THE CONCEPT OF POLffiCAL CULTURE

The Concept of Political

Culture

Stephen Welch
© Stephen Welch 1993
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenharn Court
Road, London WIP 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.

Frrst published in Great Britain 1993 by

THE MACMILLAN PRESS LID
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world

This book is published in the Macmillan!St Antony's Series

General Editor: Rosemary Thorp

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British library.

ISBN 978-1-349-22795-2 ISBN 978-1-349-22793-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22793-8

Frrst published in the United States of America 1993 by

Scholarly and Reference Division,
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 978-0-312-09144-6

library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Welch, Stephen.
The concept of political culture I Stephen Welch.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-09144-6
1. Political culture. I. Title.
JA75.7.W43 1993
306.2--dc20 92-38066
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
To my father and in memory of my mother
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 Political Culture and Democracy 14

The Civic Culture: Two Projects 14
The Comparative Project 22
Sociological Criticisms 27

2 Political Culture and Modernity 30

Cultural Lag 31
Stages of Modernity 34
Postmaterialism 39

3 Political Culture and Communism 45

The Consonance/Dissonance Theory
and Resocialization 46
The Soviet and Czechoslovak Cases 50
The Collapse of Communism and the
Multivalence of History 57
4 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 64
Cause and Effect 64
Culture and Context 72
Problems of Comparability 74

5 Political Culture and Stalinism 80

The 'Prefiguration' of Stalinist Political Culture 81
The 'Realization' of Stalinist Political Culture 84
Against Idealism 91
Political Culture and Ideology after Stalin 94

vii
viii Contents

6 Political Culture and Interpretation 99

Culture as a Resource 99
Geertz on Culture and Ideology 104
Phenomenology and Social Construction 108
Phenomenology and Political Culture 113

7 Political Culture and National Identity 118

Outline of a Phenomenological Approach to
National Identity 119
The Theory of Nationalism 122
Poland: the Nation as Response 125
Germany: the Nation as Invention 131
Implications for Political Culture 134

8 New Trends in Political Culture Research 136

Structuralism 136
The Grid and the Group 141
The Historians 147

Conclusion 159

Notes 166
Bibliography 193
Index 204
Acknowledgements

The first three years of the research on which this book is based were
funded by an ESRC Studentship. I wish to thank the following people
for useful comments or conversations: Ralf Dahrendorf, John Goldberg,
Joel Hellman, John Higley, Mary McAuley, David Priestland, Karl Robe
(and other participants in the Fifth Essen Conference on Political Culture,
Essen, February 1989) and Joe Schull. Erica Benner and Martha Merritt
read earlier versions of the manuscript in their entirety and made many
good suggestions. Lakshmi Daniel helped me with some logistical matters.
My D. Phil. examiners, Michael Lessnoff and Zbigniew Pelczynski, pro-
vided useful guidance and a singularly effective stimulus to many of the
improvements contained herein. Mr Lessnoff went beyond the call of duty
in making additional suggestions for the final revision, and could no doubt
have made many more if time had allowed. I especially want to thank my
supervisor, Archie Brown, for his support over the long haul. I used to
think that the practice of sharing the credit while taking the blame was a
paradoxical conceit; now I realize it is merely right.

ix
Introduction

'Political culture is one of the most popular and seductive concepts in

political science; it is also one of the most controversial and confused.' 1
Since this view was expressed in 1979, it has if anything become truer.
Recent years have seen a recrudescence of theoretical debate about the
concept and new applications in a variety of academic disciplines. In
addition, its use has become quite widespread among journalists and tele-
vision commentators; its appeal has even extended, in the most worrying
development, to advertising copy-writers.2 This state of affairs makes
embarking on a general critique of 'political culture' and a survey of its
uses daunting. It at first seems as though political culture research has
ramified and expanded beyond the point at which it is useful even to refer
to it under one heading. This first impression is to a degree accurate, in
that whatever the conclusions of the present study, it is clear that there
is something in the idea of political culture that will continue to attract
political scientists, historians and pundits: like the early anthropological
idea of culture itself, it threatens to absorb everything in its vicinity.
A second look reveals an opposite but equally off-putting problem.
The categorization of different types of political culture research, if we
notice the numerous attempts at this that have been made, turns out to
be quite possible - indeed all too possible. The disposition to construct
typologies that is endemic to political culture research turns out to afflict
its summarizers also. 3 The existence of several typologies of political
culture research already provides good grounds for not following that
approach here. Further grounds are provided when we consider to what
extent such typologies advance knowledge- raising thereby the important
general question of the purpose of categorization.
When dealing with a large and complex domain of data, it is of course
natural to attempt to give the domain some order by imposing categories
upon it. It is something else, however, to make a priori assumptions
about what these categories should be like, and to suppose, as many
of these accounts do, that the act of categorization exhausts analysis.
One of the studies we will consider makes the strong claim that a
typology must 'produce a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive set
of classes for the domain under consideration' .4 But why? Moreover,
whether or not such a result is feasible in the analysis of political
cultures themselves (the aim of the study just referred to), there are
2 Introduction

good reasons for doubting its feasibility in the analysis of political culture
research.
These reasons follow from the fact that no useful criterion of distinction
facilitates the creation of 'mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive'
categories. This claim rests on the meaning given to 'useful'. It is true
that 'Any criterion will organize data - will order items in classes - but
only some classifications will be scientifically useful' ,s yet there is no need
to assimilate usefulness to typological purity. Our goal in the following
chapters is to assess political culture research, not simply to order it.
Several criteria of ordering suggest themselves, but our argument will
often take the form of showing how the distinctions they would establish
are not hermetic and that the overlap or interference between 'categories'
helps us to understand problems in political culture research. Thus it is one
theme of the argument that noticing the lack of 'mutually exclusive and
jointly exhaustive' categories helps us to understand the domain we are
studying. The latter is to be considered the purpose of a 'useful' criterion
of distinction. Indeed, the very term 'criterion of distinction' is somewhat
rigid. Since we will be concerned with various forms of overlap, it would
be better to regard the criteria as a range of polarities.
With this qualification in mind, we may go on to consider the 'dis-
tinctions' that will be employed below. One that prominently suggests
itself is that between behaviouralism and interpretivism. The candidacy
of this distinction for the subdivision of the political culture field is quite
plausible. For one thing, the distinction has come to be at least one of
the more important and common ways of analyzing political science as
a whole, and polemics between the two camps have been going on for at
least thirty years. More to the point, though, is the fact that political culture
has itself provided an arena for that contest: in its ball of fame it contains
major representatives from each side, and thus has served as a microcosm
of the behavioural-interpretive debate in political science.
Behaviouralism, described by Robert Dahl as a 'mood' rather than a
'field', approximates in his view to a 'scientific outlook'. It had as its
ultimate goal 'the development of a science of the political process', 6 'a
major step forward in the nature of political science as science . . . toward
a probabilistic theory of politics' .7 The optimism of these aspirations was
of a piece with the optimistic attitude towards science and technology as
a whole that was prevalent in America in the 1950s and early 1960s. But
aside from this consonance with the mood of the times, behaviouralism
drew strength from various sources. Dahl mentions specific factors such
as the support for behavioural research given by various foundations
and the hands-on experience of government by political scientists that
 Introduction 3

occurred in the Second World War, as well as more general ones such as
the influence of European sociologists who emigrated to the United States
in the 1930s.
Bernard Crick, taking a more critical stance, has argued that the
behaviouralist aspiration to 'value-freedom' is the result of a liberal 'belief
in a natural unity and unanimity in American thought' which 'has cut itself
away from the actual reasonings and experience that underlay the great
political literature of the early republic' .8 Crick's argument in tum has been
contradicted by Gabriel Almond, who calls attention to the continuity of the
behavioural movement with intellectual developments already underway in
Europe, mediated by the fact of emigration, and argues that, therefore, 'the
counterposition of a European and an American approach to social science
around the issue of humanist vs. scientific scholarship will simply not bear
the light of day' .9
Its philosophical roots aside, a sounder basis for distinguishing
behaviouralism is perhaps that it combined the aspiration to make
the study of politics scientific with a methodology that appeared to
make the aspiration fulfillable: quantitative, and more precisely survey,
methodology. The development of survey techniques, in other words,
facilitated what had previously been seen as only a distant goal, because
it enabled truly comparable and cumulative research. Nevertheless, we
will discuss below the role of interpretation in survey methodology itself,
justifying Anthony Giddens's conten~on that 'All so-called "quantitative"
data. when scrutinized, tum out to be composites of "qualitative" - i.e.,
contextually located and indexical - interpretations produced by situated
researchers, coders, government officials and others.' 10
Another feature of behaviouralism, one clearly implied by its characteri-
zation by Dahl as a 'protest movement', is its attempt to transcend what
were seen as the deficiencies of the previously dominant paradigm in the
study of politics, the so-called 'legal-institutional' approach. This approach
was held to have had an excessively narrow scope, restricting its attention
to formal rules and institutions, and overlooking informal behaviour. 11
Behaviouralism may thus be seen as a stage in the territorial expansion
of political science as a discipline; that is, the enlargement of its subject
matter from constitutions to informal elite political behaviour, thence to
voters' behaviour and, finally, to mass attitudes and behaviour beyond the
realm of electoral participation.
The concept of political culture was in the vanguard of the behavioural
revolution. Although the term bad been used earlier (for instance by Herder
in the eighteenth century and by Lenin in the twentieth), 12 Almond's
characterization of political culture as the 'particular pattern of orientations
4 Introduction

