Those views are set out in two articles separated by 20 years: "The Science Of 'Muddling Through'" (1959) and “Still Muddling, Not yet through” (1979), both of which were published in Public Administration Review.
Together with his friend, colleague, and fellow Yale Professor Robert A. Dahl, Lindblom was a champion of the polyarchy (or pluralistic) view of political elites and governance in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.
When certain groups of elites gain crucial advantages, become too successful and begin to collude with one another instead of compete, polyarchy can easily turn into corporatism or oligarchy.
Related to that is the concurrent concentration of the mass communications media into an oligopoly, which effectively controls who gets to participate in the national dialogue and who suffers a censorship of silence.
Originally, Dahl too disagreed with many of Lindblom's observations and conclusions, but in a later work How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, he also became critical of polyarchy in general and its U.S. form in particular.
The most important of them is that the market system is the best mechanism yet devised for creating and fostering wealth and innovation, but it is not very efficient at assigning non-economic values and distributing social or economic justice.