FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS : 

An Analysis of the Writings of Gabriel Almond 

alcott Parsons began his first major sociological study with a 

T rhetorical question. " Who, " he asked, "now reads Spencer? " 

His implicit answer was, hardly anyone, and he agreed with Crane 

Brinton that Spencer was " Dead by suicide or at the hands of 

person or persons unknown. " Today many sociologists are beginning to ask the same question about Parsons himself. Parsons never 

achieved Spencer's eminence in the intellectual community and that 

community 's rejection of his work has not been as thoroughgoing. 

However, it is true that, after a period in the 1950 's during which 

the Parsonian brand of functional analysis seemed to be carrying 

all before it, his decline has been precipitous. 

There are some signs that a similar development may be about 

to take place in political science, for here, too, primarily in comparative 

politics, the late 1950 ' s and the early 1960 ' s was the era 

of a type of systems analysis loosely derived from Parsons. The 

series of volumes sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Politics 

of the Social Science Research Council and the Little Brown 

comparative politics series testify to the widespread acceptance of 

at least elements of this conceptual framework by political scientists. 

Of late, however, criticism has been mounting, induced, in part, by 

methodological considerations and in part by the changing political 

climate in the United States and the world. 

To comparativists, at least, functional analysis and the name 

of Gabriel Almond are almost synonomous. While others have 

labored mightily and fruitfully in the same vineyard, the publication 

of Almond and Coleman 's, The Politics of the Developing Areas in 

1960 was something of a landmark, and Almond and Powell's Comparative 

Politics (1966) has served, more recently, as the paradigm 

of a functional approach.' 

Almond actually yields pride of place for the introduction of 

systems analysis into political science to David Easton. For it was, 

as he notes, the publication of Easton' s, The Political System which 

1 Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937), p. 3. 

2 Gabriel Almond and James S. Coleman (eds.), The Politics of the Developing 

Areas (Princeton, 1960), and Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, 

Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach ( Boston, 1966). Hereafter 

referred to respectively as Developing Areas and Comparative Politics.

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 237 

led him to experience "one of those moments of intellectual liberation; 

when a concept comes along that gives one ' s thoughts an 

ordered structure."' Almond's earlier work had lacked a systematic 

theoretical focus, and had been largely descriptive or concerned with 

the development of what Merton would call theories of the middle 

range.' 

After his conversion to a functional approach, however, Almond 

moved in a somewhat different direction from that of Easton or 

Parsons. While the latter tended to concentrate on conceptual 

rigor, Almond remained far more concerned with developing constructs 

which were tied as closely as possible to concrete problems. 

Specification of the meaning of theoretical terms or examining all of 

the implications of theoretical constructs seemed less important to 

him than developing some ordering of the material of politics, and 

he continued to borrow concepts freely from other intellectual traditions 

than functionalism. It is for this reason, perhaps, that his influence 

among students of comparative politics has been far greater 

than that of Easton. Most of those scholars studying the politics of 

developing areas have felt that it was far easier to apply Almond 

than to work with Parsons ' or Easton ' s more elaborate frameworks. 

Almond has denied that even his work of the period (roughly 

1956-1969) can easily be subsumed under the rubric of functionalism, 

and this is certainly true.' Even at the height of his " functional 

period, " if we may so label it, he remained fairly ecclectic. 

More recently this ecclecticism has become even more pronounced. 

Functionalism is a mansion with many rooms, and has meant 

somewhat different things to different theorists. Certainly Almond ' s 

functionalism is, as we shall see, of a far more restricted kind than 

that of Radcliffe-Brown or Parson.' Thus many of the criticisms 

which have been directed against them are not applicable to him. 

' Gabriel Almond, 

" 

Political Development: Analytic and Normative Perspectives, 

" Comparative Political Studies, I (January, 1969), p. 449. 

4 

These had included: The American People and Foreign Policy ( New 

York, 1950), and The Appeals of Communism ( Princeton, 1954). The term 

middle range theory is from Robert K. Merton, 

Structure ( New York, 1949), pp. 3-16. 

5 

In a personal communication. 

Social Theory and Social 

°For a discussion of the variety of approaches subsumed under the rubric 

of functionalism, and the variety of interpretations of its essential nature, see 

Francesca M. Cancian, "Varieties of Functional Analysis, " International En-

238 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER 

On the other hand, it is the elaboration of a theoretical framework 

broadly functional in orientation which has distinguished Almond ' s 

work in the past sixteen years, and the issues raised by the approach 

shall serve as the focus for organizing this essay review. Even where 

Almond is elaborating a concept like political culture or developing 

a theory of political evolution, or talking about the capabilities of 

political systems, concepts and theories which are compatible with 

a number of approaches, the fact that he thinks of a political system 

in functional terms gives his approach a particular cast. The same, 

of course, is true of Talcott Parsons. The latter ' s emphasis on cultural 

variables is derived from a non-functionalist (Weber) and his 

developmental theory (from which Almond ' s seems to be derived) 

probably has more in common with that of Spencer than he would 

care to admit. Yet the fact that he is a functionalist leads. him to, rely 

implicitly on biological analogies of a certain kind which are not 

intrinsic to an evolutionary theory of social and political development. 

I shall attempt to summarize Almond ' s ideas as they have developed, 

bringing out what seem to me some of the underlying, but 

often unstated assumptions. At relevant points I shall point out 

ambiguities, contradictions and lacunae. It must be said at the outset 

that Almond ' s writing, because of his ecclecticism, and lack of concern 

with theoretical completeness, abounds in these. I shall, however, 

ignore minor details and stick to major issues. After all, the 

key question is whether a functional approach, presented in as reasonable 

a form as possible, is likely to be of more value in the study 

of politics than alternate conceptual frameworks. If this seems likely 

to be the case, theoretical elegance is not essential at this stage, although 

the possibility of improvement is.' Conceptual frameworks 

are not proven or disproven, they are only more or less useful. A 

cyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968) 6, pp. 29-43, and N. J. 

Demerath III and Richard A. Peterson (eds.), System Change and Conflict 

(New York, 1967). A short history of functionalism will be found in Don 

Martindale, The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory ( Boston, 1960), 

pp. 441-500. A variety of functional approaches in political science are . 

described in articles by Robert T. Holt and William Flanigan and Edwin 

Fogelman in Don Martindale (ed.), Functionalism in the Social Sciences 

( Philadelphia, 1965), pp. 84-110 and pp. 111-126. 

7 Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (San Francisco, 1964), pp. 

77-78, points out that complete conceptual clarity is not the sine qua non of 

scientific advance, and that such clarity is attained only after the maturation 

of new approaches to the study of nature, man and society.

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 

framework which lacks precision but which seems to open possibilities 

for fruitful work is much preferred to one which is quite rigorous 

but whose focus is so narrow that it can only deal with relatively unimportant 

matters. 

I shall reserve an overall evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses 

of Almond ' s approach for the concluding section of the essay. 

At that time I will consider some of the major criticisms which have 

been directed against it and against functionalism in general. 

I. SYSTEM, STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION 

Almond ' s first major attempt to develop a functional framework 

for the study of politics is to be found in his introduction to The 

Politics of the Developing Areas, although some of his ideas had 

already appeared in article form. Pointing out that such traditional 

concepts as the " state " were of little utility in comparing the politics 

of western and non-western societies, he suggested substituting such 

concepts as the " political system, " which he defined as : 

that system of interactions to be found in all independent societies 

which performs the functions of integration and adaptation (both 

internally and viz-a-viz other societies) by means of the employment 

or threat of employment, of more or less legitimate force s 

The " political system " is essentially an analytic system and is 

not to be identified with any empirical "structure " or " structures, " 

although Almond is not entirely clear on this. He does not, at this 

point, define what he means by a " structure, " nor does he define a 

system. However, he does list those features which characterize a 

political system. There are : (I) comprehensiveness, (2) interdependence, 

and (3) the existence of boundaries.' 

By comprehensiveness, Almond means that the political system 

includes all those inputs and outputs which affect in some way the 

use or threat of use of legitimate coercion, whether these derive 

'Developing Areas, p. 7. 

e lbid., pp. 7-9. In Comparative Politics, Almond defines a structure as: 

" particular sets of roles which are related to each other." He prefers it to the 

term institution, with which he regards it as practically synonomous, because 

he wishes to emphasize " the actual behavior of individuals. " Comparative 

Politics, p. 21. 

239


from formal governmental institutions or caste groups or whether 

they involve petitions, demonstrations or judicial decisions. By interdependence 

Almond means that significant changes in any part of 

the system will produce. chances in other parts : 

" a change in one 

subset of interactions produces change in all other subsets. . . . io 

By the existence of a boundary Almond means that there are points 

where other systems begin and the political system ends. Complaints 

about policy, for example, are not part of the political system, until 

they become demands upon public authorities for some form of 

action or are interpreted as such. 

According to Almond, the superiority of functionalism to other 

approaches to politics lies in the fact that it enables us to develop a 

set of categories for the comparison not only of contemporary industrial 

societies, but also of industrial societies with "developing" 

societies and of contemporary societies with historical social orders. 

Traditionally students of comparative politics have limited their 

work to the comparison of such institutions as interest groups, political 

parties, legislatures, courts, etc. These efforts can be reasonably 

successful, Almond argues, if one is concerned only with the politics 

of contemporary European societies which share something of a 

common political and social heritage. However, he notes, when one 

turns to comparisons between, say, England and Indonesia, traditional 

analytic categories break down. One can point out, of course, 

that England or the United States are characterized by many formally 

organized large membership associations, and that in Indonesia 

such associations are poorly organized and inadequately financed, 

and have highly fluctuating memberships. However, such structural 

comparisons deal only with the comparative anatomy of the three 

polities, and within a European frame of reference at that. They tell 

us little of the "physiology" of the systems in question, let alone 

their dynamics. 

On the other hand, Almond contends, if we assume that certain 

functions must be performed in all societies if they are to , survive, 

and we compare how these functions are actually performed in each 

society, we can enrich our understanding of all of them by facilitating 

meaningful comparative analysis. Further, he suggests, we escape 

both the ethnocentrism that has blinded us to the richness of 

lo Developing Areas, p. 8.


political life in societies whose formal structure differs from ours, 

and the kind of moralizing which assumes that societies lacking certain 

Western institutions are somehow at a lower stage of development. 

