FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

240 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
from formal governmental institutions or caste groups or whether
they involve petitions, demonstrations or judicial decisions. By interdependence
Almond means that significant changes in any part of
the system will produce. chances in other parts :
" a change in one
subset of interactions produces change in all other subsets. . . . io
By the existence of a boundary Almond means that there are points
where other systems begin and the political system ends. Complaints
about policy, for example, are not part of the political system, until
they become demands upon public authorities for some form of
action or are interpreted as such.
According to Almond, the superiority of functionalism to other
approaches to politics lies in the fact that it enables us to develop a
set of categories for the comparison not only of contemporary industrial
societies, but also of industrial societies with "developing"
societies and of contemporary societies with historical social orders.
Traditionally students of comparative politics have limited their
work to the comparison of such institutions as interest groups, political
parties, legislatures, courts, etc. These efforts can be reasonably
successful, Almond argues, if one is concerned only with the politics
of contemporary European societies which share something of a
common political and social heritage. However, he notes, when one
turns to comparisons between, say, England and Indonesia, traditional
analytic categories break down. One can point out, of course,
that England or the United States are characterized by many formally
organized large membership associations, and that in Indonesia
such associations are poorly organized and inadequately financed,
and have highly fluctuating memberships. However, such structural
comparisons deal only with the comparative anatomy of the three
polities, and within a European frame of reference at that. They tell
us little of the "physiology" of the systems in question, let alone
their dynamics.
On the other hand, Almond contends, if we assume that certain
functions must be performed in all societies if they are to , survive,
and we compare how these functions are actually performed in each
society, we can enrich our understanding of all of them by facilitating
meaningful comparative analysis. Further, he suggests, we escape
both the ethnocentrism that has blinded us to the richness of
lo Developing Areas, p. 8.