FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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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.
264 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER because of criticisms such as these that functional theorists began to experiment with such terms as " eufunction" and " dysfunction, " in order to permit more critical analyses." Whatever the merits of the above criticisms and the efforts to meet them, they are not relevant to Almond ' s work. From the beginning he has limited his use of functional analyses to certain key elements. Essentially all Almond has argued is that in all societies mechanisms must be created for the authoritative allocation of values, and that the job of political scientists is to study the various ways in which this has been and is being done. He has also maintained that we can do so more effectively by using a systems approach and emphasizing process rather than formal institutions. Almond has always stated that given political functions can be performed in a variety of different ways by different institutions. He has never, therefore, attempted to explain the existence of a given structure by the function it performs. If one wishes to understand why the Soviet political system aggregates interests in one way and the American in another, one must engage in historical causal analyses. One may fault Almond his list of functions, or may argue that functional analysis does not exhaust the kinds of questions of interest to political scientists, but he cannot be accused either of using teleological explanations or of being a conservative on these grounds alone. 72 One can also argue, as does Hempel, that listing functional requisites is simply to explicate the obvious. Perhaps so, but in the social sciences at least, the systematic discussion of the obvious may yield at least some advances in our understanding. Functionalists have also been accused of having adopted a conservative stance because of their equilibrium assumptions. In his later writing Almond sometimes apologizes for having done so earlier, but from what he has written there is no evidence that this is so. His approach does have a static quality in another sense, however, and I shall return to that question later. "Robert Merton seems to have introduced the term dysfunction. Eufunc Lion was coined by Marion Levy, Jr. For a recent short statement, see the latter ' s essay in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, op. cit., pp . 21-28. 72 A. James Gregor raises many of these objections to functionalism in political science. See his " Political Science and the Uses of Functional Analysis, " The American Political Science Review 62 (June, 1968), pp. 425-439. However correct he may be in describing Easton ' s work, his analysis is not applicable to Almond.
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