to political action' in which 'every political system is embedded'13 is

generally regarded as an act of coinage. It played a key role in several
subsequent studies which have assumed the status of classics of the
behavioural tradition, such as Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture
and Pye and Verba's Political Culture and Political Development. The
concept of political culture offers itself as an ideal token of and catalyst for
behaviouralism since it fulfils the two central aims of the approach: it can
be defined so as to be measurable quantitatively, and it marks the ultimate
expansion of the territory of political science. When Almond borrowed the
term 'culture' from anthropology, he was thus trying to do two things. In
subserving the goal of territorial expansion he was trying to make use of
a concept that had historically had a very broad reference in its original
anthropological setting. And at the same time, by asserting the 'autonomy'
of political culture from culture in general,l 4 he was trying to define a
concept that would subserve the goal of quantification and cumulative
research. These aims are, however, in conflict. It comes as little surprise
that the aptness of the idea of 'culture' for the purpose of behaviouralist
territorial expansion has enabled holistic conceptions of culture to come
into play, thus undermining the behaviouralist explanatory aspiration.
lnterpretivism, like behaviouralism, also has the character of a reaction;
in this case, to behaviouralism itself. It is typified by the rejection,
implicit or explicit, of behaviouralist standards of verification in favour
of a criterion of plausibility. The intellectual sources of this approach
are diverse. They are not completely distinct from those claimed as
inspiration by behaviouralist writers on political culture. Any student
of the kinds of differences between nations and groups which we now
refer to with the term 'political culture', who thought and wrote before
the advent of survey methodology, necessarily used interpretive methods,
but at the same time can be seen as a precursor of those who today use
surveys to characterize such differences. J. G. Herder, for instance, was
one of the first to discuss systematically the differences between nations,
the fact that 'human nature under diverse climates is never wholly the
same' .ts F. M. Barnard takes this as an early manifestation of political
culture writing, 16 but Herder's speculative analysis has little in common
methodologically with behavioural political culture research. Alexis de
Tocqueville is another writer who might seem to be the epitome of an
interpretivist. But he too has been claimed by the behaviouralists: 'One
has to read the Tocqueville correspondence to appreciate how close that
brilliant interpreter of American democracy ... came to doing an opinion
survey in his travels around the country.' 17 More specific to interpretivism
are the methodological principles of verstehende Soziologie elaborated
 Introduction 5

by Weber. But in terms of number of citations, the most significant

influence on political cultural interpretivism is anthropologist Clifford
Geertz, and in particular his notion of 'thick description', according to
which behaviour is not usefully described 'objectively'; its meaning bas
also to be described. Is
Thus within political culture research, the defining feature of
interpretivism is a conception of political culture as the 'meaning'
of political life, or the meaningful aspect of politics. This feature
licenses a large range of methodologies, from the sweeping description
and summary of a nation's history to the analysis of popular culture. The
only common feature of interpretive methodology is, indeed, its distrust of
quantitative analysis. The grounds for this distrust are well brought out in
a seminal article by Charles Taylor.t 9 The key terms in Taylor's approach,
consistently with the central feature of interpretivism just identified, are
'intersubjective' and 'common meanings'. Intersubjective meanings are
to be distinguished from 'common attitudes' of the sort whose presence
survey methodology can expose. They are perceptible only in the social
life to which they give rise, which they 'constitute'. Like language, they
provide the fabric of social life, the criterion of a group being a society.
Only when intersubjective meanings are present is there enough in common
in a group for there to be shared attitudes, or for that matter disagreements.
Some intersubjective meanings, moreover, do not just facilitate social life,
but make it distinctive for the society' 1: members. They express the society's
values. These are 'common meanings'. Taylor illustrates the resistance of
intersubjective and common meanings to empirical investigation with the
example of children in missionary schools, who are taught the values and
beliefs of a society that is alien to them. In this case, the values taught are
capable of investigation as 'brute data' (that is, by surveys): their content
is entirely captured in each child's individual expression of them. But that
is because the ideas in this case are mere 'social "ideals"'. Where the
missionaries come from, they are more than this; they are 'rooted in social
practice' and hence cannot be fully captured by interviewing individuals,
only by interpreting the social practice as a whole.
In accordance with its receptivity to a wide range of evidence,
interpretivism employs a characteristically broad definition of political
culture. Stephen White, for instance, defines political culture as 'the
attitudinal and behavioural matrix within which the political system is
located' .zo There is an echo of Almond's definition in the implication
that political culture provides some kind of context for politics, but the
introduction of behaviour marks a big difference. The problem lies in
differentiating the context from that which is located within it. The political
6 Introduction

system itself is, after all, from one point of view a 'behavioural matrix' or a
'pattern of behaviour'. To be sure, it is located within a larger behavioural
matrix, the entire behaviour of society, but the latter is not what White
goes on to investigate -his historical interpretation instead surveys Russian
history. Other interpretivists have faced up to this difficulty more squarely,
asserting that political culture cannot be analytically separated from politics
itself, and hence seeing it instead as a certain perspective on politics. Alfred
Meyer is one who has expressed such a view:

in practice it is difficult if not impossible to maintain the separation

between subjective propensities, actual behavior, and the framework
within which behavior takes place . . . . And once culture is every-
thing, what distinguishes it from other aspects of human behavior is
not so much its contents as a manner of ordering or viewing the
contents.2 1

It is therefore easy to distinguish behaviouralism and interpretivism in

abstract terms. Behaviouralism is characterized by its scientific aspirations,
including the aspiration to value-freedom, by its expansionist tendency and,
within political culture research, by its use of survey methodology and its
concomitant 'subjective' or psychological definition of political culture.
Interpretivism makes use of tests of plausibility, and construes political
culture as meaning; it is evidentially omnivorous, in keeping with its
comprehensive definition of political culture. However, distinctions that
seem clear when definitional and methodological preambles are compared
evaporate or are reversed when attention is focused on political culture
research itself. This is because the distinction between behaviouralism and
interpretivism that we have just elaborated is somewhat limited, in what is
not at first an obvious manner. It concerns the question of what political
culture is, in the sense both of how it is defined and of what evidence is
needed in order to describe it. This question might appear to be the only one
we need to answer in categorizing political culture research, but it is not.
The more important and useful question which will frame the discussion
to follow is, how is political culture, once defined and described, to be
used?
To be sure, the categories of behaviouralism and interpretivism have
certain implications for the use of the concept, but these are not completely
binding implications. We can thus speak of consistently behavioural or
interpretive uses of political culture, and also of hybrid uses. Wit,bin the
behavioural idiom, two uses of political culture may be identified1 which
we will refer to as the comparative and sociological uses.
 Introduction 7

