FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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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.
266 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER whether Soviet law was really law. How immensely liberating it was to forget these questions and start asking ourselves what functions such institutions performed in Soviet society. In a way functional assumptions have become so much a part of the intellectual climate, that we have forgotten what things were like before. 76 Perhaps some of the disillusion with functional analysis has to do with the kinds of claims which were initially made for it. Many of those scholars drawn to the approach, including Almond, seemed to percieve of it initially as a full blown theory which was full of law like propositions only waiting to be explicated. However, if we make more modest claims for the approach and see it as Almond now does, i.e., as a conceptional scheme whose value is primarily heuristic, it takes on a different perspective. It has not brought about a revolution in the study of politics which has all but opened the way to tremendous advances in our understanding. It has not relieved us of the difficult and frustrating job of careful research into highly complicated relationships. And it is not even a guide to study of all the political questions in which we may be interested. Almond, then, is merely suggesting we adopt a certain research strategy. To be sure, as already indicated, certain assumptions about reality are implicit. For example, it is assumed that the reciprocal relations among parts of the political system are such that significant changes in some of them will produce changes in others. However, this statement does not have the status of a " law. " The actual extent of inter-relatedness must be determined by empirical investigation, and should it eventually prove to be the case that the postulated relationships are less interesting than others, a new strategy will have to be developed. Initially Almond ' s claims were bolder. Stated more modestly they seem reasonable. 7G There are, of course, a good many problems with Almond ' s framework even in his own terms. The political system is conceived of as an analytic system, one of several subsystems of the larger society. In postulating inter-connectedness among parts of the system, Almond does not deny, or at least does not have to deny, that at the boundaries at least, the relations between elements in the political system and elements in other subsystems may be of 76 0ne of the first books to approach the Soviet Union from this perspective was Frederick 'C. Barghoorn ' s, Politics in the USSR ( Boston, 1966). 76 The subtitle of his latest book is: Essays in Heuristic Theory.
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