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Political science 21 5
the work done is admirably successful in mapping the behaviour of each system
separately. Indeed, generalization can be carried further; interest groups respond
more sensitively to shifts in technological organization than do parliamentarians
and public officials. Undoubtedly, in each country the environment of the in-
terests is different; nevertheless, it is certainly possible to identify cross-national
‘syndromes’ about the political organization of farmers, or teachers, or physici-
ans (functional groups), as can be done in regard to the military or the officials,
groups whose rGIe is to some extent determined by the organization of the State.
This limited comparative study of organizations is at present the most fruit-
ful part of the topic. Scholars seem reluctant to be pushed further towards
wider generalization by provocative utterances which cannot easily be made
operational. At one extreme is the view of Bentley, that the State is no more
than a ghost, a transparent screen for ‘real’ interests. In 1951 D.B. Truman in
his book, The Governmental Process, attempted to rescue the ‘public’, at least, if
not the State, as a latent interest capable of being mobilized in answer to a
threat. But this formulation did not win much support; and no other scholar
has tackled the problem of ‘general interest’ and ‘particular interests’ head on
as a matter of observation and ~erification.~’
Similarly, it has become a sort of commonplace of political science that the
other extremeview is untenable; that in a technological society it is not so much
improper as impossible to prevent interests from finding some way in which to
express themselves. The doctrine, as old as Rousseau, that such groups must be
either abolished or controlled by State or party, has been embodied in the
practice of various States in the last 40 years. In Hitlers’s Germany and Musso-
lini’s Italy one can see (after the event) that the doctrine was not enforced, that
interests invaded the party, that what was meant to be monolithic was as plura-
listic as was government by interests in the United States of America, and much
more barbarous.
But no real attempt has been made to bring this debate under control by
observation: and perhaps it is not within the power of political science to do so.
Communications. ‘Freedom of speech and freedom of the press’ have as
long a history as has ‘freedom to organize’: and these freedoms also are caught
up in technological change.
There has been much straight descriptive study of the institutions and finance
of mass communications in the electronic age : techniques of content analysis
make it possible to assess changes in trend and to react quickly; up to a point,
there has been technical success in developing the art of persuasion: or (perhaps
more important) the art of creating ‘a favourable climate of opinion’.
Much of fhis belongs to sociology and social psychology rather than to
political science. Modern politics depends on the art and science of mass com-
munications: but it is also interested in the problem of opinion leaders. It is now
realized that ‘small group’ discussion exists as a powerful medium alongside
television, radio and the press; and that the question of leadership in the small
group is not a separate question, because the leader in conversation leads also
in selecting and emphasizing and repeating some aspects of the contents of mass
communications and not others. In politics, ‘a mass’ is not a blank and passive