As these labels imply, the uses we are distinguishing have characteristic

disciplinary or sub-disciplinary settings: comparative politics and political
sociology, respectively. That, however, yields only the most preliminary
understanding of the point of the distinction, especially since it will be
argued below that in many cases juxtaposition of the two uses occurs,
with effects that we will analyze at length. By the comparative use of
political culture is meant not simply the invocation of the concept in
a comparison between nations, or any other units, but its invocation
n a specific role in a specific type of comparison: namely, its use as
an isolatable and comparable factor in the explanation of differences in
national political outcomes and structures. The difference between this
use and the sociological one is not one of methodology nor necessarily
of definition. It is a distinction that can only be drawn clearly at a given
level of putative explanation, or for given units of comparison. For instance,
suppose we compare various n~tions and their political cultures, with a
view to explaining divergent political outcomes in terms of the diverse
political cultures. That would be a comparative use of political culture.
If we then examine the relationship of variables within the political
cultures, such as interpersonal trust and group-forming propensity, we
are enriching the description of political culture, and arriving at a new
explanatory theory, yet it is one in which individuals, not nations, are the
units of comparison. Comparison and explanation are occurring at a lower
level. The new theory would be a theory in sociology; it would not be a
comparative use of political culture, even if the concept of political culture
were to figure in it. A conflict between comparative and sociological uses
of political culture arises from the fact that the more detailed and complex
(therefore in a sense adequate) an account of political culture is, the less
comparable it is. Sociological sophistication, as we will see in some detail,
renders untenable the generalizations that are necessary for cross-national
comparison.
One reason for concentrating on the use criterion in the discussion
to follow is that in many cases there is a damaging juxtaposition of
comparative and sociological uses. We will discuss some examples of
this in Chapters 1 and 2, and will explore some of the reasons for it in
Chapter 4. Another reason, more suited to discussion in this Introduction,
is presented by the existence of what we called the hybrid cases. These
cases render inadequate and confusing the putative distinction in terms of
behaviouralism and interpretivism.
Hyhrid cases occur when interpretive methodology and definition con-
tribute to a characterization of political culture that is then used in either
the comparative or the sociological manner just outlined as subcategories
8 Introduction

ofbehaviouralism. White's analysis of Soviet and Russian political culture

is an example of this. Not only his definition, but his dismissal of 'futile
attempts to import the methodology of the natural sciences into the study
of human affairs' ,22 suggest an interpretive outlook, but as the discussion
of Chapter 3 will make clear, the use to which he puts the concept is
explicitly comparative. Lucian Pye, a student of Asian political culture,
employs a method with a large interpretive component, as Chapter 4 will
show. But its overall purpose is comparison between nations in terms of
their political cultures and the resulting political differences. As he puts
it, 'probably no other skill is as sensitive to the parochialism of culture
as that of the politician' .23 Pye's pupil, Richard Solomon, has produced
an account of Chinese political culture that is distinctive for its use of
Freudian categories, as, for instance, in his assertion that 'Mao might be
said to be an "anal" leader seeking to transform an "oral" society' .24
This methodology makes Solomon's work seem the paradigm of an
interpretive account. But although Freudian categories differ widely from
those more normally used by comparative political culture researchers, they
nevertheless have an important similarity, which is the assumption of their
universal applicability. A different range and type of evidence is required
to support a characterization of political culture such as Solomon's, and just
like Freudian analysis in its original therapeutic setting the characterization
has a large interpretive component. But the use made of these categories is
reassuringly familiar: Chinese political culture explains certain outcomes
in Chinese politics. Interpretive methods contribute to a comparative
conclusion.
An interpretive specification of political culture can also be used in the
sociological manner. Many of the 'sociologies of modernity' that will be
discussed in Chapter 2 feature this combination. In the more speculative of
these, evidence for the existence of some form of 'modem' or 'postmodern'
culture comes from a variety of sources, with the notable exception of
attitude surveys. The political culture thus interpretively specified is not,
however, placed in a comparative framework, but is seen as an ·aspect of
the modernizing process.
The categories of comparative and sociological uses of political culture
will take us far in the analysis and critique of political culture research, but
not as far as we need to go. It would be felicitous if interpretive political
culture research offered itself for analysis in terms of contradictory uses
as the behavioural variant does. Unfortunately for seekers of symmetry,
interpretivism differs too much from behaviouralism for this to be the
case. Indeed, one might say that the distinction between characterizing
political culture and using it is itself hard to draw in cases of consistent
 Introduction 9

interpretivism, if interpretive political culture is only a 'manner of ordering

and viewing' certain phenomena. Nevertheless, an important distinction
within interpretivism needs to be made. Instead of uses, it will be better
to speak of tendencies, or even more vaguely of potentials. In particular, an
argument will be made in Chapters 5 to 8 below that interpretivism contains
an idealist tendency, as well as a phenomenological potential. Both of these
labels require some justification.
The term 'idealism' comes heavily freighted with centuries of philo-
sophical usage. We need only think of the related yet widely different
'idealisms' of Berkeley and Hegel to get an idea of its possible scope.
Despite this, the core of content common to all of the term's philosophical
variants already suggests its connection with the interpretive emphasis on
meaning. In the analysis undertaken in Chapters 5 to 8, however, something
more precise than an emphasis on ideas, or on the subjective, is intended
by the 'idealist tendency'. We '''ill be using the term to refer to analyses
in which meaning for the analyst has taken priority over meaning for
the participants. Idealist interpretivism, in this sense, manifests itself in
a number of different ways, and to different degrees. We will argue,
for instance, that it is to be found in the Geertzian notion of 'thick
description', and that it is egregiously present in some recent analyses
of political culture that have drawn on the anthropological structuralism
of Claude Levi-Strauss. In all such cases, for reasons that will become
apparent, idealism is a deficiency. One possible means of avoiding it
would be to avoid interpretivism altogether, but the argument below will
suggest that idealism can be avoided within the interpretive framework by
having recourse to the social theory of phenomenology. Phenomenology,
and in particular the phenomenology of the social world elaborated by
Alfred Schutz, we will argue, offers an antidote to idealism by insisting
that the justification of the interpretive method lies in the interpretive
practices of the participants themselves, which in turn are related to
their social practices. In other words, phenomenology serves to anchor
interpretivism to concrete social reality, while at the same time arguing
that such reality is a construct needing to be continually reproduced. Since
phenomenology has hitherto not been explicitly drawn upon as a basis for
political culture research, we can hardly argue that there exists such a thing
as the phenomenological use of political culture. But a phenomenological
analysis of political culture, we will argue, both accounts for and avoids
the deficiencies of behaviouralism and idealist interpretivism. Thus the
phenomenological potential of interpretive political culture is the analysis
upon which the argument of the following chapters converges.
Aside from distinctions of political culture research in terms of use of
10 Introduction

the concept, another polarity that will arise, though less explicitly, in the
following discussion is between two categories of subject matter or focus of
political culture research: mass and elite, where the latter usually refers to a
political and sometimes to an intellectual elite. The initial impression that
the concept, as originally defined within behaviouralism, is a necessarily
mass-focused one, both because of its quantitative methodology and
because of behaviouralist expansionism, is wrong. The same quantitative
methodology that seems most applicable to the mass level has been applied
also to the study of elite attitudes, pre-eminently by Robert Putnam.25
Within interpretivism, analysts often concern themselves with issues such
as ideology and political organization, issues that arise primarily in the
study of political elites. We will see, in fact, that an interpretive use of
political culture that left out of account the distinctive activities of political
elites would be sorely deficient.
Before concluding this discussion of categories of and within political
culture research, two further distinctions which, in contrast, are not going
to figure largely in the following analysis should be mentioned. For an
obvious reason, uses of the term 'political culture' that are casual will
not be examined. Casual uses are by now in simple numerical terms the
most common. They are not confined to journalists and commentators,
but frequently appear in academic writing. They are distinguished by the
fact that scholarly attention is elsewhere; the concept of political culture
carries no explanatory weight. It is tantamount to 'historical background'
or 'context' - concepts that themselves are potentially load-bearing, but
are generally not so. Something analogous to what befell the concept of
'political system' has occurred. When it was first introduced, the latter
concept was intended to bear much explanatory and descriptive weight.26
Considerable controversy was generated by its introduction and by the
attempt to define the concept. By now, however, the term is mainly used as
a mere synonym of 'political structures' or 'political institutions'. In casual
uses of political culture, explanatory claims are absent. It is merely, like the
idea of 'political system', a convenient shorthand.
Uses of the term that are explicitly normative, having connections with
the idea of 'culturedness' or 'civilization',27 while they merit further
discussion, are also largely outside the scope of this study. Explicitly
normative usage is best illustrated by Soviet political discourse, where the
concept became even more widely accepted than it is in the West, being
frequently used by politicians as well as scholars.28 Although reference
will be made to this use, it will not be a major focus. (It is not intended,
however, that the possibility be excluded that some of the uses we will be
considering are, as some critics have alleged, implicitly normative.)
 Introduction 11

