FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

250 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
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may well be superseded by something else.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).