Especially in the USA, the broad consensus applauding this pluralist system – what political scientist Theodore Lowi called ‘interest group liberalism’ (Lowi, 1979) – came under enormous stress with the civil rights, welfare rights, anti-war, and environmental movements of the 1960s, and many academics attacked the system on both descriptive and normative grounds. Those on the left, like Lowi, emphasized the inequalities that the process preserved and promoted, while those on the right (led by economists such as George Stigler and James Buchanan) emphasized the distortions that interestgroup incentives and behavior created in the polity and economy. This odd intellectual alliance of Left and Right was soon joined by the egalitarian, often populist critical legal studies movement, which argued that legal doctrine was deformed by some of the same organizational and political incentives and dynamics identified by the political scientists and economists. In the 1970s, these ‘public choice’ critiques of the role of interest groups began to dislodge pluralism as the ruling academic paradigm, while discrediting its procedural, functionalist, and often reductionist conception of the public interest. Such critiques, however, generally failed to offer a convincing alternative. And there the debate rests, both within liberalism and against it.