Some justification needs to be offered for the selection of examples

in the analysis to follow. The desire not simply to reproduce at greater
length existing typological approaches to the study of political culture
research provokes an opposite reaction: emphasis on a small number of
case studies. The examples we will consider have been selected for their
representativeness of the issues raised in this Introduction. One of them,
Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture, is an indisputable classic upon
which much commentary has already been lavished. It will be argued in
Chapter 1 that its critics have failed to do it justice, but also that a more
powerful critique can be based on it<; conflation of the comparative and
sociological uses of political culture. Chapter 1 also considers The Civic
Culture as a basis for the evaluation of change in political culture in several
of the nations studied. The aptness of the concept of political culture for the
study of political change may thereby be assessed.
Chapter 2 pursues that question in relation to secular political change
of the type referred to as 'modernization'. Here, again, a conflict between
the comparative and sociological uses of political culture is revealed, the
emphasis this time being on the latter. A variety of approaches to the
process of modernization and the manner in which they use and construe
political culture are considered, but particular attention is given to the most
substantial study of the effects of secular change on political culture, a
study ranking with Almond and Verba's as a contribution to political
culture research in general, Ronald I11glehart' s Culture Shift in Advanced
Industrial Society (a continuation of his earlier Silent Revolution).
Chapter 3 pursues a different aspect of the issue of political change
raised by Chapter 1, focusing instead on cases of sudden and radical
political change, and looking at the use of the concept of political culture
in the study of communist states. This body of research, which kept the
concept alive through its period of greatest opprobrium during the 1970s,
is occasionally mentioned by writers in the 'mainstream', but only one
such writer, Almond, has paid it serious attention. The justification for
doing so here (apart from that of novelty) is that communist states
themselves, and the methodologies that, partly for logistical reasons,
have been applied to the study of their political cultures, raise in a
stark form some important issues in political cultural explanation. For
the analysis of a political cultural explanation of political change, com-
munist cases are doubly advantageous, both because of the imposition
of communism, and because of its recent breakdown. Archie Brown
and Jack Gray's colloquium, Political Culture and Political Change in
Communist States, provides the main resource for the discussion of the
first, and the chapter continues by attempting to assess the significance
12 Introduction

for political culture research of the events of 1989 and 1990 in Eastern
Europe.
Chapter 4 draws together and reinforces the argument of the first
three chapters, reaching sceptical conclusions about the adequacy of a
comparative use of political culture, and presenting these conclusions in
the light of the general theory of the 'comparative method'. It suggests
that further development of the comparative use of political culture will
have to involve not a perfecting of the techniques of measurement, but a
radical contraction of explanatory ambitiousness.
In Chapter 5, we embark on a discussion of interpretive uses of political
culture. Our starting point is the work of Robert Tucker on communist
political culture, particularly on Leninism and Stalinism. But his analysis
is amended, and supplemented by others that, while not explicitly using
the term 'political culture', offer support for the cultural· interpretation.
At the same time, substantial qualifications are introduced, centred around
the claim that an interpretive use of political culture, despite its apparent
suitability (for reasons that will be made clear) to Stalinist politics, has
the idealist tendency to abstract attention from concrete evidence, and to
project on to the subjects of study the description made by the analyst.
Chapter 6 undertakes a more philosophical discussion of justifications
and deficiencies of political cultural interpretivism. It approaches this by
examining some developments in the way culture bas been represented
within anthropology, not in order to justify one or another definition of
political culture,29 but for the purpose of penetrating more deeply than
is usually done in cross-disciplinary borrowing the theoretical issues
that the donor discipline is contending with and learning from them.
For a similar reason, the chapter refers to some historiographical uses
of the concept of political culture and what will be seen to be related
concepts, such as ideology. Common features of the use of culture in
these diverse settings will expose the need for a phenomenological analysis
of political culture. Chapter 6, accordingly, enters upon an account of
phenomenological social theory, touching on related issues such as the
relevance of ethnomethodology and 'social constructionism'.
As the discussions of East European and Soviet communism (in Chap-
ters 3 and 5) suggest, there is a role for 'invention' in the elabora-
tion of the interpretive context, the context of meaning. This observa-
tion indicates a focus on the elite sphere. In Chapter 7, the role of
'invented' meaning and its relationship to the phenomenological analysis
are discussed in connection with the concept of national identity, itself
a frequently mentioned but seldom examined component of political
culture. Polish and German political histories provide examples. The
 Introduction 13

phenomenological analysis of political culture is thereby expanded and

further refined.
Chapter 8 returns to political culture research proper, specifically to its
recent and somewhat distinct variants. Its first subject is the direct impact of
anthropological structuralism on the use of political culture within political
science. Structuralism is also the indirect source of an interpretive theory of
political culture developed by Aaron Wildavsky and others from the work
of anthropologist Mary Douglas. The theory presents a universal typology
of 'viable' political cultures- a typology not only to end all others but, its
authors claim, also to comprehend them. This theory is the chapter's second
subject. In both cases, the phenomenological analysis of political culture
is used as a critical tool. A more positive argument is made in the final
section, in which it is found that political culture as used and developed
within American historiography has begun to fulfil some of the promise of
a phenomenological approach.
Enough has perhaps been said in this Introduction to justify the claim
made at the outset that we are not dealing with a field which one can
hope to divide up into neat, mutually exclusive categories. Our subject
is instead best approached using categories that admit interpenetration and
that offer insight precisely through that admission. Political culture research
is a scholarly jungle, tangled and cacophonous. Accordingly, the concepts
and categories we have elaborated provide a critical apparatus rather than
an aesthetically pleasing typology. They comprise not so much a map of
the complex terrain as a machete with which to hack a way through it.
Representing the full complexity of the terrain would be impossible, and
thus cannot be the aim of a study such as this. Instead, a single route across
it has to be followed, a single sequence of chapters and arguments. That
no other route exists is in this case a particularly transparent illusion. But
it may at least be claimed, by the time the Conclusion is reached, that the
following critical and constructive argument represents at least one viable
route through this forbidding territory.
1 Political Culture and
Democracy

One of the first questions to which Almond's newly-coined concept of

political culture was applied was that of the relationship between political
culture and democracy, and this has indeed continued to be a major area
of political culture research. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba's The
Civic Culture, published in 1963, 1 was the original entry into this field, and
has remained a benchmark for much subsequent research. At the same time,
it has provided an inviting target for criticism. Moreover, the substantial
body of data it gathered has been utilized by other authors in arguments
that diverge somewhat from Almond and Verba's. These are good reasons
for according The Civic Culture some prominence in the present chapter,
but, in view of its familiarity, not yet perhaps sufficient ones. Our
argument will be that the study attempts to combine what were termed
in the Introduction comparative and sociological uses of political culture.
Critics have not noticed this fact, and their critiques have in consequence
been somewhat partial. The aim of this chapter is, however, not simply to
provide a more complete analysis and critique of The Civic Culture. It is to
illustrate the effects of what we will argue is a characteristic combination
of sociological and comparative uses of political culture. A perspective will
thereby be developed that assists in the evaluation of the literature, critical
and otherwise, that in one way or another has been provoked by Almond
and Verba's study.

THE CIVIC CULTURE: TWO PROJECTS

To say that The Civic Culture deals with the relationship between political
culture and democracy is accurate, but not very informative; to say exactly
what relationship it establishes, or even tries to establish, is much more
difficult. Rather than simplify and thus set up an easy target for criticism,
this chapter takes the study's protean quality and the resulting diversity
of the critical response as the major target of explanation. This quality
is the product of the attempt to combine two distinct and not fully
complementary projects. The comparative project, in summary fonn,

14
 Political Culture and Democracy 15

amounts to an attempted explanation of the presence of stable democracy

in some countries and its absence in others in terms of pre-existing
political cultural conditions. It is a comparative explanation with political
culture as the independent variable. The sociological project consists in an
investigation of the social conditions under which democracy functions. It
is a contribution to the 'empirical theory of democracy' in which a range
of sociological variables is taken to be explanatory. The way that these
projects interact, and the tension between them, will be the main theme of
this section.
The motivation behind the study is stated on the first page: it is anxiety,
provoked by events in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century,
about the future of democracy, and the resulting desire to understand the
phenomena that sustain it (p. 1). The study gathers attitude data from five
countries- the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Mexico-
for a purpose expressed as follows: 'We wish to make statements, based
on those separate interviews, about the general state of attitudes in these
nations. And we wish to make statements about the relationship between
these attitudes and the way in which the political systems operate' (p. 41).
The authors note one difficulty of such an enterprise: the smallness of the
sample of nations means that purely statistical correlations of attributes
of political culture with attributes of national political systems are not
possible. In response, the phenomena to be explained - those comprising
stable democracy- are characterized much less rigorously than the putative
explanans: 'a brief glance at history will tell us which of these are more
stable, or an analysis of the party structures will allow a classification by
type of party system' (p. 43).
Although a critique cannot be based on these introductory remarks
alone, it is already possible to see in outline the tensions between the
two projects which recur throughout the book. The comparative project
argues that the civic culture is the type of political culture most conducive
to stable democracy, and takes this argument to be verified by the fact,
which much of the study is intended to demonstrate, that in the stable
democracies of Britain and the United States political cultures most closely
approximate to this ideal, while they fall somewhat short of it in countries
where there has been recent instability or (in the case of Mexico) a deficit
of democracy. The sociological project of developing a 'scientific theory of
democracy' (p. 10) involves, as we will see, the description of the 'capillary
structure' of democracy, that is, of its local or low-level manifestations in
the democratic cases. Now a 'comparative political sociology' is not a
patent contradiction. A theory which posited a certain political cultural phe-
nomenon as being conducive to stable democracy would indeed receive
16 The Concept of Political Culture

