Periods of disorder in the United States have generally been regarded as evil times which must be terminated as quickly as possible. But in this provocative analysis of our political system, pursuing the argument of his noted study The End of Liberalism, Theodore J. Lowi maintains that political disorder affords new opportunities for effective political action-or that it can, in system of juridical democracy. Professor Lowi presents a convincing case for the workable possibility of juridical democracy-formal democracy, whose main feature is rule of law-as against interest-group democracy, characterized by policy-without-law.

Theodore J. Lowi was John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University. He was elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1990 and was cited as the political scientist who made the most significant contribution to the field during the decade of the 1970s. Among his numerous books are The End of Liberalism and The Pursuit of Justice, on which he collaborated with Robert F. Kennedy.