took on the roles of ‘honest broker’ or ‘referee’, and sometimes this entailed intervention on behalf of the powerless (see Dunleavy and O'Leary, 1987, pp. 44–9). But pluralist theory did not find in this experience principles governing the relationship between society and the state that were substantially different from the earlier traditional conceptions of liberalism. Neo-corporatism re-introduced ‘the active state’ and construed the postwar experience in terms of the state’s pivotal role in mediating between the politico-economic interests central to capitalist society. As we shall see, although some political scholars referred to corporatism to describe aspects of interest mediation in the United States, the concept developed on European soil and is more applicable to European politics.