support from the discovery that only stable democracies feature that
phenomenon. However, the more complex the theory of democracy,
the more difficult it would be to validate it in this manner; that is, the
sociological part would be in tension with the comparative part. If a large
range of phenomena were taken to be potentially conducive to stability,
comparison among only five countries would be unlikely to be compelling.
If, at the same time, quite complex relationships between the phenomena.
and not merely their absolute values, formed part of the theory, it would
begin to look impossible in principle to validate the theory comparatively.
Just such a theory is developed in The Civic Culture, and just such a method
is used ostensibly to validate it. When Almond and Verba write, in defence
of the smallness of the national sample, 'This is no new problem in political
analysis, and we are in fact five times as well off as most studies of this
sort' (p. 43), they are expressing the very tension between a sociological
theory of democracy and a comparative study. Does this statement mean
that theories of democracy lacking a comparative element are worthless?
If not, then we may ask whether the features that justify them might not
be in tension with the requirements of comparison.
Let us now turn to some detailed examples of this tension. One is to be
found in the authors' account of the prevalence of 'norms of participation'
in local government (ch. 5). They find wide variation in this measure,
and rank the five nations accordingly. The authors acknowledge that
the wide difference in structures of local government, hence in scope
for participation, between the nations may influence attitudes towards
participation. But they argue that reciprocal influence of attitudes on
government nevertheless obtains:

The norms to which an individual adheres are largely determined by

the role that the system allows him to play (though the fit between
norms and structure will rarely be perfect); but these norms in turn
have a feedback effect on the structure, reinforcing the structure if the
fit between norms and structure is a good one; introducing strain into
the system if norms and structure fit less well. (p. 125)

This admission suggests a particular instance of a criticism made by Brian

Barry: that perceptions of government may be largely accurate, leaving
no independent causal role for political culture.2 Although, like many
of Barry's criticisms, this is too general a claim (since some of the
data gathered by Almond and Verba cannot be so plausibly explained
by reference to variations in political structures), it certainly applies
to the present argument, as Almond and Verba admit. But what we
 Political Culture and Democracy 17

may note is that such circularity is damaging only to the comparative

project. It is, on the other hand, a perfectly acceptable part of the
sociological theory of democracy, which seeks to display the social
'micro-structure' of a democratic polity in the form of mutual inter-
dependence between sociological variables. Hence, if one chooses at
this point to emphasize the sociological theory, Barry's objection is
rendered irrelevant. This is convenient, but perhaps a little too con-
venient.
Another example of the tension between a sociological theory of democ-
racy and a comparative theory of political culture occurs in Almond and
Verba's discussion of variations in political 'style' (ch. 9). Again, the
authors discover wide variations, specifically in the extent of political
co-operation - variations which are, in contrast with other variables (such
as level of knowledge of politics) not eliminated by controlling for level
of development. This is a finding, they note, consistent with Tocqueville's
observation of the 'tumult' of political activity to be found in America,
to which they counterpose contrasting observations about political style
in an Italian village (pp. 216-218). Their method of arriving at these
conclusions, the authors claim, while less 'colorful' than Tocqueville's,
is, apart from being 'more reliable' and 'more precise', also superior
for the possibility it offers of relating such behaviour to other variables
(n. 5, p. 219). This is what they go on to do. It is found, for instance,
that the propensity to discuss politics is correlated with group style
(pp. 221f.), though the relationship is a 'mild one'. The uniformity
of this correlation across nations compensates, the authors say, for its
relative statistical weakness ( p. 222). A relationship between group style
and a preference for what Almond and Verba call 'outgoingness' (actually
a measure combining approval of generosity and considerateness) is
found to exist in Britain and the United States, but not elsewhere -
indeed these variables are negatively correlated in Germany and Mexico
(pp. 224f.). A similar pattern (though with the positive correlation strength-
ened) is found for the relationship of group style to a measure of 'trust
in people' (pp. 227f.). Almond and Verba conclude that the 'buzz of
political activity' is found in Britain and the United States for two
reasons:

it is not only that general social values and attitudes that would foster
co-operation with one's fellow citizens are more widespread in Britain
and the United States; beyond that, these general social attitudes are
more closely related to political attitudes in these two nations than in
the other three nations. ( p. 230)
18 The Concept of Political Culture

This formulation contains a peculiar mixture of interpretive and statisti-

cal reasoning. If the general social attitudes in question foster a political
group style, we would expect the correlation between them to be uniform
across nations. If, on the other hand, it is found that the correlation is not
uniform, where is the evidence other than its plausibility for the claim that
the social attitudes 'would foster co-operation'? There is an impression that
Almond and Verba are having their cake and eating it, a trick facilitated
by the scope for equivocation given by relating three variables: attitudes,
group style and nationality.
Spelt out more fully, the authors' analysis at this point is as follows.
Group style is demonstrably more prevalent in Britain and the United
States than in the other countries. Social attitudes that are plausibly related
to group style are also demonstrably more prevalent in these two countries.
Furthermore, this plausible relationship is demonstrably present in these
cases, although it is absent elsewhere, indeed is reversed in Germany
and Mexico. The question that arises is whether it is the group style, the
social attitudes or the correlation between them that is supportive of stable
democracy. The answer 'all of the above', which is the answer Almond and
Verba appear to give, is not justified by their data.
In fact, in this part of the argument it is not stable democracy that serves
as the explanandum at all, but group style: 'The data presented ... offer
some explanation for the phenomenon of group formation noticed by
Tocqueville and by many others since' (p. 239). As already noticed, this
phenomenon might plausibly be related to stable democracy - although it
is not difficult to imagine it reaching a level that would be destabilizing.
The point is that the data and relationships presented by Almond and Verba
here do not enable us to verify this claim, because of the lack of clarity in
the putative explanation as to which of the three conditions is necessary.
An explanation such as this, in which either absolute levels of variables
or presence or absence (or degree) of correlations between them might be
explanatory, and only five cases are compared, is sufficiently complex to
be in principle impossible to verify: this is not mere lack of care on Almond
and Verba's part.
The tension between the comparative and sociological projects thus has
some damaging effects at the level of detailed analysis of data. Its effects
can also be seen clearly in the overall structure of the argument, particularly
in its concluding sections. Barry has identified a question posed by the
authors as being particularly revealing of their intentions in the study: 'is
there a democratic political culture ... that in some way "fits" the demo-
cratic political system?' (pp. 337f.). This is indeed a crucial utterance, but
its deficiency is not just the extreme vagueness of the notion of 'fit' to
 Political Culture and Democracy 19

which Barry draws attention. 3 The question equivocates between the two
projects we have been considering. On a first reading the question calls for
a comparative answer showing how American and British political cultures
differ from those of the other nations. On a second, and especially in the
mention of a 'democratic political culture', it suggests something broader,
a cultural perspective on democracy.
The most crucial findings for the purposes of the first question concern
the prevalence of what the authors term 'citizen' or 'political' competence,
on the one hand, and 'subject' or 'administrative' competence on the
other (the proliferation of labels is unfortunate). The former concerns
the respondent's level of political knowledge and confidence in his or
her ability to influence politics, the latter the respondent's expectation of
fair treatment by political authorities (as Barry notes, subject competence
does not actually require the respondent to be competent at anything). 4 The
relative weight of these two categories, as well as their absolute level, is
found to vary across nations. The explanation offered for this variation
is historical. For instance, the contrast in the proportion of citizen-to-
subject competence between the United States and Britain (65% : 37%
in Britain and 56% : 50% in the United States - p. 173) is attributed to
the absence in Britain of the historical competition between political and
administrative competence that is held to have occurred, primarily through
the revolutionary experience, in the United States (pp. 177-179). Similar
interpretive hypotheses are advanced for the other countries. So far as the
comparative project is concerned, the authors take the implications to be
clear. Of the Italian case, where both citizen and subject competence were
found to reach only 27%, Almond and Verba say: 'The current political
culture of Italy may be inappropriate for a healthy, functioning democracy'
(p. 184). But while the Italian case diverges from the American and British
in respect of these measures, the divergence is too complex to admit
comparative conclusions. Are high levels of both variables necessary, or
only one, or is the proportion of one to the other significant? We cannot
tell from these data.
Accordingly, the theoretical apparatus into which these centrally impor-
tant findings are inserted is also lacking in support. This apparatus is seen
by the authors as a response to the theory they call the 'rationality-activist
model', which argues that widespread political knowledge and participa-
tion, of the sort espoused in high school 'civics' courses in the United
States, is necessary for functioning democracy. The unreality of this model
had already been amply demonstrated; Almond and Verba's contribution
is to argue.that this state of affairs should not be diagnosed as a 'failure',
but as indicating the unnecessarily high standards of the model (p. 340).
20 The Concept of Political Culture

