In this chapter, I trace the evolution of the influential field of interest group theory from the 1920s to the 1950s. Two consequential things happened in this empirically oriented literature. First, the social ontology introduced by pluralists and theorists of process could be taken as given, accepted as factual descriptions of the political process. Second, community was reconceptualized and relegated to the status of a presupposition, now under the name of "consensus," invoked as a restraint on group conflict and a foundation for modern political life without being a topic of debate in its own right. This provided the discipline of political science with the rudiments of what would become an influential and lasting behavioralist solution to the problem of social order.

In this chapter and the next, I describe and analyze critical analyses of power and domination, starting in the late 1950s with the power research of Floyd Hunter and C. Wright Mills. After these efforts, the problem of social order could no longer be plausibly addressed by reference to community, consensus, or consent to authority. Instead, social order came to look like a structural or systemic effect of power or domination.