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FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 247 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).
248 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER 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.
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