In the end we will develop a better perspective on our own 

and other advanced societies, because we will come to realize that, 

while the same functions must be performed in all societies, they 

can be performed ,by a variety of different structures which are 

related to each other in quite different ways than is the case of our 

own or other European systems. Finally, in so far as this approach 

orders our empirical material more systematically, and leads to the 

discovery of new data, it should help us develop theories and lawlike 

statements about the political process. '1 

Any conceptual scheme, even if only classificatory, has embedded 

within it some general model the relationships which its 

creator hopes to clarify. The model Almond chose was derived from 

the work of David Easton." Easton conceived of the political system 

essentially as a mechanism for converting demands from the society 

(inputs) into policies which involved the "authoritative allocation 

of values " (outputs) and further supports for the system through a 

feedback loop. Although the discerning reader can probably detect 

at least a tension between this model and some of Almond 's definitions, 

his efforts in The Politics of the Developing Areas were largely 

directed to explicating in some detail what kinds of activities this 

conversion process entailed. Before demands could become politically 

relevant they had to be articulated in some way, and since, theoretically, 

the number of demands was infinite, they had to be aggregated 

into a relatively smaller number of policy alternatives before processing 

could take place. If values were to be allocated in an authoritative 

manner, the system had to include mechanisms for rule making, 

rule application, and rule adjudication. Finally, mechanisms had 

to be created for recruiting individuals into political roles, and for 

communicating both demands and policy decisions. " 

The study of how these conversion mechanisms perform their 

1l 

lbid., pp. 9-17. In this summary I have made explicit a few points which 

are only implicit in Almond ' s discussion. 

12 

" " 

An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems, 

David Easton, 

World Politics IX ( April, 1957), pp. 383 if. Easton developed his ideas more 

fully in: A Framework for Political Analysis (New York, 1965) and A Systems 

Analysis of Political Life ( New York, 1965). 

13 

Developing Areas, pp. 15-19. 

241


functions in various political systems constitutes the meat of comparative 

politics for Almond, and the essay attempts to demonstrate 

the utility of an approach with this focus in organizing political 

data, as well as its fruitfulness in the development of law-like 

statements of a " probabilistic " kind. For example, Almond argues 

that if various interest groups in a society make " raw " demands 

upon governmental institutions, rather than allowing these demands 

to be aggregated by political parties, such demands will be more 

difficult to process and the result may well be political instability. 14 

Almond is convinced that the most important differences between 

political systems pertain to whether they are " traditional " or 

" modern. " Traditional societies with traditional political systems 

are those characterized by particularistic, ascriptive and functionally 

diffuse norms and structures, while modern societies tend to be 

characterized by universalistic, achievement, and functionally specific 

norms and structures. The classification is one derived from contemporary 

sociological analysis and Almond is careful to point out 

that the concepts refer to " ideal types. " No society is completely 

modern or completely traditional. All societies contain a mixture of 

modern and traditional elements. Modern societies are more highly 

differentiated than traditional ones, such that specialized structures 

have been created for the performance of particular functions. 

Nevertheless, even in advanced societies all political structures are 

multifunctional, and the analysis of the relation between function 

and structure is always a highly complex matter. 76 

Nevertheless, it is already clear that Almond ' s standard for 

analyzing societies is derived from advanced industrial European 

communities such as England and the United States. Further, the 

metaphor is already an organic one. The structures to be 

found in " advanced " societies are implicit in traditional societies, 

which modernize, in part, by a process of differentiation. Latent 

in the conception is an evolutionary theory of social change 

which becomes explicit in his later work; and at least one problem 

is also discernible here: Almond tells us that his list of functions 

is derived from the classic separation of powers doctrines of European 

and American political theorists. " Logically this fact is of 

' Ibid., p. 35. 

"Ibid., pp. 24-25. 

"Comparative Politics, pp. 10-12.


little relevance to its adequacy as a means of classifying and studying 

political systems. However, as we shall later see, the source of 

its derivation is not without importance, for Almond is not completely 

free of that ethnocentric bias from which he had hoped to 

escape. 

The Politics of the Developing Areas was a preliminary attempt 

to apply a structural-functional framework to the analysis of political 

systems. In it Almond was not particularly concerned with the 

nature or direction of social change, at least explicitly, but merely 

with fashioning a tool which would permit effective comparisons In 

Comparative Politics he added a number of dimensions to his 

analysis, including a theory of evolution and a set of concepts designed 

to enable political scientists to evaluate political systems. 

Both of these dimensions will be described later. For the moment, 

however, we are concerned with his efforts to increase the precision 

and depth of his conceptual framework. 

Almond begins Comparative Politics with a discussion of some 

of the criticisms which have been leveled against a functional approach-for 

example, that it implies an equilibrium or harmony of 

parts and that it has a conservative bias. He rightly points out that 

his use as a functional approach does not assume that system equilibrium 

is natural and certainly does not assume harmony among 

system parts. He admits that his previous writing had lacked an approach 

to political change, but promises to rectify this in the present 

volume. 14 

His definition of the political system has changed somewhat. 

The political system now consists of ". . . all those interactions 

which affect the use or threat of legitimate physical coercion. " It is 

the potential use of legitimate force, indeed, which gives the political 

system its coherence. 18 He still considers himself a functionalist, however, 

and promises to : 

. . . consider the activities or functions of political systems from 

three points of view. The first of these we have already referred tothe 

conversion functions of interest articulation, interest aggregation 

political communication, rule making, rule application, and rule 

adjudication. The second consideration is the operation of the politi- 

"Ibid., pp. 12-13. 

18 1bid., pp. 17-18. 

243

244 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE .REVIEWER 

cal system as an " individual " in its environment. We refer to this 

aspect of the functioning of a political system as its capabilities. 

Finally, we will need to consider the way in which political systems 

maintain themselves or adapt themselves to pressures for change 

over the long run. We speak here of system maintenance and adaptation 

functions-political recruitment and political socialization. 19 

After invoking the names of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Parsons, 

Merton and Levy, he actually begins his discussion of functions with 

the analysis of system capabilities. 

Now all of this is very confusing, and it might be wise to pause 

and take stock at this point. Functionalism has meant many things 

to many people. Au Fond, however, and especially in the authors 

whom Almond cites, it is a conceptual scheme which involves the 

analysis of social institutions in terms of the functions they perform 

in some larger system, and/or the analysis of the functions which 

must be performed in any system if it is to persist. 20 An activity is 

not synonomous with a function, and while Almond ' s analysis of 

system capabilities derives from a functional analysis, a description 

of the capabilities of a system or an institution has nothing to do 

with functionalism as a system of thought. Given Robert Merton ' s 

explicit treatment of this kind of error many years ago, it is surprising 

that a scholar as sophisticated as Almond should repeat it at 

this late date. 21 

Almond faces other problems. One can define the political 

system in functional terms or coercion terms, but, as Meehan points 

out, one cannot easily do both, at least without developing the argument 

in much greater detail. The monopoly of legitimate force is a 

system attribute not a system function, and the admitted effort to 

combine Weber and Parsons in one definition leads only to confusion. 

22 

"Ibid., p. 14. 

20 

See the references in footnote 6. 

21 " " 

Robert Merton, Manifest and Latent Functions, in Social Theory and 

Social Structure, op. cit., pp. 21-82. 

22 

Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought: A Critical Study 

( Homewood, Illinois, 1967), pp. 175-81. Almond is obviously trying to give 

both Parsons and Weber their due. For a critical appraisal of functionalism 

from a Weberian perspective see Randall Collins, " A Comparative Approach 

to Political Sociology, " in Reinhard Bendix (ed.), State and Society ( Boston, 

1968), pp. 42-69.


Our confusion is compounded by the fact that Almond has 

dropped integration and adaptation as overall functions of the political 

system. In one sense the loss is not very great, for he never did 

define the terms. They seem to have been taken over from the work 

of Parsons, although Parsons tended to see adaptation as a function 

of the economic system, and thought that integration was the function 

of the legal system, among others. 23 

The inconsistencies in Almond ' s discussion of the political system 

are fairly distressing. However they are not really terribly important 

in terms of his analysis, for it is quite clear as we examine Comparative 

Politics, that Almond ' s functionalism is still derived from an 

Eastonian model. The political system is conceived of as a mechanism 

for processing demands from the larger society. Almond ' s strategy 

for comparing political systems, then, is still in terms of the variables 

first developed in The Politics of Developing Areas, with some additions. 

As already noted, interest articulation, interest aggregation, 

rule making, rule application and communication are considered 

" conversion functions. " Political recruitment, as classified along 

with political socialization as fulfilling intra political " system maintenance 

" and " adaptation " functions, and the content of demands 

and supports which flow into the political system, are specified, as 

are system outputs. Demands include those for the allocation of 

goods and services; for the regulation of behavior, for participation 

and communication. Supports include material supports, obedience 

to laws and regulations, participatory supports such as voting, and 

attention paid to communications. Finally, outputs include extractions, 

regulations, allocations or distribution of goods and services, 

and symbolic outputs. Clearly, Almond ' s scheme for evaluating 

system capabilities derives from this list. 24 

There are a number of issues we might raise. It is not easy to 

see, for example, why communication is called a conversion function. 

Communication would seem, on the face of it, to play a 

quite different role in any political system than, say, interest aggregation. 

Further, Almond still fails to indicate clearly what he 

means by adaptation and system maintenance and how and why 

political recruitment and political socialization fulfill these functions 

23 

Talcott Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (New York, 1969), pp. 

398-99. 

24 Comparative Politics, pp. 25-27 and seq.


for the political system. These, however, are relatively minor difficulties 

which can probably be worked through and I shall not pursue 

them. 

Even more explicitly" than in The Politics of the Developing 

Areas, Almond seems convinced, in his later work, that the major 

differences between political systems have to do with where they 

fall on a continuum from primitive to modern. The structural factors 

which seem to be of key importance for determining the nature 

of demands, conversion processes and outputs are: (1) the degree to 

which political roles, structures and subsystems are specialized or 

differentiated, and (2) the relative autonomy or subordination of 

these roles with respect to each other. 25 Modern systems are those 

with a relatively high level of institutional and subsystem differentiation, 

as well as relative subsystem autonomy, and despite Almond ' s 

efforts to avoid ethnocentrism, it is quite clear that his model of 

advanced states is drawn from the British and American political 

systems. 

