FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

More documents

Recommendations

Info

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 253 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 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER 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).
Page 1 and 2: FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS : An
Page 3 and 4: 238 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
Page 9 and 10: 244 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE .REVIEWER
Page 17: 252 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
Page 41: 276 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?