I want to thank Richard Ellis and Jo Freeman for helpful comments on previous versions of this article. Additionally, this article owes an intellectual debt to Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky, Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership: From Washington Through Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989)

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28. The first of these processes (i.e., shifts in persons' cultural biases arising from changing social circumstances) is stressed by Douglas, , How Institutions ThinkGoogle Scholar. The second (i.e., shifting coalitions among cultures) later came to be emphasized by Ellis, and Wildavsky, , Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership.Google Scholar

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Further any form of abstract theoretical device, such as the conception of shifting cultural coalitions that I am employing here, necessarily misses and misinterprets specific aspects of empirical reality's daunting complexity. There are always reasonable questions as to whether the theoretical purchase such a device provides produces enough in benefits to outweigh the costs in terms of tortured or misleading fits for some range of facts that presses the device near or beyond its limits. I acknowledge that this application of grid-group theory suffers from such problems, but I think that its capacity for revealing a pattern to American political development overshadows these difficulties.

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41. Persons with bifocal cultural biases perceive the world through two distinct lenses. Frequently they view various domains of life through different perspectives (e.g., applying individualism to workplace issues while relying more thoroughly on egalitarianism or hierarchy in family life). Yet “bifocals” are characteristically more sensitive to the limits of their perspectives even in their primary domains of application (e.g., more hesitant than purer individualists about overcoming the Great Depression through market means alone). See Lockhart, Charles, Protecting the Elderly: Culture's Contributions to Explaining Social Policy Decisions (University Park: Perm State University Press, 2001), chap. 2Google Scholar.

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53. In those relatively rare instances in other societies in which individualists are virtually eliminated from societal influence (e.g., the former Soviet Union), the prospects for long-term societal well-being are not encouraging.

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58. Kristen Renwick Monroe suggests that, in political life, persons' objectives are frequently more appropriately conceived as socialized preferences integral to their identities, rather than as choices. Accordingly, she adopts the term “rational action” in place of “rational choice.” See her “The Theory of Rational Action: Origins and Usefulness for Political Science,” in The Economic Approach to Politics, pp. 1–31Google Scholar.

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