In the nature of things a political conflict among special interests is never restricted to the groups most immediately interested. - Elmer Eric Schattschneider

One possible synthesis of pressure politics and party politics might be produced by describing politics as the socialization of conflict. That is to say, the political process is a sequence: conflicts are initiated by highly motivated, hightension groups so directly and immediately involved that it is difficult for them to see the justice of competing claims.

Political conflict is not like a football game, played on a measured field by a fixed number of players in the presence of an audience scrupulously excluded from the playing field. Politics is much more like the original primitive game of football in which everybody was free to join, a game in which the whole population of one town might play the entire population of another town moving freely back and forth across the countryside.

It is the losers in intrabusiness conflict who seek redress from public authority. The dominant business interests resist appeals to the government. The role of the government as the patron of the defeated private interest sheds light on its function as the critic of private power relations.