Instead, they endorse a view expressed by Harry Eckstein, that the 'contra-
dictory' nature of democracy requires a 'contradictory' political culture
which is the attitudinal or subjective correlate of the balance between the
effectiveness and responsiveness of the political system (pp. 341-343).
This is just what the 'civic culture' provides, evidence coming from the
data on citizen and subject competence in the five nations. But we have
just seen that no such conclusion is warranted; indeed if 'balance' between
citizen and subject competence is the crucial factor, Italy's score of 27%
for each would appear to put it in the most favourable position.
Abnond and Verba develop their alternative to the 'rationality-activist'
model by relating it to the dimension of time. The authors assert that
the 'contradictory' or 'balanced' nature of the civic culture is kept from
leading to stress by the relatively low importance attached to politics.
But if politics is made intense by some salient issue, 'the inconsist-
ency between attitude and behavior will become unstable' (p. 349).
Therefore, for long-term stability, a 'cycle of involvement' is neces-
sary, in which increased tension leads to adequate government response
and a renormalization of politics. Such cycles reinforce the civic cul-
ture, by providing evidence of the responsiveness of the political sys-
tem, preventing the citizens' belief in their political effectiveness from
'fading away': 'For the democratic "myth" to be an effective politi-
cal force, it cannot be pure myth. It must be an idealization of real
behavioral patterns' (p. 351). For this to happen, elites as well as popu-
lation must share in the ambivalence of the civic culture (p. 353). But
if the theory of 'balance' is itself not comparatively well supported,
the same is all the more true of this 'cycles of involvement' theory,
which in addition would require time series data for its confirmation.
In further support of their comparative findings, as we have seen,
Almond and Verba attempt to provide historical explanations for the 'alien-
ated' political culture of Italy; the combination of alienation with aspiration
in Mexico; that of political detachment with subjective competence
in Germany and the respectively primarily 'participant' and 'deferential'
political cultures of the United States and Britain (pp. 308-315). Ample
evidence is thus provided to justify at least the positive half of W.
G. Runciman's statement, 'History furnishes the explanation for their
correlations, not their correlations for history.' 5 For Almond and Verba,
of course, the findings are explanatory, in the sense of having predictive
power. Divergent conclusions are drawn as to the prospects for democracy
in the five nations. Though in different ways, German, Italian and Mexican
political cultures are held to be 'incongruent with an effective and stable
democratic political system' (p. 354). Moreover, 'unless the political
 Political Culture and Democracy 21

culture is able to support a democratic system, the chances for the success
of that system are slim' (p. 366). The gradual means by which the civic
culture has emerged in British and American history are contrasted with
the absence of such a process in the 'new nations' (pp. 368f.), and the
possibility of education and other socialization agencies substituting for
this historical process is held to be limited (p. 370). At this late stage
a new idea is introduced: the necessity of a 'sense of common political
identity', created perhaps by a 'symbolic and unifying event', such as a
revolution, for the development of a civic culture (pp. 371f.). Only by this
means, they assert, can the necessary evaluative and affective elements of
the civic culture be created.
So far as the sociological project is concerned, the authors bring their
findings together by relating political cultural variables to more general
sociological categories. Education is shown to be the most influential
of these - there are more attitudes that differ uniformly with education
across nations than ones that do not change with education or upon which
it has a varying effect. Some examples of 'strikingly uniform cross-national
patterns' in the relationship of education to political cultural variables
are found (pp. 317f.). Thus, 'the nature of political culture is greatly
determined by the distribution of education' (p. 320). Gender is another
important factor, mediated both through the degree of direct participation
by women and by the role of women in family socialization: hence
'politically competent, aware, and active women seem to be an essential
component of the civic culture' (p. 334).
It is in the findings about education that a link is drawn by Almond and
Verba between the comparative and sociological projects, but the effect
is by no means to vindicate either. The cognitive elements of the civic
culture, it is found, are most strongly related to levels of education, and
it is inferred that these are capable of being taught. Less easily inculcated
are the evaluative and affective components. Hence the dim prospects for
countries lacking a civic culture. But the finding, supported by comparative
evidence, that only some portions of the civic culture are capable of being
taught has only a secondary role in overall theory of the necessity of the
civic culture to stable democracy. That theory, as we have seen, is not
supported comparatively.
The Civic Culture, precisely because of its ambitiousness and the scope
of its data, illustrates the mutually destructive effect of the comparative
and sociological uses of political culture. Its data make possible and invite
statistical ~ysis, both by Almond and Verba and by subsequent users,
of a degree of complexity that prohibits comparison. From the point of
view of the comparative project, Almond and Verba demonstrate a wide
22 The Concept of Political Culture

range of political cultural differences between the nations they study, but
are unable to demonstrate which of these are crucial. 'Their version of the
empirical theory of democracy, that is, the sociological project, presents
a theory that does indeed seem more realistic than the one it is intended
to supersede. But even though some of the components of this theory are
comparatively validated, in the sense that some correlations are found to
be invariant across national samples, the theory as a whole is not.
We now turn to discussion of the ample literature, critical and otherwise,
that has spun off from The Civic Culture. Our analysis of the two projects
serves to organize discussion of this literature also, suggesting that the
juxtaposition of the two may be more than simply a product of insufficient
care on Almond and Verba's part, and thus, as we have supposed,
suggesting that their study teaches us some general lessons about political
culture research.

THE COMPARA fiVE PROJECT

As a theory in comparative politics, The Civic Culture makes certain

predictions. An obvious test is to ask whether these turned out to be correct.
The authors themselves have generously provided an edited volume- The
Civic Culture Revisited 6 - whose contributors go some way towards
answering that question, largely in the negative. Since the early 1960s,
Britain and the United States have experienced, separately 0r jointly,
the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, Watergate, confrontations
between government and trade unions, and the effects of the oil crises of
the 1970s. Germany and Italy have not been immune to the more general
of these processes, but have nevertheless experienced steady economic
growth and, moreover, increasing distance from the events that made
these countries such obvious cases of instability to Almond and Verba.
The authors were not clairvoyant, and of course could not have predicted
many of the events of the 1960s and 1970s; however, the differentia-
tion in reactions to external and internal stimuli that might have been
expected has not occurred. Germany provides the starkest contrast between
prediction and reality, and its case merits more detailed investigation.
Writing two years after the original study was published, in 1965,
Verba describes West Germany as 'a case study of the possibilities of
the conscious manipulative change of fundamental political attitudes, in
particular in the direction of more democratic attitudes' .7 This differs from
the position of The Civic Culture in treating it as an open question whether
a supportive political culture could be generated, but the two positions have
 Political Culture and Democracy 23

in common the idea that a certain political culture is supportive of stable

democracy and is a necessary condition for it. Concern over the prospects
for attitude change in Germany was not peculiar to Almond and Verba, or
indeed to political scientists: assumptions about the significance of such
change underlay a more widespread and quite understandable political
concern over 'normalization' in Germany after the Second World War.
Reflecting this concern, a particularly rich body of survey materials
is available. Verba's conclusions from these data refer to a lack of
intensity in attitudes towards politics, and a close connection between
attitudes towards economic progress and democracy, revealing an overall
pattern of 'apolitical attachment' that was also reflected in data on political
participation. He also asserts the influence of the issue of national identity
- going somewhat beyond the mere hint about this issue provided in The
Civic Culture- whose unresolved nature, symbolized by the Berlin Wall,
introduced volatility, he suggests, into the political culture. 8
In his contribution to The Civic Culture Revisited (1980), David Conradt
comes to somewhat different conclusions. Explaining Verba's finding of
'detachment' as a response to Germany's 'traumatic history', Conradt
goes on to point to evidence of change: increased 'system pride', 'civic
competence', 'participation' and 'mass interest' in politics, and a decrease
in the family-oriented Lagermentalitiit, thus allowing German democracy
to reach its 'take off' state. Conradt also asserts that acceptance of borders-
between East and West Germany, and between East Germany and Poland-
had greatly increased, and that it was correlated with support for democratic
institutions and processes. Thus 'the question is now not whether there
exists a consensus and strong support for political democracy, but what kind
of democracy Germany will have' -apparently providing an affirmative
result for Verba's case study. 9
Geoffrey Roberts, surveying the literature on West German political
culture in 1984, sees the differences between these two accounts in terms
not of change over time in the data. but of differences in the analysts'
evaluations. He characterizes the difference as a dispute over whether West
German political culture is 'normal' or 'critical', a choice of terminology
that reveals sympathy with Almond and Verba's original project. While
agreeing that there is a tendency to normality and that West German
political culture increasingly resembles that of other Western countries,
Roberts notices some countervailing factors. The persistence of elements
of the traditional, 'less democratic' political culture prevents any 'firm
conclusion' about normality on the basis of survey data; and furthermore,
persistent critical factors include the salience of 'new politics' issues, the
existence of a large floating section of the electorate, the potential large
24 The Concept of Political Culture

