FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 251
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.