Almond ' s analysis of political culture, defined as " the pattern 

of individual attitudes and orientations toward politics among the 

members of a political system, " demonstrates this derivation quite 

clearly. 26 The basic distinction developed is that 'between " secularized 

" and non-secularized political cultures. The former are characterized 

by "pragmatic, empirical orientations, " and a " movement 

from diffuseness to specificity " of orientations. Individuals who' are 

part of a secular political culture deal with others in terms of universalistic 

criteria as against considerations arising from diffuse 

societal relationships such as those of tribe caste or family. 27 They 

are aware that institutions have specific functions and orient themselves 

to institutions in these terms. 28 

Further, secularized, i.e., modern, political cultures are characterized 

by bargaining and accommodative patterns of political 

action which are relatively open, in that values are subject to change 

in the basis of new experience. Modern states in which " rigid " 

ideological politics continue to play a substantial role are those in 

which, for some reason, " the bargaining attitudes associated with 

2 51bid., p. 306. 

26 1bid., p. 50. 

27 1bid., p. 58. 

28 1bid.


full secularization " have failed to develop. 29 The image is of the 

United States and England in the 1950 ' s, and I would suppose 

that Almond would be forced to say that both of those societies have 

regressed somewhat in recent years. 3o 

Most of Comparative Politics is taken up with elaborating the 

basic elements of Almond ' s conceptual scheme and demonstrating 

its utility. He applies his categories to a number of historical and 

contemporary societies to indicate the fruitfulness of his framework 

for ordering existing data and discovering new relationships. The 

richness of the offering is hard to convey in a short review but one 

comes away with the impression from this and other works of the 

same genre that whatever the weaknesses of the approach, its utility 

for some purposes has been demonstrated. Comparisons can more 

easily be made between England and Indonesia or 'between England 

and France, which take into account the richness of political life in 

all of these societies; and the traditional modern distinction seems 

to order a good many relationships which had been ignored by political 

scientists in the past. 

The volume does contain at least one general (although incomplete) 

theory: an analysis of the nature of political development. 

Almond follows Talcott Parsons in approaching social change from a 

broadly evolutionary view, and it is to this theory and its consequences 

that we shall now turn. 3' 

29 

1bid., 58-59. pp. 

'°Almond seems to have accepted and built upon " the end of ideology, " 

which became so prominent in the 1950 ' s. For debate on the subject, see 

Richard H. Cox, Ideology, Politics and Political Theory ( Belmont, California, 

1969). See also Joseph La Palombara, " Decline of Ideology: A Dissent and 

Interpretation, " The American Political Science Review LX (March, 1966), 

pp. 5-16, and the reply by Lipset in the same issue. The concept of modernization 

is derived essentially from German sociology of the late nineteenth 

century and especially Weber. Rinehard Bendix, Embattled Reason (New 

York, 1970), pp. 250-315 gives a good review of its sources as well as a 

critique, and Samuel Huntington, 

" The Change to Change: Modernization, 

Development, and Politics, " Comparative Politics 3 (April, 1971), pp. 283- 

332, provides some interesting insights in a review of the contemporary literature 

on development. I will have more to say on the concepts of political culture 

and modernization later. 

3 "Talcott Parsons, " Evolutionary Universals in Society, " American Sociological 

Review 29 (June, 1964), pp. 339-357, and Societies: Evolutionary 

and Comparative Perspectives ( New York, 1966).


II. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE : 

A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH 

Almond' s 'Comparative Politics offers two theories of political 

development which, for want of better terms, may be called his 

general and special theories. The general theory implicitly draws 

upon biological analogies. Societies begin as one celled (primitive) 

creatures, and gradually differentiate. They develop specialized roles 

and structures (cells and organs), such as judiciaries, specialized 

organs of communication, etc., for dealing with particular problems. 

As they do so their capacity to deal with their environment increases, 

although problems of coordination become more pressing, 

entailing the creation of a more complex 'bureaucratic (nervous?) 

system. 32 

Almond suggests on a number of occasions that relative 

subsystem autonomy is an important aspect of development, the 

argument being that such autonomy allows for the more efficient 

performance by particular structures of their functions." The implication 

is sometimes that modern pluralistic societies on the English 

or American model are more advanced than one party regimes. 34 

Almond, however, is not completely convinced, for in his comparisons 

of the Soviet with other modern regimes he speaks of the 

high capabilities of the former, in terms which will be described 

later. 35 

Democratic pluralistic regimes are more advanced than one 

party regimes or traditional regimes in still another way. Culturally, 

a major feature of development is secularization, defined as " the 

process whereby men become increasingly rational, analytical, and 

empirical in their political action." 3fi " We may illustrate this concept, 

" Almond notes: 

by comparing a political leader in a modern democracy with a 

political leader in a traditional or primitive African political system. 

A modem democratic political leader when running for office, for 

instance, will gather substantial amounts of information about the 

"Comparative Politics, pp. 299-332. 

33 

Ibid., pp. 311-312, for example. 

34 1bid. Almond uses the term totalitarian to describe one party regimes 

such as the Soviet. 

35 

Ibid., p. 278. 

"Ibid., p. 24.


constituency which he hopes will elect him and the issues of public 

policy with which that constituency will be concerned. He has to 

make estimates of the distribution and intensity of demands of one 

kind or another; he needs to use creative imagination in order to 

identify a possible combination of demands which may lead to his 

receiving a majority of the votes in his constituency. A village chief 

in a tribal society operates largely within a given set of goals which 

have grown up and been hallowed by custom. The secularization of 

culture is the process whereby traditional orientations and attitudes 

give way to more dynamic decision-making processes involving the 

gathering of information, the evaluation of information, the laying 

out of alternative courses of action, the selection of a course from 

among these possible courses, and the means whereby which one 

tests whether or not a given course of action is producing the consequences 

which were intended. 37 

Part of this description of tribal societies seems something of a 

caricature, for we seem to find as much bargaining and weighing of 

alternatives in these societies as in our own. 3S Almond, however, is 

suggesting something more. Pluralistic societies are more advanced 

than others because the ends of these societies are not given. Rather, 

their values are constantly being revised in the light of new experience. 

His pragmatism-and it is the very American naturalistic 

pragmatism of a John Dewey-is clear. Evolution is the replacement 

of unscientific (traditional or ideological) choices of ends by a 

rational experimental model in which both means and ends are 

constantly changing, as our knowledge increases and the adaptive 

problems of the society change. 

Evolutionary advance may be defined in any number of ways 

For example, one can argue, that the application of the scientific 

method to social affairs, including the sphere of moral action, is 

more " advanced " because it is more rational or more humane or 

more adaptive. Almond clearly thinks that all three statements are 

true. His implicit theory of evolutionary change (it is never quite 

explicit), as against a description of evolutionary stages has to do 

with power. He seems to be saying that those societies become 

dominant whose capabilities (power) are greater, either, one sup- 

37 1bid., p. 25. 

38 See, for example, Marc J. Swartz and associates (eds.), Political Anthrolology 

(Chicago, 1966) and Marc J. Swartz (ed.), Local Level Politics 

(Chicago, 1968). 

249


poses, because they become models for other societies or incorporate 

them. 39 Rationality, differentiation and openness enhance capability 

and the dominance of certain kinds of political orders over other 

kinds. Unfortunately the evidence on this issue is far from clear. 

Democratic societies have been rather short lived historically, and 

we have little real empirical reason to believe that an "experimental 

democratic " model is more efficient in this sense than others. 

Indeed, Almond never comes to grips with the criticisms of 

scholars like Nisbet or Bendix. The diffusion of a scientific industrial 

culture may be the result of a unique breakthrough in Europe. 4o 

After all, before the modern period, a good many more highly 

differentiated societies rose to prominence only to collapse. Moreover, 

the fact that the scientific revolution and the power derived 

from it were associated with liberal pluralism initially says nothing 

about the future, and Almond does not offer any good theoretical 

reasons for assuming that the pluralist model is more adaptive in the 

contemporary world than other political models. Indeed, one can 

argue, on a number of grounds, that contemporary scientific culture 

may well be superseded by something else. In the introduction to his 

collected essays, Almond perceives in the contemporary world : 

a reaction against the cognitive overemphasis of the Enlightenment 

and associated modernizing processes, and a search for philosophical 

and moral meaning and order consistent with science and technology 

but not subordinated to it. 41 

One need not add, perhaps, that current problems of population, 

and pollution and the destructiveness of modern weapons raise 

serious doubts as to the ultimate adaptiveness of scientific industrial 

culture. Indeed, there are some very cogent reasons to believe that 

the agricultural productivity so necessary to current levels of existence, 

and which depends so heavily on fossil sources, will not be 

able to be sustained very long even at present population levels. 42 In 

39 

Almond never says this, but, so far as I can determine, it is the most 

reasonable assumption to be drawn from his analysis. 

40 " 

Bendix, " 

Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered, op. cit. Robert Nisbet, 

Social Change and History ( New York, 1969). 

41 

Gabriel Almond, Political Development: Essays in Heuristic Theory 

(Boston, 1970), p. 27. 

42 

Hugh Nicol, The Limits of Man: An Inquiry into the Scientific Bases 

of Human Population ( London, 1970).


short, it is conceivable that the scientific revolution has had very nonadaptive 

consequences. 

Whatever the ultimate merits of Almond ' s scheme (although 

I have raised objections to it, these are by no means insurmountable), 

it does serve admirably to organize a good deal of material 

about historical societies which had hitherto been dealt with in a 

very ad hoc fashion. It must be added that Almond, in Comparative 

Politics, has transcended his earlier rather simple distinction between 

modern and traditional societies and has developed a far more complex 

and satisfying scheme, partly derived from Eisenstadt. 43 His 

classification runs from primitive bands through patrimonial systems 

and centralized bureaucratic empires, to various types of 

modern systems, including secularized city states, pre-mobilized 

modern systems and mobilized modern systems. 44 

Almond ' s specific theory of evolution seems to apply primarily 

to the modern period and, more specifically, to Europe and the developing 

countries: It has a peculiar teleological quality to it, for 

it assumes the mobilized modern state as the inevitable outcome of 

development, and deals with the countries studied in terms of the 

problems they faced in trying to achieve this end. In Almond ' s terminology, 

European states, since about the sixteenth century, have 

been faced with a series of problems, viz, state building, nation building, 

participation, and distribution. State building pertains to the 

creation of institutions which enable the political system to regulate 

behavior and extract a larger volume of resources from the society. 