support for 'alternative' political channels and the increasing gap between
traditional political culture and 'alternative' political culture. to
These 'critical factors' are identified not through survey methodology
but by analysis of democratic institutions and the operation of the political
system. In particular, the nature and role of political parties is held to be
crucially important, as indicators both of stability and of the persistence of
'critical factors': Roberts argues that all the accounts he cites 'demonstrate
the importance of coupling analysis of political culture with examination of
the party system if satisfying explanations of the West German "political
miracle" are to be approached'. For Roberts, the necessity of this compre-
hensive analysis follows from the apparent paradox of the conjunction of
West Germany's political stability with the ambiguous portrait of political
culture drawn from surveys: 'one cannot with ease on the one hand acclaim
the stability of the democratic system, and on the other criticize its political
culture as fragile or non-supportive of such a stable system' .11 This shift
marks a deviation from the project of explaining stability in terms of
political culture.
As Roberts' observations make clear, a large part of the problem here is
with the meaning of the idea of 'stability', a problem that is an inheritance
of Almond and Verba's comparative project A distinction between stable
and unstable countries that might have seemed obvious in 1963, as we have
observed, is by now if not reversed then at least invisible. The absence of
formal criteria for identifying stability has become a more serious problem.
Indeed it raises doubts about the viability of the comparative project.
What is a stable democracy? Italy has suffered from frequent elections,
but of course some democracies have fixed-term governments, so that is
an unsatisfactory criterion. Resignations of Presidents or ministers, or other
rapid changes in personnel, do not necessarily tell us anything about the
stability of democracy, only about the stability of governments. It appears
that only when we begin to consider the behaviour of the population
- dramatic declines in electoral turnout, sharp increases in support for
revolutionary or fascist parties, rapid escalation of protest, for example -
are the relevant criteria approached. But then we also approach the problem
of differentiating the explanans from the explanandum. Fully describing
stable democracy seems to involve describing cultural attributes also. It is
scant protection against this to fall back on a distinction between attitudes
and behaviour, and to argue that these 'cultural attributes' are nevertheless
behavioural and hence part of the explanandum. To do so would be to
represent the problem addressed by comparative political culture theory as
one of social psychology: the problem of discovering the conditions under
which attitudes lead to action. We can put this another way. Suppose that
 Political Culture and Democracy 25

attitudes hostile to democracy were widespread - would this be seen as

leading to instability, or would it be seen as instability?
The impact of Almond and Verba's framework and of this particular
deficiency of it can be seen also in works which are not direct follow-ups
of The Civic Culture, such as in Walter Rosenbaum's survey, Political
Culture.I2 Rosenbaum notes that a 'recurrent approach' in political culture
writing bas been to differentiate stable and unstable societies on the basis
of their respective 'integrated' and 'fragmented' political cultures. In an
'integrated' political culture are found relatively consistent and hierarchical
political identifications, low levels of political violence and the predomi-
nance of civil procedures for conflict management, diffuse political trust
among social groups and reasonably strong and durable regime loyalties.
A 'fragmented' political culture (found especially, Rosenbaum avers, in
post-colonial areas, but also, for example, in Northern Ireland, and France),
features the dominance of parochial political loyalties over national ones,
the absence of civil conflict management procedures, the prevalence of
political distrust between social groups and the tendency for national
governments to be unstable in form and duration. 13 These descriptions
for the most part would also suffice to distinguish stable from unstable
societies - again, the separation of explanans from explanandum is not
achieved.
Although the influence of The Civic Culture has been widespread, the
deficiency we have just noted is not yet sufficient to justify a blanket
criticism of the comparative use of political culture. In order to see
how this problem might be overcome within the context of a com-
parative theory relating political culture to democracy, we may tum
to the work of Ronald Inglehart. For some years Inglebart bas been
reporting findings based on a much larger body of survey research than
Almond and Verba's, covering many more countries and extending over
a considerable time period. His research largely concerns the relationship
between values and the development of 'post-industrial' society, and as
such will be considered at some length in Chapter 2. He has also used
the data set, however, to address the same question as did Almond
and Verba: the relationship of political culture to stable democracy .14
Inglehart's rescue bid for this comparative theory involves jettisoning
some parts of it. He does not, for one thing, use Almond and Verba's
definition of the civic culture, instead speaking of a 'syndrome' of attitudes
that are hypothetically supportive of democracy, of which interpersonal
trust and levels of 'life satisfaction' are the major components. His data
demonstrate that life satisfaction levels do show enduring differences
between nations that are not explained - although short-term fluctuations
26 The Concept of Political Culture

of them are - by immediate economic conditions. Long-term economic

conditions, on the other band, are hypothesized as the source of life
satisfaction levels, as indeed, this time without evidence, are specific
historical factors such as the defeat of certain countries in the Second
World War. For interpersonal trust, similar enduring differences, and a
high degree of consistency within nations over time, are found. In order
to link these variables with stable democracy, lnglebart uses the duration
of democratic institutions as the criterion of the latter. The evidence,
though still not conclusive, owing to the fact that the most telling cases
of transitions from non-democracy to democracy do not figure in the time
series data, suggest that the original hypothesis relating the syndrome to
stable democracy is correct.
The details of this finding are of some interest. In the first place, it
bas a large interpretive component, specifically with respect to the causal
direction that correlations are said to indicate. Inglebart writes: 'It seems
more likely that a global sense of well-being would also shape one's
attitude towards politics than what is experienced in one relatively narrow
aspect of life would determine one's overalt"sense of satisfaction.' 15 More
important is the test Inglebart performs to assess the relative impact of
cultural and other variables. Level of economic development (GNP in
1950) alone bas little impact on persistence of democratic institutions:
the two most important variables are political culture and social structure,
the latter being measured by percentage of the population employed in
the tertiary sector. Inglebart reports that 'over half of the variance in the
persistence of democratic institutions can be attributed to the effects of
political culture alone'. So far as social structure is concerned, Inglebart
makes the argument that this factor's influence itself bas a cultural
component 'commercial elites accept bargaining among equals, rather
than hierarchical authority, as a normal way of dealing with people;
these habits and skills are carried over into the emphasis on bargaining,
rather than command, that characterizes parliamentary democracy' . 16
This last point is of some significance, since it goes some way towards
undermining the rigid distinction between cultural and other variables that
is assumed by the statistical comparison of them. Economic development,
social structure and political culture are separable up to a point, and their
relative impacts thereby measurable. But if we probe more deeply, the
boundary becomes hazy. Can a statistical test to determine the 'proportion'
of the cultural element in the impact of the size of the bourgeoisie be
conceived? Clearly not. This fact hints at something very important: that
Almond and Verba's failure adequately to differentiate explanans and
explanandum is a product not of lack of care, but of the fundamental
 Political Culture and Democracy 27

inseparability of culture from structure. The example we have just con-

sidered is too meagre to support such a portentous conclusion, but it does
at least suggest that the question of the separability of political culture from
rival explanans and putative explananda is one worthy of more general
investigation. Such will be undertaken in Chapter 4.

SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISMS

The comparative project of The Civic Culture has a tendency, in construing

political culture as an independent variable, to understate differences within
nations. That Almond and Verba do, in fact, pay much attention to intra-
national differences, invoking variables such as gender and education level,
is an effect of their sociological project. Critics from the perspective of
political sociology who accuse Almond and Verba of holding a 'consensus
theory' are therefore half right; their objections illustrate the constraints
that the comparative project exerts on the sociological one.n Where these
objections are half wrong is in the claim that such an assumption is made
by Almond and Verba: on the contrary, the authors explicitly disavow it
(p. 13). They do admit that the extent to which they can provide cultural
profiles of sub-national groups is limited by their sample size (about
1,000 in each country) and by concentration on attitudes towards the
political system, not the ideological differences that might more clearly
differentiate sub-national groups (pp. 307f.). Thus it is their comparative
project that distracts their attention elsewhere, and necessitates looking at
and comparing 'the' national political cultures, not any assumption about
consensus.
Nevertheless the effect is the same, which is that sub-national cleavages
receive less attention in The Civic Culture than its sociological critics think
they merit. Michael Mann is one sociologist who has reused Almond
and Verba's data for somewhat different purposes. On the basis of this
and several other studies showing wide divergences and inconsistency in
mass values he hypothesizes that 'only those actually sharing in societal
power need develop societal values' .1s Surveys of the attitudes of political
activists add support to this hypothesis. He concludes by suggesting that
it is the lack of consensus that keeps the working class docile and allows
democratic stability.
Indeed, a substantial sociological debate has occurred over this question
of which sector of society, the elite or the mass of the population, serves
as the main locus of whatever subjective or cultural attributes are necessary
to maintain stability.1 9 One of the best-known contributions to this debate
28 The Concept of Political Culture

