FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS greater significant than relations among parts of the political system itself. We should like, then, some clarification as to the relationship between the political system and other subsystems in the society. Almond, however, has little or nothing to say about this problem. For one thing he has not developed a functional model of the whole society. Thus, while he argues that the political system performs certain functions, he never tells us what other functions must be performed in a society, and how the performance of such functions is to be conceptualized. Furthermore, Almond never tells us clearly what a boundary is, although he talks freely about boundaries. in reading his analysis we can develop some vague ideas After all, the political system is involved in processing demands, and we have some vague notions as to which structures are involved in such processing and which are not. Unfortunately, these vague notions are never clarified, and, as a result, a good deal of fudging occurs, some of it of considerable importance. The political system floats uneasily in an environment whose relation to it remains unclear, and, indeed, at times it seems to expand until it becomes practically co-equal with the society as a whole. " One of the major reasons for this, I think, has to do , with Al - mond 's conceputalization of the functions of the political system. The Eastonian model has very serious limitations. For example, if followed rigorously, it would prevent really adequate comparisons between the Soviet Union under Stalin, China under Mao, Cuba under Castro, and countries such as the United States or England. Indeed, it would make comparisons difficult between most modern states and bureaucratic empires (such as the Ottoman). In the case of mobilization regimes the effort of the political elite has not been simply to process demands, but to achieve certain goals based on ideological preconceptions, and, in fact, to change the demand structure of society. And, as Eisenstadt points out, one of the characteristics of bureaucratic empires was the availability of resources which the elite could use for ends of its own choosing. 78 Almond attempts to deal with such questions by arguing that de- "See, for example, his discussion of France in Comparative Politics, op. cit., pp. 263-66. " " "Cf. Stanley Rothman, One Party Regimes: A Comparative Analysis, Social Research 34 (Winter, 1967), pp. 675-702 and Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires, op. cit. 267
268 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER mands can come from within the political system itself. 79 The statement is, however, incompatible with the model. The political system cannot be at one and the same time a mechanism for processing societal demands and the source of such demands. It is, of course, quite clear that Almond ' s as well as Easton ' s conception of the functions of a polity are derived from classical liberalism. The view of Locke and others was essentially that society consisted of individuals and groups pursuing their own interests and that the role of the state was to mediate among these groups, and to perform certain common functions upon which all agreed. One may feel that this kind of society is essentially the good society, and the direction in which all political orders should move. However, such feelings are not a substitute for a conceptual framework which will enable us to understand how societies have functioned in the past and do function now. 80 I am not suggesting that the " conversion " model is entirely wrong or lacks utility. Indeed, in so far as it has encouraged us to examine the structure of demands. in, say, Soviet society, it has served as a useful corrective to the totalitarian model so popular in the 1950 ' s. I would suggest, however, that it is a partial and ethnocentric model, and that Parson ' s definition of the functions of the political system is superior, although not without problems. In Parsonian terms the political system would be defined as that subsystem of the society through which its members define its goals, and, in the broadest sense, mobilize resources to achieve these goals.' Such goals, of course, include the authoritative allocation of values within the society. Parsons has been. criticized for. failing to specify whose goals he is talking about, and, in general, for ignoring power assymetries in society as well as the key role of dominant elites. S2 However, if he is at fault in this regard, his definition is not. The existence of political systems in all known present and historical societies is to 79 Comparative Politics, p. 25. 80 Joseph LaPalombara has made a similar point in Joseph LaPalombara (ed.), Bureaucracy and Political Development ( Princeton, 1963), p. 10. 81 Talcott Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (New York, 1969), pp. 317-351. 82 See the very insightful discussion and critique by Anthony Giddings, " Power in the Recent Writings of Talcott Parsons," Sociology 2 (September, 1968), pp. 257-272. and W. G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory (Cambridge, 1969, 2nd edition), p. 117.
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