ABSTRACT
For more than twenty-five years Arnold Rose has fused the liberal ethos with the sociological imagination. The attempt of Arnold Rose is clear enough: to effect a reconciliation of power theories by employing the political analyses of the pluralists, from Bentley to Key, and the sociological methods of the elitist school, particularly the contemporary work of Mills and Hunter. One serendipitous finding made by Rose is the degree to which his empirical researches demonstrate a gap between civics and politics, between perceptions of influence and basic political issues within the nation. There is a strong undertone to Rose's remarks which clearly places him, no matter how dissatisfied he is with the results of Mills, on the side of the "classical" tradition, precisely because political sociology comes to represent the study of social interaction among political men, and not the study of electoral victories among nonpolitical men.
