FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 265
I should add that one cannot really accuse Almond of having
become a new scholastic, a charge which has been leveled against
Talcott Parsons with some justification. 7 3 He does share some of
the jargon of the functional school . of sociology, but he has tried
to stick closely to the data and his category building enterprises have
never really gotten out of hand. The negative side of this virtue is
a lack of conceptual precision in some areas. However, I, for one,
feel that, on balance, the positive aspects of his strategy outweigh
its weaknesses.
Finally, I am not impressed by the arguments of those scholars,
such as LaPalombara, who maintain that attempts to develop an
overall framework for studying political systems are premature
and inhibit effective work. 14 All of us approach the study of society
with some conceptual scheme or other. The benefits of attempts to
make these explicit seem to me to outweigh the possible losses. It is
undoubtedly true that system building of the functional kind has
encouraged at least some scholars, including occasionally Almond
himself, to apply conceptual schemes mechanically rather than
creatively and to ignore the kinds of reality which could not fit into
preconceived boxes. They have also used conceptualization as an
excuse for not doing research. Frankly, I doubt that such students
would be more creative if the functional model did not exist. The
capacity of academics to substitute conceptual schemes or rhetoric
for research is boundless.
LaPalombara ' s critique is, however, useful. During the early
1960's the movement in the direction of overarching intellectual
schemes probably went too far, and rewards in the profession seemed
to be directly proportional to the number of neologisms an author
used. Further careful empirical and historical analysis tended to
be downplayed as mere description. Nevertheless, when used with
sensitivity and as a tentative guideline, the functional _approach has
been fruitful. It certainly has enriched the study of politics in any
number of ways. We forget now that for many years discussions of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union revolved about the question
as to whether it should or should not be called a party, or
73 See Barrington Moore, Jr., "The New Scholasticism and the Study of
Politics, " in Demerath and Peterson, op. cit., pp. 333-338.
7 4 Joseph LaPalombara, " Macrotheories and Microapplications in Comparative
Politics: A Widening Chasm, " in Comparative Politics 1 ( October, 1968),
p p. 52-78.