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202 W. J. M. Mackenzie
tain that law, lawyers and adjudication have an independent place even in dicta-
torial regimes, in that civil order is essential to economic continuity, and that no
modern industrial State, however tyrannical, can flourish without regularity of
expectations, duly specified and promulgated.
This last point is an open question of fundamental importance which has not
been treated methodically. There is however a rich stock of monograph material
on the other topics : military, bureaucracy, ideology and police.
It is usual in such studies to find that an organization does not stay within the
functions allocated to it by meamlends analysis. In recent years attention has been
given particularly49 to the tendency for the military to intervene in politics, and
Finer and others have identified the types of situation in which this is likely to
occur, and the types of difficulty which an officer-corps will face if it seizes
formal positions of authority. Analysis of bureaucracy involves on the one hand
the study of public administration, on the other hand a reference (on the lines
indicated by Max Weber) from administrative institutions to the structure of
society. Indeed, under each of these headings there is required a study of ‘ecology’
on the lines suggested on p. 178 above: and we do in fact know a great deal of
the interaction between the fundamental elements of State organization and their
economic and social environment. One hesitates to claim that this knowledge
can be set out in the form of ‘laws’. Each case is strongly individual, and tradi-
tion, the social habit of acting in certain ways, is very strong once it has been
established. Who (for instance) would claim to have discovered by empirical
research laws exactly applicable to the case of China? W e have tools of analysis
with which to frame quite precise and relevant questions about conditions
governing the political development of China. But we do not know the answers
a priori; at best, we claim to have some skill in patching together coherent
hypotheses from scanty clues.
E. Constitutional States
It should be repeated that the categorization set out in Section D is meant to
apply to all States. Within this universe, there is a general desire to demarcate a
sub-set of States which are in some sense ‘approved’ in that they have achieved
more, politically, than the bare conditions of political existence.
I. The approved political system
It seems inescapable now that this approved condition should be tagged with
the name ‘democracy’; it would be an interesting piece of research (comparable
to the late Professor Koebner’sSO work on ‘empire’) to piece together how the
Greek word 6qpoxpudu, a word with a rather specialized political meaning in
classical Greek, came gradually to mean no more than an approved political
condition.
Various attempts have been made to appropriate the use of the word for
specific ends, by attaching evocative adjectives, for instance ‘free enterprise
democracy’, ‘people’s democracy’, ‘national democracy’, ‘African democracy’,