FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 263
Conceivably it might lead him to argue that it is impossible to develop
a general science of politics.
V. FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS
The functional approach to the study of society has been around
for some time, and the literature on it has grown to fairly enormous
proportions. Most of the arguments as to its utility have been fairly
well rehearsed and need not be repeated here. It should be noted
that many of the technical objections raised against the functionalism
of Radcliff-Brown, Malinowski or even Parsons are not really applicable
to Almond, although some critics behave as if they were.
Hempel, for example, quite correctly pointed out that " explaining"
the emergence or persistence of an institution by the functions
it performs in the larger society is not an explanation at all, for it
assumes that the same function cannot be fulfilled by some other
institutions, or indeed has to be fulfilled at all. 70 Hempel and others
have also noted that many functional analyses implicitly assume
some ideal model of a functioning society, and have suggested that
this is a dubious procedure. One can easily identify a well functioning
car, or, perhaps, a healthy organism, but given the difficulty of
setting overall goals for a society, what appears to be functional
from one perspective might well be disastrous from another.
At least some functionalists have seemed to feel that every institution
must have some relevance to the functioning of a given
social system, and have attempted to explain institutions in ways
which seemed to justify them. Critics have rightly pointed out that
such analyses assume what has to be proven. They also point out
that such analyses often take the overall values and structure of a
society as given. It may be legitimate to demonstrate that Europeans
have too lightly dismissed institutions which played an important
integrative role in various " primitive " societies as archaic and irrational.
It is another matter to inhibit reform in one ' s own society
by making a similar suggestion.
Other critics have suggested that since all societies consist of
individuals and groups competing for relatively scarce resources,
social arrangements which are functional for dominant sectors,
may, in fact, injure other sectors of the population. It is, perhaps,
70 See Hempel, op. cit.