Nation building is a process of evolving allegiance to the larger 

community at the expense of parochial attachments to tribes, vil - 

lages or regions. Problems of participation and distribution arise 

as more and more members of the community demand a voice in 

determining the decisions that affect them and what they consider a 

more equitable division of the values of the society. 45 

Almond suggests that the relative peacefulness of British development 

in the modern period stems from the fact that these problems 

emerged one at a time. A viable state and nation had been created, 

for example, before other problems emerged. Other European 

nations faced many of the problems at the same time. As a re- 

43 

S. N. Eisenstatd, The Political Systems of Empires ( New York, 1963). 

44 

See the table in Comparative Politics, p. 217. 

45 

1bid., pp. 34-41.

252 

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER 

suit the load upon the system was too great, resulting in distorted 

development and authoritarian rule. Most of the developing countries 

today are faced with the need to solve all of these problems at 

the same time. 46 

The specific developmental model does not seem to derive from 

the more general, except for state building which, of course, has 

to do with differentiation. While it is extremely useful in ordering 

certain kinds of material, it raises certain questions. The general 

theory deals with society as an organism, differentiating and coordinating; 

the specific theory seems to treat the community as an 

individual involved in a problem solving. A good many critics of 

functionalism argue that societies are always composed of individuals 

and groups with divergent interests, and that such groups are always 

in conflict. The organismic model ignores, or, at least, plays down 

this fact. 47 In so far as the special theory treats the nation state as an 

individual engaged in problem solving, it has the same effect. The 

effect is compounded by a tendency to set up the modern " stable " 

democratic state as the norm, and to examine development in so far 

as it has led to this goal or deviated from it. Given this emphasis, 

social justice questions are ignored. The end of the political community, 

after all, argues 'Christian Bay, is not stable anything, but a 

richer and more meaningful life for all its members. " 

Almond has not been insensitive to some of these criticisms. His 

most recent work takes into account conflict approaches to the study 

of politics and both Comparative Politics and other writings have 

attempted to deal with broader issues of sound justice. Indeed, 

Almond regards political scientists as sober trustees of the enlighten- 

"Ibid., pp. 322 if. 

47 See, for example, Collins, op. Cit. and Ralf Dahrendorf, " Out of Utopia: 

Toward a Reconstruction of Sociological Analysis," in Demerath and Peterson, 

op. cit., pp. 465-480. 

48 See, for example, Christian Bay, " Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical 

Evaluation of Some Behavioral Literature, " in Jack L. Walker, " A Critique of 

the Elitist Theory of Democracy, " 

in Charles A. McCoy and John Playford 

(eds.), Apolitical Politicals: A Critique of Behavioralistn (New York, 1967), 

pp. 12-37 and pp. 199-219 respectively. On the stable democracy theme Almond 

is lumped together with a number of other political scientists who start 

with fairly different assumptions under the general label of "behavioralist. " 

These latter include people like Heinz Eulau, Robert Dahl and Nelson Polsby. 

One should add that critics of " behavioralism " are generally less harsh with 

Almond than they are with scholars like Dahl.


ment. Their job is to bring intelligence to , bear on social issues. While 

he never states his position in full detail, he clearly feels that the ends 

we choose and the means to choose to attain given ends can both be 

improved by a better understanding of reality. The political scientist 

cannot and should not avoid dealing with the moral dimensions of 

politics. We may, then, turn to Almond ' s attempts to evaluate political 

systems. We shall first describe and discuss the implications of 

his concept of the civic culture and democratic stability. From there 

we will turn to his analyses of the capabilities of regimes, and finally 

we shall discuss his attempt to create an index for scoring regimes 

according to explicit social justice criteria. 

III. EVALUATIONS AND VALUES 

It is perhaps a commentary on the attitudes prevalent among 

American academics during the 1950 ' s, that Almond ' s major concern 

at that point should have been the conditions of democratic 

stability. The Civic Culture reflected these concerns. Anglo-American 

institutions were regarded as reasonably satisfactory; certainly satisfactory 

enough to serve as a normative model. The aim of the 

volume, then, was to understand the bases of their democratic 

stability from a political culture perspective. The study served other 

purposes, i.e., it enabled Almond to refine his concept of political 

culture. However, it is his conception of democracy, a conception 

which falls into the camp of what some of his critics have called 

" neo-elitist " democratic theory, that has roused the most controversy, 

and we shall emphasize the problems the theory raises in our 

discussion of the book. 

In The Civic Culture the evolutionary model which was to be 

made explicit later in Almond ' s work is already foreshadowed. 

Political culture is described in terms of the orientation of citizens 

toward the political system. The scholar should study orientations 

toward the system as a general object, toward political roles or structures 

involved in political inputs or outputs, and toward the self 

as a political actor. The character of these orientations varies with 

the society ' s level of political development, and Almond develops a 

typology of three basic kinds of political culture: " parochial " political 

cultures, " subject " political cultures and " participant " political 

cultures. 

Parochial political cultures characterize primitive or traditional 

societies with limited political role differentiation. Members of such

254 


societies have few if any orientations toward the political system. 

Subject political cultures are found in more advanced-although 

still (usually) traditional-societies. Members of the community exhibit 

"a high frequency of orientations toward a differentiated 

political system, but orientations toward specifically input objects 

and toward the self as an active participant approach zero. " 4 ° 

The third major type of political culture, the participant political 

culture, is one in which the members of the society tend to be 

explicitly oriented to "the system as a whole and to both the political 

and administrative structures and processes. " 50 Such a culture is 

obviously more congruent with modern democratic states. 

These are ideal type constructs and Almond carefully points 

out that most actual political cultures are a mix of these orientations. 

One of these mixes, The Civic Culture, is most congruent with existing 

stable democratic regimes and is the culture which, in somewhat 

different ways, is characteristic of both England and the United 

States. 

The civic culture, Almond notes, is not the "rationalityactivist 

" model described in American civics textbooks. That model 

implies that all citizens must participate actively and rationally at 

all times in the political process. On the contrary, Almond argues, 

not only do citizens in successful democracies fail to behave in this 

way, but they cannot. Indeed any approach to full participation in 

such a political order would lead to stasis, instability and perhaps 

eventual collapse of the democratic polity. 61 

British and American politics do not conform to the rationality 

activist model because citizens also accept passive subject roles viz a 

viz authority, and maintain parochial ties to families and other nonpolitical 

groupings. Participation in politics does not have great 

salience save at certain critical junctures. It is kept in its place. 

Actually, the civic culture and stable democracy depend for 

their continued success on an uneasy balance between the myth of 

p. 17. 

5 

49 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture ( Boston, 1965), 

°Ibid., p. 18. 

51 

The substance of this argument and the next few paragraphs will be 

found on pp. 337-368 of The Civic Culture. Almond, of course, is largely 

continuing the analyses of people like Robert Dahl, Bernard Berelson and 

V. O. Key. See Bernard Berelson et al, Voting ( Chicago, 1954), Robert Dahl, 

Who Governs (New Haven, 1961), and V. O. Key, Public Opinion and 

American Democracy ( New York, 1961).


the rational activist citizen, the non-salience of politics, and the 

willingness of most citizens to behave as subjects most of the time. 

The rationalist activist myth is necessary so that citizens will act at 

enough times on sufficient issues to keep elites in line and so that 

elites will expect such action. If special groups of citizens act only 

at certain times and on issues which are salient to them, the polity 

can respond to their demands, thus re-enforcing their allegiance. 

The balance, however, does face certain dangers. If issues of 

considerable salience to substantial segments of the population 

emerge and cannot be dealt with in a reasonable time, serious 

problems can develop. Citizen activity can increase to a point where 

elites, caught up in all sorts of cross pressures, will be unable to act 

at all, and citizens whose demands are not met could develop a 

sense of impotence and alienation, with serious consequences for 

the system. Further, in so far as socialization into the civic culture 

stems less from early childhood experiences (although these are important) 

than from experience with the political process itself, the 

impact of a crisis like this on later generations could be fairly substantial. 

Assuming the argument to be correct, its further implications 

are rather disturbing. Mass activism would probably result in either 

a longish period of political stasis punctuated by considerable violence, 

or some sort of dictatorship. In the latter eventuality voluntary 

participation might be replaced by directed participation, but 

the great mass of the population would, in fact, be merely subjects. 

Of course, some of the issues which brought about the crisis could 

be resolved and political activity would then fall back to. normal 

levels. 

I ' ve extended and extrapolated from Almond ' s argument somewhat 

for a particular purpose. It seems to me that it offers some 

interesting insights into the current malaise of American democracy, 

especially among upper middle class youth, although among other 

groups as well. 

Both the Vietnam war and the race issue have generated a 

series of conflicts involving upper middle class youth (and their 

parents) allied in some cases with blacks, versus various middle class, 

and working class " ethnics. " Despite all the current student rhetoric 

about power elites it seems quite clear that upper middle class reformers 

have failed to, achieve their aims not because of " elite " 

opposition (after all they and their parents constitute a substantial


part of the social establishment, at least, if there is an etsablishment) 

but because a segment of the political and social elite has joined 

with the working class and lower middle class white majority in opposition. 

Having been brought up on a " rationality activist " model, 

upper middle class youth expect the system to respond relatively 

rapidly to the essential rightness of their cause, as they perceive it. 

When the system fails to respond in textbook fashion they become 

alienated. Their alienation is heightened when they discover that 

supposedly " liberal " politicians who profess sympathy are unable 

or unwilling to sponsor the policies upon which they theoretically 

agree. What they often fail to realize is that these political figures are 

more fully committed to the political system as it actually functions 

than are activist youth and/or their hands are partially tied by an 

electoral constituency which is more conservative than they themselves 

are. 

In part upper middle class youth and their parents have been 

able to achieve more than they might have in terms of numbers, 

because they have succeeded in mobilizing positions of the black 

community, and because their working class and lower middle class 

opponents tend to behave more like " parochials " and "subjects." 

Of course, upper middle-class liberals also dominate the prestige 

papers and magazines as well as national television and the universities. 

