FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS
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).
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