In Here the People Rule: Selected Essays (Plenum Publishing Corporation, 233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013; $39.50), Edward C. Banfield, of Unheavenly City fame, casts a cool eye on the institution of representative government in its peculiarly American form. Although several of these pieces are printed here for the first time, most of them have appeared in scholarly journals or previously edited volumes; none of them, however, has been either taken or adapted from Professor Banfield’s own books. And yet, as the author himself points out, the collection is not a miscellany but a selection of essays upon a single, though broad, theme: “the extreme fragmentation of formal authority” that characterizes the American political system, and which Banfield considers to be its “analytically most interesting” feature.
Descriptive and analytical in approach, Banfield eschews the prescriptive: “The reason for not making recommendations is that I do not see how, after explaining why things are as they are, one can go on to say how they could be different.” His view, he admits, is a conservative one, but not
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