They have achieved less than they might have because their 

opponents have been activated at least sporadically by real or 

imagined threats W . what they consider vital interests: Urban 

planning is a case in point. The problems faced by New York City 

today, while they have many sources, are less a result of the mayor ' s 

unwillingness to act than they are of the fact that almost all groups 

feel that their interests should be served and are increasingly willing 

to engage in direct action to secure them. Urban planning has been 

far easier in England in part . (but only in part) because the average 

citizen is still willing to accept elite decisions rather passively.6 2 

It seems to me, then, that Almond ' s theory is of considerable 

utility in explaining some of our current difficulties, and that he 

could have predicted them with the relevant information. His 

analysis, therefore, should commend itself to us. It has, however, 

come under serious attack from those who argue that because it 

52 

The argument is developed somewhat more fully in Stanley Rothman, 

European Society and Politics (Indianapolis, 1970), pp. 580-582.


undermines the " rationality activist model" it has conservative implications 

and. thus is unacceptable. 53 It is a little difficult to understand 

what the attackers propose. At least some of their arguments 

sound quite similar to those the Church offered when deciding to 

silence Galileo because his theories were felt to undermine the basis 

of Christian morality. After all, if the kind of democratic polity described 

by Almond is the best we can realistically expect to create, 

then rejecting it because it does not conform to our wishes, is a 

little like suggesting we repeal the law of gravity because it does 

not permit men to walk on water. 54 Whatever the relation between 

facts and values, no reasonable person will. continue to strive to 

achieve a state of affairs which cannot be realized, especially if 

Almond ' s theory is correct, and the attempt seems likely to lead to 

greater evils than now exist. 

Faced with Almond ' s analyses, then, a scholar with a serious 

commitment to attaining as democratic a polity as possible, has but 

two options. He may offer an alternative theory which is at least 

as good as Almond ' s in terms of its explanatory power, and which 

permits us to believe that full "rational" political participation can 

be achieved by means of structural changes in the society. Alternately, 

he may accept Almond ' s analysis and yet deny its implication, 

by showing that so-called disruptive behavior promotes values which 

are more important than " democratic stability." He may not, 

without emulating the Church in one of its most ludicrous moments, 

reject the analysis for its " moral " or political implications." 

Bay and Walker, in the analyses I have been summarizing, attempt 

both tasks. With regard to the first, however, they do little 

but assert that the average man has potentially more competence 

than Almond gives him credit for. Unfortunately their argument 

remains on the level of assertion, and does not quite hit the mark 

53 See Walker, and Bay, op. cit., among many others. 

54 

As Marx noted in attacking the German idealists. His point was that 

there was little to be gained in attacking the existing system and calling for 

socialism, unless one could develop a conceptual scheme and a theory which 

demonstrated that a superior type of social order such as socialism could replace 

existing social arrangements. 

J5 See the insightful essay by Charles Taylor, " Neutrality in Political Science," 

in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and 

Society, third series (Oxford, 1967), pp. 25-57. Walker cites this article, but 

it seems to me that he does not really understand its implications.

258 


at that. Almond ' s analysis, after all, was derived from structural 

considerations rather than personal competence arguments. 

The second part of their criticism seems to me to be on firmer 

ground. In The Civic Culture Almond seemingly focused on the 

achievement of stable democracy to the exclusion of other concerns. 

66 His critics suggest, as a counter argument, that a certain 

amount of disorder may serve humane ends. Now, this may very 

well be true. However, the issues are rather more complicated. Very 

few political scientists today would seriously suggest that a political 

system characterized by violence and disorder is an end to be sought 

in itself. The vast majority would recognize that some kind of order 

is necessary if any goals are to be attained. A given kind of political 

order may benefit dominant groups. Continued disorder can only 

benefit the stronger and the more aggressive, if it benefits anyone. 

Walker and Bay would certainly seem to accept the above proposition. 

Their argument is that a certain amount of instability can 

be tolerated if it results in greater social justice. I suspect that Almond 

would not disagree with their position. The differences, if any, 

would have to do with the relationship between instability, social 

justice and a reasonably democratic order. In short, the issues between 

the revisionist democratic theorists and their post-revisionist 

critics are essentially empirical. I will not, here, attempt to join in 

the argument, except to point out that the analyses of the revisionists, 

including Almond, have to be dealt with directly. They cannot 

simply be dismissed. 5 7 

Actually, Almond himself has recently attempted to develop 

measures which might allow theorists to begin to talk in more meaningful 

terms about just the issues we have been discussing. In Comparative 

Politics he discussed in a preliminary manner the problem 

56 ' 

Two points should be made in Almond s defense. One cannot say everything 

in one book, and The Civic Culture was about the cultural conditions 

supportive of democratic regimes. Secondly, nothing in Almond ' s analysis 

denies that stable democracy can be associated with the repression of some 

minority groups. 

6 7 These points are made from a somewhat different perspective by Peter 

Y. Medding, 

" 

Elitist Democracy: An Unsuccessful Critique of a Misunderstood 

Theory," Journal of Politics 31 (August, 1969), pp. 641-654. I shall 

return to some of the points made here in the conclusion of the essay. I shall 

also have some critical remarks of another kind to make about Almond ' s 

approach to the study of political culture at that time.


of evaluating political systems. His aim was to develop measures 

which would enable us to specify the consequences of policies and 

hence to make more intelligent choices: 

The capacity for greater precision . . . enables us to make our 

comparative analysis more relevant to debates over the ethics and 

benefits of different types of political systems. 5R 

When we introduce the capabilities level of analysis, we enhance 

not only our capacity for scientific prediction and explanation, but 

also our capacity to talk about policies as they may affect political 

change in desired directions. 59 

Almond ' s first concern at this point was with measures of sys - 

tem effectiveness. Such measures, he felt, could give us some notion 

of the capacity of the system to survive and grow. A measure of 

system capacities is certainly a necessary preliminary to evaluating 

any political system in social justice terms, if we assume that ought 

usually implies can. For example, one ' s ethical evaluation of a 

society which exposed weak or deformed children would certainly 

depend very much upon one ' s estimate of its food resources and 

level of technology. 

Almond concentrates on three system capacities: the extractive, 

regulative, and symbolic. 40 Extractive capacity has to do with the 

range of system performance in drawing material and human resources 

from the domestic and international environment. 61 Regulative 

capacity has to do with the system's capacity to exere&se control 

over individuals and groups. Symbolic capacity is not defined with 

complete clarity, but seems to be a measure of the system ' s ability 

to secure the support of its members through the "judicious creation 

and exploitation of the set of powerful and popular symbols." 6 2 

Two measures of system capacity discussed by Almond are more 

closely related to issues of social justice, those of " distributive " 

and "responsive " capacity. The first has to do with the "activity 

of the political system as a distributor of benefits among individuals 

or groups. Capacity here is measured by 

5 8 Comparative Politics, p, 192. 

69 Ibid., p. 194. 

"Ibid., pp. 190-212. 

sl lbid., p. 195. 

"Ibid., p. 200. 

259


... the quantity and importance of the objects distributed, the areas 

of human life they touch, the particular sections of the population 

receiving various benefits, and the relationship between individual 

needs and governmental distribution to meet those needs." 

To determine the responsive capacity of a regime one must know 

what groups are making demands, how these are processed and 

what kinds of reactions occur to such demands. 64 

In a later essay Almond expanded his attempts at evaluation 

somewhat further, and added a system of ethical scores primarily 

for purposes of "loosening up the imagination. "61 A justice score 

would 

consist of a set of per capita rates of regulatory acts over a period 

of time, emanating from a particular political system, weighted for 

the salience of the areas regulated and the severity of the regulation, 

and corrected for opportunities available to the subjects of regulation 

to participate in the determination of the content, scope and 

intensity of the regulatory rules, and for the procedural protections 

in their enforcement. G ° 

He added suggestions for a liberty score and offered the possibility 

of adaptability and other scores. 

It is probably unfair to evaluate these efforts at setting up 

empirical measures for evaluating polities, given the tentativeness 

with which they have been offered. Thus far, however, attempts 

to translate them into meaningful research strategies would not 

seem too likely to meet with success. One can perhaps develop some 

measures of regulatory and extractive capacity, but categories like 

responsiveness raise all sorts of issues as to what constitute decisions 

and non-decisions, which seem to raise problems of considerable dif - 

ficulty, to put it mildly. 87 

The ethical scoring system seems even more dubious. Frankly, 

I find it hard even to conceive how a justice score might be opera- 

63 Ibid., p. 198. 

"Ibid., p. 203. 

65" Political Development ...," op. cit., p. 467. 

86 Ibid. 

G7 See Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, " Decisions and Non-Decisions: 

An Analytic Framework, " American Political Science Review 57 ( December, 

1963), pp. 632-642, and a critique of their argument by Richard M. Merelman, 

" On the Neo-Elitist Critique of Community Power, " American Political 

Science Review 62 (June, 1968), pp. 451-460.


tionalized. For example, would one measure opportunities available 

for participation in terms of felt needs or perceptions, or would one 

attempt to create some absolute scale? Nevertheless, continued attempts 

in this direction would not be without value, even if they 

contributed only slightly to our ability to talk about such issues in 

more precise terms. 

IV. TOWARD A PLURALISTIC APPROACH TO 

THE STUDY OF POLITICS 

Even as he began to work in a more detailed manner with 

problems of evaluation, Almond ' s thinking was undergoing some 

shifts as regards empirical analyses. In a series of essays he began 

to move away self-consciously from as heavy a reliance on a functional 

model as characterized Comparative Politics, and to seek to 

combine such a model with other approaches. " The criticisms 

leveled against functionalism in his most recent writing parallel those 

of some of his critics. Functionalism focuses too much upon equilibrium. 

Its picture of society is too mechanistic or organismic. It is 

too deterministic, ignoring such phenomena as political leadership. It 

assumes reciprocal relationship among elements of a system which 

may indeed not exist. It is too abstract, because its more general 

statements are not tied closely to research into the ways in which 

groups actually make decisions. It ignores or has ignored such 

matters as the changing international environment by not being 

sufficiently aware of the openness of political and social systems, and 

it ignores the effects of particular policies adopted by elites at critical 

periods. 

Almond also admits that functionalism has remained somewhat 

ethnocentric in its outlook, and accepts the criticisms of Hempel 

us" 

Determinancy Choice, Stability-Change: Some Thoughts on a Contemporary 

Polemic in Political Theory, " Government and Opposition 5 ( Winter 

1969-1970), pp. 22-40; Gabriel A. Almond, "State Building in Britain, France 

and Prussia, " 

(Draft paper prepared for the Summer Workshop in State 

Building in Western Europe; Stanford, California, mimeographed, n.d., 42 

pp.) ; " Approaches to Developmental Causation, " ( First draft of an introduction 

to Gabriel Almond and Scott Flanagan (eds.), Developmental Episodes, 

mimeographed, n.d., 71 pp.). Professor Almond was kind enough to send me 

copies of both papers prior to publication. The latter paper will be published 

this year. 

