FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS tionalized. For example, would one measure opportunities available for participation in terms of felt needs or perceptions, or would one attempt to create some absolute scale? Nevertheless, continued attempts in this direction would not be without value, even if they contributed only slightly to our ability to talk about such issues in more precise terms. IV. TOWARD A PLURALISTIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF POLITICS Even as he began to work in a more detailed manner with problems of evaluation, Almond ' s thinking was undergoing some shifts as regards empirical analyses. In a series of essays he began to move away self-consciously from as heavy a reliance on a functional model as characterized Comparative Politics, and to seek to combine such a model with other approaches. " The criticisms leveled against functionalism in his most recent writing parallel those of some of his critics. Functionalism focuses too much upon equilibrium. Its picture of society is too mechanistic or organismic. It is too deterministic, ignoring such phenomena as political leadership. It assumes reciprocal relationship among elements of a system which may indeed not exist. It is too abstract, because its more general statements are not tied closely to research into the ways in which groups actually make decisions. It ignores or has ignored such matters as the changing international environment by not being sufficiently aware of the openness of political and social systems, and it ignores the effects of particular policies adopted by elites at critical periods. Almond also admits that functionalism has remained somewhat ethnocentric in its outlook, and accepts the criticisms of Hempel us" Determinancy Choice, Stability-Change: Some Thoughts on a Contemporary Polemic in Political Theory, " Government and Opposition 5 ( Winter 1969-1970), pp. 22-40; Gabriel A. Almond, "State Building in Britain, France and Prussia, " (Draft paper prepared for the Summer Workshop in State Building in Western Europe; Stanford, California, mimeographed, n.d., 42 pp.) ; " Approaches to Developmental Causation, " ( First draft of an introduction to Gabriel Almond and Scott Flanagan (eds.), Developmental Episodes, mimeographed, n.d., 71 pp.). Professor Almond was kind enough to send me copies of both papers prior to publication. The latter paper will be published this year. 261
262 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER and others that functionalism does not involve casual explanation. 89 Rather, he now argues, its major purpose is hueristic. It is designed to throw light on relationships which scholars might otherwise have ignored or misread. Almond ' s response to his self-criticism is to seek " the historical cure " and to attempt to use the functional model in combination with other models to examine particular developmental episodes in a variety of countries. The attempt is to combine analytic efforts with in depth studies of particular historical events. His conclusion is that any political analysis must draw upon four major approaches to the study of politics, which complement each other: the functional, social mobilization, decision making and leadership models. Any political analysis must also take into account both the domestic and international environment. Thus the study of a given system involves an analysis of system-environmental properties, structural functional properties, decision coalition properties and leadership properties. The analysis of change will involve the examination of coalition and policy outcomes and linkages between these and the system which is emerging. Part of the job of comparative political history is to write alternative scenarios in an attempt to clarify the impact of particular choices. For example, to clarify the development of English history in the nineteenth century the analyst might ask what would have happened if Whigs and Tories in 1831 had organized a coalition based on a policy of repression, or the Social Democratic Party in 1918 had moved toward the left rather than toward the " discredited military-bureaucratic establishment. " Almond is hopeful that the analyses of a series of case studies will help scholars integrate these various approaches into a more sophisticated general theory. The nature of this theory is not as yet clear. For example, Almond seems less taken with an evolutionary approach, but has not discarded it. He also seems more willing to accept the possibility of considerable indeterminancy in political change involving, for example, " accidents, " such as the appearance of a particular charismatic leader. However, it is far from certain how this would affect his attempts at conceptualization. 69 The classic critique is that of Carl G. Hempel, " The Logic of Func- tional Analysis, " in Llewellyn Gross (ed.), Symposium on Sociological Theory ( Evanston, 1959).
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