FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS 273 It may be true, for example, that all modern societies are and will be characterized by structures that fulfill the functions commonly assigned to bureaucracies, whatever one may call them. Nevertheless, there are still differences between modern societies which are important, and these differences are not adequately conceptualized by terms like " subsystem autonomy. " The Soviet Union may be a modern political system and a one party regime. It is also a socialist society. There can be but little question that the nature of the economic system has important consequences for political institutions, and that the politics of equally modern neocapitalist and socialist societies will take different forms. The study of these problems has been relatively neglected in recent years. They remain crucial to our understanding of comparative politics, as well as to our ability to confront some of the problems with which we shall be faced in the fairly near future. One final issue remains to be discussed. In recent years a widespread attack has been raised against functionalism in sociology and the whole behavioral tradition in political science (of which functionalism is usually considered part) which goes well beyond some of the criticisms I have already elaborated. 90 A good deal of the criticism is highly rhetorical and does not readily lend itself to systematic analysis. However, in much of it behavioralism and functionalism are accused of being conservative because they draw their image of man and his behavior from a highly corrupt contemporary society. Assuming contemporary behavior is natural, they refuse to use the facts for a leap of utopian speculation which would permit th emergence of new forms of social organization which are freer, more spontaneous and less characterized by " repressive " authority. 90 The literature is becoming fairly substantial in sociology and political science. In the latter field the criticism of functionalism is generally part of a general criticism of the " behavioral " approach. Some representative works include: Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology ( New York, 1970): Henry Kariel (ed.), Frontiers of Democratic Theory ( New York, 1970), Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe (eds.), An End to Political Science (New York, 1970), Philip Green and Sanford Levinson (eds.), Power and Community: Dissenting Essays in Political Science (New York, 1970), and the McCoy and Playford volume already cited. See also Henry Kariel, " Expanding the Political Present, " The American Political Science Review 63 ( September, 1969), pp. 768-776, and Sheldon Wolin, " Political Theory as a Vocation," The American Political Science Review 63 December, 1969), pp. 1062-1082.
274 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER Insofar as the (behavioralist) eliminates alternative realities by embracing as "real" the very institutions which the social sciences properly subject to continuous criticism, it is anti-empirical as well as elitist. When it fails to acknowledge the problematic-not to say grotesque character of the present, it is unable to specify how men are kept underdeveloped by the dominant order of commitments; government by a plurality of elites, a functional division of labor . . . the system of fixed social and biological roles within hierarchical organizations. ... 91 ... the issue is ... between those who would restrict the "reach" of theory by dwelling on facts which are selected by what are assumed to be the functional requisites of the existing paradigm and those who believe that because facts are richer than theories, it is the tasks of the theoretical imagination to restate new possibilities. e2 In so far as behavioralists or functionalists have taken as natural what is twentieth century American and European political behavior, Kariel, Wolin and others certainly have a point, if we ignore their hyperbole. Beyond this I am more skeptical. It may be that developing a theory of human political behavior by drawing on its past and present manifestations produces a conservative bias. It still seems to be infinitely preferable to deriving such theory from the future unless one owns a good ouija board. Functionalists, after all, can argue that on the basis of their own assumptions they could have predicted and can explain why the French had to recreate a legal profession after 1789 and why the Russians had to recreate a legal system or a bureaucracy which re - sembles very closely the bureaucracy of other industrial societies. They could also have predicted the need for organizing industry and education in ways not too different from other communities. And they would predict that the Chinese, despite Mao 's efforts, will continue to face the same requirements. 93 Finally, they could have predicted that the failure to recognize the need for some structure of authority in any society and public checks upon it would most likely result in its concentration in the hands of a self-perpetuating 91 Kariel, op. cit., p. 769. "Wolin, op. cit., p. 1082. "Stanley Rothman, European Society and Politics, op. cit., chapters 3, 4, 7, 20, 21, 22. On China after the cultural revolution, see John W. Lewis (ed.), The City in Communist China (Stanford, 1971).
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