261


and others that functionalism does not involve casual explanation. 89 

Rather, he now argues, its major purpose is hueristic. It is designed 

to throw light on relationships which scholars might otherwise have 

ignored or misread. 

Almond ' s response to his self-criticism is to seek " the historical 

cure " 

and to attempt to use the functional model in combination 

with other models to examine particular developmental episodes in 

a variety of countries. The attempt is to combine analytic efforts 

with in depth studies of particular historical events. 

His conclusion is that any political analysis must draw upon 

four major approaches to the study of politics, which complement 

each other: the functional, social mobilization, decision making and 

leadership models. Any political analysis must also take into account 

both the domestic and international environment. Thus the study 

of a given system involves an analysis of system-environmental 

properties, structural functional properties, decision coalition properties 

and leadership properties. 

The analysis of change will involve the examination of coalition 

and policy outcomes and linkages between these and the system 

which is emerging. Part of the job of comparative political history is 

to write alternative scenarios in an attempt to clarify the impact of 

particular choices. For example, to clarify the development of English 

history in the nineteenth century the analyst might ask what 

would have happened if Whigs and Tories in 1831 had organized 

a coalition based on a policy of repression, or the Social Democratic 

Party in 1918 had moved toward the left rather than toward 

the " discredited military-bureaucratic establishment. " 

Almond is hopeful that the analyses of a series of case studies 

will help scholars integrate these various approaches into a more 

sophisticated general theory. The nature of this theory is not as 

yet clear. For example, Almond seems less taken with an evolutionary 

approach, but has not discarded it. He also seems more willing 

to accept the possibility of considerable indeterminancy in political 

change involving, for example, " accidents, " such as the appearance 

of a particular charismatic leader. However, it is far from 

certain how this would affect his attempts at conceptualization. 

69 

The classic critique is that of Carl G. Hempel, 

" The Logic of Func- 

tional Analysis, " in Llewellyn Gross (ed.), Symposium on Sociological Theory 

( Evanston, 1959).


Conceivably it might lead him to argue that it is impossible to develop 

a general science of politics. 

V. FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 

The functional approach to the study of society has been around 

for some time, and the literature on it has grown to fairly enormous 

proportions. Most of the arguments as to its utility have been fairly 

well rehearsed and need not be repeated here. It should be noted 

that many of the technical objections raised against the functionalism 

of Radcliff-Brown, Malinowski or even Parsons are not really applicable 

to Almond, although some critics behave as if they were. 

Hempel, for example, quite correctly pointed out that " explaining" 

the emergence or persistence of an institution by the functions 

it performs in the larger society is not an explanation at all, for it 

assumes that the same function cannot be fulfilled by some other 

institutions, or indeed has to be fulfilled at all. 70 Hempel and others 

have also noted that many functional analyses implicitly assume 

some ideal model of a functioning society, and have suggested that 

this is a dubious procedure. One can easily identify a well functioning 

car, or, perhaps, a healthy organism, but given the difficulty of 

setting overall goals for a society, what appears to be functional 

from one perspective might well be disastrous from another. 

At least some functionalists have seemed to feel that every institution 

must have some relevance to the functioning of a given 

social system, and have attempted to explain institutions in ways 

which seemed to justify them. Critics have rightly pointed out that 

such analyses assume what has to be proven. They also point out 

that such analyses often take the overall values and structure of a 

society as given. It may be legitimate to demonstrate that Europeans 

have too lightly dismissed institutions which played an important 

integrative role in various " primitive " societies as archaic and irrational. 

It is another matter to inhibit reform in one ' s own society 

by making a similar suggestion. 

Other critics have suggested that since all societies consist of 

individuals and groups competing for relatively scarce resources, 

social arrangements which are functional for dominant sectors, 

may, in fact, injure other sectors of the population. It is, perhaps, 

70 See Hempel, op. cit.


because of criticisms such as these that functional theorists began 

to experiment with such terms as " eufunction" and " dysfunction, " 

in order to permit more critical analyses." 

Whatever the merits of the above criticisms and the efforts to 

meet them, they are not relevant to Almond ' s work. From the beginning 

he has limited his use of functional analyses to certain key 

elements. Essentially all Almond has argued is that in all societies 

mechanisms must be created for the authoritative allocation of 

values, and that the job of political scientists is to study the various 

ways in which this has been and is being done. He has also maintained 

that we can do so more effectively by using a systems approach 

and emphasizing process rather than formal institutions. 

Almond has always stated that given political functions can be 

performed in a variety of different ways by different institutions. 

He has never, therefore, attempted to explain the existence of a 

given structure by the function it performs. If one wishes to understand 

why the Soviet political system aggregates interests in one 

way and the American in another, one must engage in historical 

causal analyses. One may fault Almond his list of functions, or may 

argue that functional analysis does not exhaust the kinds of questions 

of interest to political scientists, but he cannot be accused 

either of using teleological explanations or of being a conservative 

on these grounds alone. 72 One can also argue, as does Hempel, that 

listing functional requisites is simply to explicate the obvious. Perhaps 

so, but in the social sciences at least, the systematic discussion 

of the obvious may yield at least some advances in our understanding. 

Functionalists have also been accused of having adopted a conservative 

stance because of their equilibrium assumptions. In his 

later writing Almond sometimes apologizes for having done so 

earlier, but from what he has written there is no evidence that this 

is so. His approach does have a static quality in another sense, however, 

and I shall return to that question later. 

"Robert Merton seems to have introduced the term dysfunction. Eufunc 

Lion was coined by Marion Levy, Jr. For a recent short statement, see the 

latter ' s essay in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, op. cit., 

pp . 21-28. 

72 A. James Gregor raises many of these objections to functionalism in political 

science. See his " Political Science and the Uses of Functional Analysis, " 

The American Political Science Review 62 (June, 1968), pp. 425-439. However 

correct he may be in describing Easton ' s work, his analysis is not applicable 

to Almond.


I should add that one cannot really accuse Almond of having 

become a new scholastic, a charge which has been leveled against 

Talcott Parsons with some justification. 7 3 He does share some of 

the jargon of the functional school . of sociology, but he has tried 

to stick closely to the data and his category building enterprises have 

never really gotten out of hand. The negative side of this virtue is 

a lack of conceptual precision in some areas. However, I, for one, 

feel that, on balance, the positive aspects of his strategy outweigh 

its weaknesses. 

Finally, I am not impressed by the arguments of those scholars, 

such as LaPalombara, who maintain that attempts to develop an 

overall framework for studying political systems are premature 

and inhibit effective work. 14 All of us approach the study of society 

with some conceptual scheme or other. The benefits of attempts to 

make these explicit seem to me to outweigh the possible losses. It is 

undoubtedly true that system building of the functional kind has 

encouraged at least some scholars, including occasionally Almond 

himself, to apply conceptual schemes mechanically rather than 

creatively and to ignore the kinds of reality which could not fit into 

preconceived boxes. They have also used conceptualization as an 

excuse for not doing research. Frankly, I doubt that such students 

would be more creative if the functional model did not exist. The 

capacity of academics to substitute conceptual schemes or rhetoric 

for research is boundless. 

LaPalombara ' s critique is, however, useful. During the early 

1960's the movement in the direction of overarching intellectual 

schemes probably went too far, and rewards in the profession seemed 

to be directly proportional to the number of neologisms an author 

used. Further careful empirical and historical analysis tended to 

be downplayed as mere description. Nevertheless, when used with 

sensitivity and as a tentative guideline, the functional _approach has 

been fruitful. It certainly has enriched the study of politics in any 

number of ways. We forget now that for many years discussions of 

the Communist Party of the Soviet Union revolved about the question 

as to whether it should or should not be called a party, or 

73 See Barrington Moore, Jr., "The New Scholasticism and the Study of 

Politics, " in Demerath and Peterson, op. cit., pp. 333-338. 

7 4 Joseph LaPalombara, " Macrotheories and Microapplications in Comparative 

Politics: A Widening Chasm, " in Comparative Politics 1 ( October, 1968), 

p p. 52-78.

266 


whether Soviet law was really law. How immensely liberating it 

was to forget these questions and start asking ourselves what functions 

such institutions performed in Soviet society. In a way functional 

assumptions have become so much a part of the intellectual 

climate, that we have forgotten what things were like before. 76 

Perhaps some of the disillusion with functional analysis has to 

do with the kinds of claims which were initially made for it. Many 

of those scholars drawn to the approach, including Almond, seemed 

to percieve of it initially as a full blown theory which was full of 

law like propositions only waiting to be explicated. However, if we 

make more modest claims for the approach and see it as Almond 

now does, i.e., as a conceptional scheme whose value is primarily 

heuristic, it takes on a different perspective. It has not brought 

about a revolution in the study of politics which has all but opened 

the way to tremendous advances in our understanding. It has not 

relieved us of the difficult and frustrating job of careful research 

into highly complicated relationships. And it is not even a guide 

to study of all the political questions in which we may be interested. 

Almond, then, is merely suggesting we adopt a certain research 

strategy. To be sure, as already indicated, certain assumptions about 

reality are implicit. For example, it is assumed that the reciprocal 

relations among parts of the political system are such that significant 

changes in some of them will produce changes in others. However, 

this statement does not have the status of a " law. " The actual 

extent of inter-relatedness must be determined by empirical investigation, 

and should it eventually prove to be the case that the postulated 

relationships are less interesting than others, a new strategy will 

have to be developed. Initially Almond ' s claims were bolder. Stated 

more modestly they seem reasonable. 7G 

There are, of course, a good many problems with Almond ' s 

framework even in his own terms. The political system is conceived 

of as an analytic system, one of several subsystems of the larger 

society. In postulating inter-connectedness among parts of the system, 

Almond does not deny, or at least does not have to deny, 

that at the boundaries at least, the relations between elements in 

the political system and elements in other subsystems may be of 

76 0ne of the first books to approach the Soviet Union from this perspec- 

tive was Frederick 'C. Barghoorn ' s, Politics in the USSR ( Boston, 1966). 

