Déjà Vu,All Over Again: A Comment on Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson,“Winner-Take-All Politics”

C. Wright Mills , The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1967); G. William Domhoff , Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967).

Charles Lindblom , Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Lawrence R. Jacobs , "Democracy and Capitalism: The Limits of Oligarchic Rule," Politics & Society (IN PRESS).

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, The New Class War (New York: Pantheon, 1982) and The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New York: New Press, 1997); Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy (New York: Penguin, 1983); Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986).

Elizabeth Drew, Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption (New York: Macmillan, 1983); William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); David Cay Johnston, Perfectly Legal (New York: Portfolio, 2003); Robert Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980); Kevin Philips, Wealth and Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2002).

Yet it is also true that most of sociology has, in recent years, neglected Mills’s project of studying the power elite.

In fact, a reform movement labeled "Perestroika" emerged precisely to challenge this narrowing of scholarship in the discipline. Kristen R. Monroe, ed., Perestroika: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

Steven Lukes , Power: A Radical View (New York: Macmillan, 1974); John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness (Oxford, UK: Clarendon , 1980).

The triumphalism of the period was exemplified in Frances Fukyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, American Political Science Association, American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality ( Washington, DC: American Political Science Association , 2004).

Frances Fox Piven, "Response to ‘American Democracy in an Age of Inequality,’" PSonline (January 2006): 43-46; Jacob S. Hacker, "Inequality, American Democracy, and American Political Science: The Need for Cumulative Research," PSonline (January 2006): 47-49.

Eric Foner , Tom Paine and Revolutionary America ( New York : Oxford University Press, 1976); Richard K. Matthews , The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984).

Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Free Press, 1935/1986); Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1921); William W. Fisher, Morton Horwitz, and Thomas Reed, eds., American Legal Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Robert Brady, Business as a System of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1944/2001); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942); Harold Laski, The American Democracy: A Commentary and Interpretation (New York: Viking, 1948).

Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); Fred Block, Revising State Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

Lindblom, Politics and Markets; Robert Dahl, Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

The frame of such an interpretation of U.S. history is provided in Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America ( Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).