The Rediscovery of Interest Group Politics

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Abstract
American politics is the politics of interests. Throughout American history, a seamless web of commentary variously accepts, elevates, or bemoans the centrality of interests in political life. Thomas Paine, the first international revolutionary, denounced factions and parties for their tendency to subvert government by using it to further their own particular interests at the expense of the public good. 1 In the Federalist 10, James Madison acknowledged the inevitability of the faction, warned of its potential for majority tyranny, and defended the capacity of a representative republic to check and balance its mischief. Alexis de Tocqueville praised the propensity of Americans to join associations as an essential ingredient of democracy. The radical Democrat William Leggett (1836) recommended the "principle of combination" as the "only effectual mode" of opposing "a common enemy." 2 The protection of interests was central to John C. Calhoun's (1853) theory of the "concurrent majority" that "tends to unite the most opposite and conflicting interests and to blend the whole in one common attachment to the country." 3 Just past midcentury, the eminent political scientist Francis Lieber (1859) argued that "the American spirit of self-government" was dependent upon the nation's "all-pervading associative spirit." During the latter half of the century, attention turned to the rise of the lobby—"an institution peculiar to America," in the words of Arthur G. Sedgwick (1878). That peculiar institution figured prominently in the young Woodrow Wilson's (1885) critique of congressional government.

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