76 

The subtitle of his latest book is: Essays in Heuristic Theory.


greater significant than relations among parts of the political system 

itself. We should like, then, some clarification as to the relationship 

between the political system and other subsystems in the society. 

Almond, however, has little or nothing to say about this problem. 

For one thing he has not developed a functional model of the 

whole society. Thus, while he argues that the political system performs 

certain functions, he never tells us what other functions must 

be performed in a society, and how the performance of such functions 

is to be conceptualized. 

Furthermore, Almond never tells us clearly what a boundary is, 

although he talks freely about boundaries. in reading his analysis 

we can develop some vague ideas After all, the political system is 

involved in processing demands, and we have some vague notions 

as to which structures are involved in such processing and which are 

not. Unfortunately, these vague notions are never clarified, and, as 

a result, a good deal of fudging occurs, some of it of considerable 

importance. The political system floats uneasily in an environment 

whose relation to it remains unclear, and, indeed, at times it seems 

to expand until it becomes practically co-equal with the society as 

a whole. " 

One of the major reasons for this, I think, has to do , with Al - 

mond 's conceputalization of the functions of the political system. 

The Eastonian model has very serious limitations. For example, if 

followed rigorously, it would prevent really adequate comparisons 

between the Soviet Union under Stalin, China under Mao, Cuba 

under Castro, and countries such as the United States or England. 

Indeed, it would make comparisons difficult between most modern 

states and bureaucratic empires (such as the Ottoman). 

In the case of mobilization regimes the effort of the political elite 

has not been simply to process demands, but to achieve certain 

goals based on ideological preconceptions, and, in fact, to change 

the demand structure of society. And, as Eisenstadt points out, one 

of the characteristics of bureaucratic empires was the availability 

of resources which the elite could use for ends of its own choosing. 78 

Almond attempts to deal with such questions by arguing that de- 

"See, for example, his discussion of France in Comparative Politics, op. cit., 

pp. 263-66. 

" 

" 

"Cf. Stanley Rothman, One Party Regimes: A Comparative Analysis, 

Social Research 34 (Winter, 1967), pp. 675-702 and Eisenstadt, The Political 

Systems of Empires, op. cit. 

267


mands can come from within the political system itself. 79 The statement 

is, however, incompatible with the model. The political system 

cannot be at one and the same time a mechanism for processing 

societal demands and the source of such demands. 

It is, of course, quite clear that Almond ' s as well as Easton ' s 

conception of the functions of a polity are derived from classical 

liberalism. The view of Locke and others was essentially that society 

consisted of individuals and groups pursuing their own interests and 

that the role of the state was to mediate among these groups, and 

to perform certain common functions upon which all agreed. One 

may feel that this kind of society is essentially the good society, and 

the direction in which all political orders should move. However, 

such feelings are not a substitute for a conceptual framework which 

will enable us to understand how societies have functioned in the 

past and do function now. 80 

I am not suggesting that the " conversion " model is entirely 

wrong or lacks utility. Indeed, in so far as it has encouraged us to 

examine the structure of demands. in, say, Soviet society, it has 

served as a useful corrective to the totalitarian model so popular in 

the 1950 ' s. I would suggest, however, that it is a partial and 

ethnocentric model, and that Parson ' s definition of the functions 

of the political system is superior, although not without problems. 

In Parsonian terms the political system would be defined as that 

subsystem of the society through which its members define its goals, 

and, in the broadest sense, mobilize resources to achieve these 

goals.' Such goals, of course, include the authoritative allocation 

of values within the society. 

Parsons has been. criticized for. failing to specify whose goals 

he is talking about, and, in general, for ignoring power assymetries 

in society as well as the key role of dominant elites. S2 However, if 

he is at fault in this regard, his definition is not. The existence of 

political systems in all known present and historical societies is to 

79 

Comparative Politics, p. 25. 

80 

Joseph LaPalombara has made a similar point in Joseph LaPalombara 

(ed.), Bureaucracy and Political Development ( Princeton, 1963), p. 10. 

81 

Talcott Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (New York, 1969), pp. 

317-351. 

82 

See the very insightful discussion and critique by Anthony Giddings, 

" Power in the Recent Writings of Talcott Parsons," Sociology 2 (September, 

1968), pp. 257-272. and W. G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory 

(Cambridge, 1969, 2nd edition), p. 117.


be explained by the fact that men require mechanisms of some kind 

to define common goals, including mere survival, as well as to mo - 

bilize resources for their attainment. The key role played by the 

political system in any society makes it a focal point of conflict, and 

a mechanism by which dominant elites can insure their dominance 

and engage in various forms of self-aggrandizement. In the study 

of any given society the actual relationship between the role of 

demands emanating from other groups within the society and elite 

preferences and perceptions is an open question to be settled by 

research. 

Almond ' s liberal perspectives also weaken his discussion of political 

culture. It may be that secular, rational, pragmatic cuture is 

the high point of evolution, as it manifests (should we say manifested?) 

itself in England and the United States. However one 

must deal with some serious questions before such an assertion can 

be accepted. American " pragmatism " has always operated within 

a framework of certain widely shared values themselves derived 

from the Liberal tradition. The " pragmatism " of the British, while 

superficially the same, has other roots. Both traditions seem to be 

breaking down, and I suspect that Almond would have been more 

sensitive to this fact had he not been caught up in certain assumptions 

of his own. 

His problems with the concept of political culture as an analytic 

tool have, however, deeper roots which are related to his entire 

methodology, and the methodology of much of the contemporary 

behavioral school. Responding to criticisms that functional theory 

was static, that it ignored conflict, and that the relationship between 

macro-theory and actual empirical analysis was not clearly articulated, 

Almond has modified his approach. An evolutionary theory 

was added to the repertoire of functionalism and, more recently, 

efforts have been made to include coalition and leadership analysis. 

However, the model still remains static in many ways. Scholars are 

to search for relevant variables to describe a given society at a given 

point and then to look for the forces which produce change. As yet, 

however, one has little sense that Almond has begun to think about 

the weight of particular variables in producing a given change or 

has developed a. method for adequately describing a society at a 

given period of time. As a result, superficial resemblances are often 

assumed to represent basic similarities, and concepts like political 

culture become reified. Let me offer an example of what I mean and 

269


then attempt to suggest a strategy. by which efforts may be made to 

deal with the problem. 

In Comparative Politics, Almond contrasts the political style of 

the United States, England and the Philippines, on the one hand, 

with countries such as France on the other. The latter he argues, is 

characterized by an " absolute, value oriented " style. The former 

on the other hand are more pragmatic. He goes on to note: 

The pragmatic-bargaining style characterizes aggregation in such 

systems as those of the United States, Great Britain and the Philippines. 

In these countries a wide variety of interests are often combined 

into a limited number of alternative policies. This aggregation 

is sometimes guided by more general ideological perspectives, 

but the accommodation of diverse interests is its more notable char- 

acteristic. . . The presence of this style greatly facilitates system 

responsiveness. 83 

My knowledge of the Philippines is not very detailed. I would 

guess that the style of politics described by Almond is based on quite 

different values than that of the United States or England, and has 

more to do with the clientelist politics so characteristic of Latin 

American as well as a number of Asian societies. 84 Placed in the 

total context of the society, the style of interest aggregation in the 

Philippines, therefore, would seem likely to have a quite different 

meaning than superficially similar styles in the U. S. and Great 

Britain. It has, for example, been associated with extremely low 

rates of economic growth and quite high levels of corruption. The 

latter phenomenon, at least, is not characteristic of English 

politics. 86 

Further, while Almond ' s model helps us understand some aspects 

of the American malaise today, it seems clear that other forces 

have been at work too, associated with changing family patterns, 

and the decline of Protestant sensibilities of a certain kind. Relating 

the particular pattern of American political culture dynamically 

to other variables in the 1950 ' s might not have enabled Almond 

83 

Comparative Politics, p. 108. 

84 " 

See John Duncan Powell, Peasant Society and Clientelist Politics," 

American Political Science Review 64 (June, 1970), pp. 411-425. 

86 

Almond is certainly aware that similar styles do not have the same 

meanings in all three countries, but I feel that he is unable adequately to 

conceptualize the differences (see Ibid., pp. 57-58). 

1

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 27 1 

to be completely clear about what would happen in the 1960 ' s. 

It would perhaps have inspired somewhat greater caution in making 

statements about political cultures which implied that their character 

was relatively fixed. 

Almond ' s efforts to conceptualize societies at given periods of 

time do seem to resemble a series of static snapshots. One finds a 

certain kind of balance at point A. One then searches for exogenous 

and indigenous forces which have led or might lead to change. The 

strategy is not without merit. It does have limitations. 

This kind of approach, however, is not intrinsic to functional 

analysis per se.. On the contrary, a scholar can just as easily begin 

with the assumption that all modern societies, at least, represent at 

any given time an uneasy balance of forces. He would then 

actively search out potential tensions and sources of conflict and 

would recognize that any full description of the structures which 

characterize the political system necessarily involve an analysis of 

the balance of forces which led to their emergence, and the ways 

in which they seem to be changing. S6 The problems involved in 

dealing with political systems in this fashion are very complex, but, 

then, political systems are very complex. Political scientists might, 

in this respect, take a leaf from the work of contemporary psychoanalysts. 

The full description of the balance of forces which constitute 

a personality, involves the recognition that they are in a state 

of dynamic tension, and that they are a composite of an individual ' s 

entire life history. The same neurotic symptoms may represent a 

quite different combination of elements." Analyses of this type 

may often be erroneous, but those making them are less likely to be 

surprised by change, and are certainly less likely to be taken in by 

superficial resemblances in the responses to relatively short and 

highly structured questionnaires. 

The efforts which have been made by those of the functional 

school to develop an evolutionary theory of political development 

face a great many difficulties. They are not insuperable, but in so 

far as their analyses are decidely teleological they will have to be 

recast before they can be regarded as more than suggestive. Just 

as significantly, they will somehow have to be broadened to take 

"The point is made quite well in Walter Buckley, Sociology and Modern 

Systems Theory ( Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967). 

87 Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis ( New York, 1945).


into account man ' s relation to his total environment, and a theory 

of motivation which satisfies our knowledge of man ' s biological 

nature as well as his capacity to create culture. 88 If the events of 

the past several years have reminded us of anything it is that any 

such theory must take into account the non-rational elements of 

human behavior. Almond regards himself as a " sober " trustee of the 

enlightenment, but he is still a trustee, as are most political scientists. 

The model is still of rational men seeking to satisfy interests. Their 

conceptions of this interest may be determined, in part, by cultural 

givens, but within that framework, their means and ends are more 

or less rationally chosen. Despite the fact that psychoanalysis is all 

but an American institution, there has been little effort to integrate 

its insights into our work, since Lasswell ' s rather abortive efforts. 89 

These last remarks have been critical, and it is much easier to 

criticize than to innovate, at least if one sets reasonably rigorous 

empirical standards by which one ' s innovations shall be judged. The 

criticisms, however, are offered not to demolish functionalism as an 

approach, but to suggest possible ways in which its fruitfulness for 

the study of politics may be increased. Again, the functional approach 

has not involved a revolution in the study of politics and 

it has not led us much closer to solving the riddle of the sphinx. It 

has enabled us to develop increased sophistication. In short, Almond 

and those who have worked with him have important achievements 

to their credit. 

Much of the content of political science has remained and will 

remain unchanged by the development of functional perspectives. 

The need for historical analysis remains as important as ever, as do 

detailed descriptions of particular institutions. More importantly, and 

this may have more to do with the historical sources of functionalism, 

than the framework itself, certain very important questions 

do not seem amenable to a functional approach. 

88 

Two recent and very stimulating attempts to do just this are those of 

Weston LaBarre, The Ghost Dance (New York, 1970), chs. 1 and 2, and 

Peter A. Corning, 

" The Biological Bases of Behavior and Some Implications 

for Political Science, " World Politics 23 (April, 1971), pp. 321-370. 

88 The reasons for this are complicated and have as much to do with the 

nature of classical psychoanalysis as with political science. Recently signs have 

developed of a new attempt to build bridges between psychoanalytic theory, 

history and other social sciences. See, for example, the very insightful book 

by Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt, The Wish to Be Free ( Berkeley, 

1969), La Barre, op. cit., also incorporates a psychoanalytic perspective.


It may be true, for example, that all modern societies are and 

will be characterized by structures that fulfill the functions commonly 

assigned to bureaucracies, whatever one may call them. 

Nevertheless, there are still differences between modern societies 

which are important, and these differences are not adequately conceptualized 

by terms like " subsystem autonomy. " The Soviet 

Union may be a modern political system and a one party regime. 

It is also a socialist society. There can be but little question that 

the nature of the economic system has important consequences for 

political institutions, and that the politics of equally modern neocapitalist 

and socialist societies will take different forms. The study 

of these problems has been relatively neglected in recent years. They 

remain crucial to our understanding of comparative politics, as 

well as to our ability to confront some of the problems with which 

we shall be faced in the fairly near future. 

One final issue remains to be discussed. In recent years a widespread 

attack has been raised against functionalism in sociology and 

the whole behavioral tradition in political science (of which functionalism 

is usually considered part) which goes well beyond some 

of the criticisms I have already elaborated. 90 A good deal of the 

criticism is highly rhetorical and does not readily lend itself to systematic 

analysis. However, in much of it behavioralism and functionalism 

are accused of being conservative because they draw their 

image of man and his behavior from a highly corrupt contemporary 

society. Assuming contemporary behavior is natural, they refuse to 

use the facts for a leap of utopian speculation which would permit 

th emergence of new forms of social organization which are freer, 

more spontaneous and less characterized by " repressive " authority. 

90 The literature is becoming fairly substantial in sociology and political 

science. In the latter field the criticism of functionalism is generally part of a 

general criticism of the " behavioral " approach. Some representative works 

include: Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology ( New 

York, 1970): Henry Kariel (ed.), Frontiers of Democratic Theory ( New 

York, 1970), Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe (eds.), An End to Political 

Science (New York, 1970), Philip Green and Sanford Levinson (eds.), Power 

and Community: Dissenting Essays in Political Science (New York, 1970), 

and the McCoy and Playford volume already cited. See also Henry Kariel, 

" Expanding the Political Present, " The American Political Science Review 63 

( September, 1969), pp. 768-776, and Sheldon Wolin, " Political Theory as a 

Vocation," The American Political Science Review 63 December, 1969), pp. 

1062-1082.


Insofar as the (behavioralist) eliminates alternative realities 

by embracing as "real" the very institutions which the social sciences 

properly subject to continuous criticism, it is anti-empirical as well 

as elitist. When it fails to acknowledge the problematic-not to say 

grotesque character of the present, it is unable to specify how men 

are kept underdeveloped by the dominant order of commitments; 

government by a plurality of elites, a functional division of labor 

. . . the system of fixed social and biological roles within hierarchical 

organizations. ... 91 

... the issue is ... between those who would restrict the "reach" 

of theory by dwelling on facts which are selected by what are assumed 

to be the functional requisites of the existing paradigm and 

those who believe that because facts are richer than theories, it is 

the tasks of the theoretical imagination to restate new possibilities. e2 

In so far as behavioralists or functionalists have taken as natural 

what is twentieth century American and European political behavior, 

Kariel, Wolin and others certainly have a point, if we ignore 

their hyperbole. Beyond this I am more skeptical. It may be that 

developing a theory of human political behavior by drawing on its 

past and present manifestations produces a conservative bias. It still 

seems to be infinitely preferable to deriving such theory from the 

future unless one owns a good ouija board. 

Functionalists, after all, can argue that on the basis of their own 

assumptions they could have predicted and can explain why the 

French had to recreate a legal profession after 1789 and why the 

Russians had to recreate a legal system or a bureaucracy which re - 

sembles very closely the bureaucracy of other industrial societies. 

They could also have predicted the need for organizing industry 

and education in ways not too different from other communities. 

And they would predict that the Chinese, despite Mao 's efforts, will 

continue to face the same requirements. 93 

Finally, they could have 

predicted that the failure to recognize the need for some structure 

of authority in any society and public checks upon it would most 

likely result in its concentration in the hands of a self-perpetuating 

91 Kariel, op. cit., p. 769. 

"Wolin, op. cit., p. 1082. 

"Stanley Rothman, European Society and Politics, op. cit., chapters 3, 4, 

7, 20, 21, 22. On China after the cultural revolution, see John W. Lewis 

(ed.), The City in Communist China (Stanford, 1971).


elite. 94 

Such predictions and explanations, deriving as they do from 

functional and structural imperatives, seem rather more reasonable 

than the simplistic notions of betrayal by which some utopians, at 

least, attempt to explain the failure of all past efforts to usher in 

the millenium. 

If one, then, is to convince reasonable men that transcendence 

is more than merely possible, one must develop a conceptual framework 

and theories which stand the test of all empirical theories. The 

creators of such frameworks and theories will have to demonstrate 

that they enable us to organize data about the present and past 

roughly as efficiently as alternate models, and that they are more 

fruitful with regard to new discoveries. Marx certainly realized 

this. Most of his adult life was dedicated to the attempt to construct 

a model of man and history which would demonstrate, on 

just these grounds, the probability of a future society which 

would maximize human freedom. Those who would make use of 

the philosophic " existential " Marx, while ignoring or rejecting the 

mature theory would have received little sympathy from him. Very 

few radical theorists have attempted anything like a comparable 

task, and the efforts of those who have tried, such as Marcuse, Bay, 

Gouldner or Moore seem less than convincing. 95 

At least some of the new set of radical critics would refuse to 

accept this task. The argument seems to be as follows: All social 

science begins with value assumptions, in Gouldner's terms " background 

" and " domain " assumptions. We, then, are free to choose 

our own and proceed from there. The only requirement is that we 

must be aware of the assumptions from which we start. 99 

I would assert the contrary. Unless we assume that disagreements 

about political-moral questions stem from constitutional 

94 

Stanley Rothman, "One Party Regimes ..., op. cit. 

95 

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization ( Boston, 1955), One Dimensional 

Man ( Boston, 1964), Christian Bay, The Structure of Freedom (New York, 

1965), and other works cited above; Gouldner, op. cit., and Barrington Moore, 

Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1966). For 

critiques, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Herbert Marcuse ( New York, 1970), Stanley 

Rothman, "Barrington Moore and the Dialectics of Revolution: An Essay 

Review, " The American Political Science Review 64 (March, 1970), pp. 

" " 

Objectivity, Commentary 50 (December, 1970), 

61-82. Stanley Rothman, 

pp. 95-97 represents a critique of Gouldner, and R. S. Peters, The Concept 

of Motivation (London, 1958) offers a short but devastating critique of 

Abraham Maslow, upon whom Bay builds much of his theorizing. 

"Gouldner, op. cit.


differences, they can only derive from differing beliefs about the 

natural order of things and their relation to human needs. Most 

of us derive these beliefs initially from our culture, or from childhood 

experiences. However, confessing that one starts from certain 

assumptions, does not release one from the obligation constantly to 

re-examine them in the light of new evidence. To refuse is to 

abdicate moral responsibility. Children do this, but as adults we 

should put away childish things. 

As Charles Taylor notes, in an article which should be read carefully 

by every political scientist: 

" " " . . . good doesn't mean conducive to the fulfillment of human 

wants, needs or purposes " ; but its use is unintelligible outside of any 

relationship to wants, needs and purposes. . . For if we abstract 

from this relation, then we cannot tell whether a man is using 

"good" to make a judgment, or simply to express some feeling; and 

it is an essential part of the meaning of the term that such a distinction 

can be made . . . " good " is used in evaluating, commending, 

persuading and so on by a race of human beings who are such that 

through their needs, desires, and so on, they are not indifferent to 

the outcomes of the world process. 

In setting out a given framework, a theorist is also setting out the 

gamut of possible politics and policies. But a political framework 

cannot fail to contain some, even implicit conception of human 

needs, wants and purposes. The context of this conception will de- 

termine the value-slope of the gamut... . 

In this sense we can say that a given explanatory framework 

secretes a notion of good, and a set of valuations, which cannot be 

done away with-though they can be overridden-unless we do 

away with the framework. 97 

To say that most ethical disagreements about politics stem from 

different conceptions of the world, is not to make the task of securing 

agreement easier. The assumptions underlying various frameworks 

and theories are difficult to deal with, and prejudice dies 

hard especially when compounded by self-interest. It is to say that 

morally responsible men must always subject their own and other 

frameworks to the kinds of empirical tests I have suggested. 

Smith College 

97 

Taylor, op. cit., pp. 54-55, 5 

STANLEY ROTHMAN

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