is Nicholas Abercrombie and Bryan Turner's critique of the Marxist

'dominant ideology thesis', the thesis that a dominant class produces the
values found throughout society (a thesis that is, incidentally, implied by
the radical critique of Jessop and Pateman). On the basis of a survey
of English history covering, for instance, the degree of exposure of the
medieval peasantry to the dominant religious and theocratic ideology,
the temporal priority of individualism to capitalism, and the apparent
irrelevance of 'Victorian morality' to the lower classes, they conclude that
'the dominant ideology has a greater impact on the dominant classes than
the dominated' .20 Bob Jessop's class-based theory of democratic stability,
in which 'commitment to the dominant values is not equally distributed
through society' ,21 is a variant of this position. Jessop argues that The Civic
Culture neglects the role of the elite in propagating democratic 'myths',
and argues for a use of the concept of 'civic culture' and other studies of
'civility' as a means of describing dominant values, not an explanation of
stability.22
Pateman's soctological critique is the sharpest and fullest. She
redescribes Almond and Verba's 'subject competence' as 'apathy', a
label with the opposite evaluative connotation. A degree of apathy may
well, as The Civic Culture argues, lead to stability, but she takes issue with
the description of this result as democratic stability. Pateman contends that
not only is a degree of apathy on the part of the population caused by a
straightforward perception of the unresponsiveness of the political system
(as Barry has argued), 23 but access to political influence and hence percep-
tion of the responsiveness of the political system is unevenly distributed.
Apathy is not equally balanced with 'citizen competence' within each
individual; it is prevalent among women, the poor and other relatively
excluded groups. Pointing to these cases Pateman asks, 'What is democratic
about the civic culture? . . . Very little at all, except that it encompasses
universal suffrage.' 24
Pateman has also made explicit the location of The Civic Culture within
the empirical theory of democracy, a body of political theory that attempted
to come to terms with embarrassing survey research findings about the level
of public knowledge of and interest in politics, such as those that made
the 'rationality-activist model' look over-ambitious. The theory was a
component of the behavioural revolution, not just in this reliance on survey
data but also in its claim to be purely non-evaluative. This claim has been
challenged on the grounds that a breakdown in consensus over what consti-
tutes democracy, coupled with the commendatory sense now attaching to
the term, makes its application by definition an ideological move, an act
of commendation of a set of facts that could also be described by terms
 Political Culture and Democracy 29

such as 'elitism' and 'oligarchy' .2 5 Pateman more pointedly asserts that

the theory is a rationalization of the state of affairs it purports to describe
objectively, and is merely a reworking of Schumpeterian liberal theory,
'the theory of (ideology of?) the actual political institutional arrangements
that have been part and parcel of the capitalist, liberal, "democratic" West,
especially the United States and Great Britain'. She refers to an alternative,
genuinely participatory, model of democracy, which she argues is obscured
by empirical theory's claim to be the theory of democracy. The role played
by the idea of political culture in this rationalization, Pateman argues, is
further to reinforce the impression of the theory's 'reality' through the
implication that the political system is 'embedded' in the political culture:
'The empirical theorists' defence would appeal to the existing political
system and its political culture and therefore is ... conservative.' 26
The relationship of these critiques to Almond and Verba's sociological
theory is complex. Mann, and Abercrombie and Turner emphasize the
utility of culture for the cohesion and effectiveness of the ruling class.
Jessop adds to this the suggestion that the civic culture contains myths
whose propagation helps to maintain this class in its position of dominance.
Pateman goes further, representing not just the civic culture, but The
Civic Culture, as a contributor to dominance, through the 'empirical'
rationalization that it offers. Yet although Pateman is the most critical,
she also comes closest to agreeing with the description Almond and Verba
offer, despite her revulsion at the rosy hue of their conclusions. Substituting
'apathy' for 'subject competence', and a skewed distribution for balance,
she replaces Almond and Verba's complacency with censoriousness, while
not disputing any of their findings. That this, and the many other reuses of
Almond and Verba's data to different effects, may occur, tells us something
about the supposed 'hardness' of statistical evidence.
We should not, however, at this observation flip over to the uninformed
view that 'anything can be argued with statistics'. What is certainly true is
that one's explanatory target necessarily introduces a degree of blindness to
other issues. This applies a fortiori to The Civic Culture, for the reasons we
have already elaborated. The comparative aims of the study entail a relative
blindness to sub-national cultural variation. Yet its attempt to produce a
'scientific theory of democracy' yields a sociological theory of a degree
of richness and complexity that not only is comparison prohibited, but an
ample resource is offered for use by researchers not similarly constrained
by the comparative goal, and possibly of somewhat distinct political
persuasions too. Hence the peculiar misfortune of The Civic Culture: to
have been most harshly criticized on the basis of information that the book
itself provides.
2 Political Culture
and Modernity

The Civic Culture was one of a group of studies published by Princeton

University Press in the early 1960s together comprising the heroic phase
of behavioural political culture research. While The Civic Culture con-
centrated on the relationship of political culture to stability, particularly
stable democracy, others of these Princeton studies, such as Almond and
Coleman's The Politics of the Developing Areas, and Pye and Verba's Pol-
itical Culture and Political Development, 1 as their titles suggest, extended
the use of the new concept to cover cases of political change. The Civic
Culture, as we have seen, has implicit within it many of the ideas current
at the time, for instance the empirical theory of democracy, and something
similar is true of the studies that took political change as their main focus.
Indeed, the similarity extends further, for their own implicit and sometimes
explicit assumptions have also come to be seen as reflecting a Eurocentric
or indeed Anglocentric bias. These assumptions concern the related ideas
of modernization and political development.
However, this chapter has somewhat broader aims than the exposure of
these assumptions, which has in any case been undertaken many times
before. It takes the relationship between political culture and modernization
not as the target of criticism, but as a starting point. The term 'modernity'
is used in its title by way of implying not just the specific claims of
modernization theory, but more generally those of perspectives such as
'postindustrial society' and indeed 'postmodernism' too. The theme of
the chapter concerns the diverse ways in which political culture has been
invoked in these perspectives. More specifically, we will observe the effect
of the combination of the two uses of political culture within behavioural
political culture research, as we did in Chapter 1. In this case, we are
considering a number of studies rather than just one, and the two uses are
not both present in all of them. But within the broad enterprise of relating
political culture to secular change, a comparative and a sociological use
of political culture can be identified. We will first consider the notion
of 'cultural lag', a significant concept in the Princeton studies and their
successors, before discussing the relationship of political culture to 'stages
of modernity', variously conceived. We conclude by looking in detail

30
 Political Culture and Modernity 31

at Ronald lnglehart's substantial contribution to the project of relating

political culture to secular change.

CULTURAL LAG

The idea of 'cultural lag' expresses the claim that, while political culture
may be created by political experience and hence by the structures of
government, the latter can change much more quickly than the former. The
creation of political culture is therefore not immediate. The idea plays a role
in Almond and Verba's theory of stable democracy, both in their historical
analysis of the emergence of the civic culture (and the persistence within
it of earlier 'parochial' and 'subject' attitudes) and in their conclusion of
the difficulty of creating a civic culture except in the long term. Cultural
lag does not exhaust comparative political cultural explanation, because
such explanation needs to demonstrate, as well as the stability of political
culture, its subsequent influence. It is, however, a precondition of such
explanation.
Cultural lag is linked theoretically with the process of socialization, the
process by which, through childhood and adult experience, individuals
come to learn the norms and habits of their society. If childhood socializa-
tion is emphasized, cultural lag operates in an obvious manner: it refers to
the time difference between the period in childhood when norms and habits
are learned, and the period in adulthood when they are put into effect in the
political world, through voting and other forms of participation. However,
even if the emphasis is on adult socialization, as it is, for instance, in The
Civic Culture, 2 cultural lag comes into effect through the assumption that
the process of learning is gradual. Thus, in both cases, changes in the
political environment, from whatever source, take time to be registered
in political culture and thus reciprocally to affect the political environment
in the kinds of ways we have already discussed.
Evidence for the existence of cultural lag can take several forms. The
simplest kind of evidence would be the 'persistence' of cultural attributes
beyond the lifetime of their original stimuli. Evidence requiring more
sophisticated measurement, not undertaken in all the studies we will
consider in this chapter, would be the presence of generational differences
in political culture or what statisticians call 'cohort effects'. Cohort effects
are distinguishable from 'lifecycle effects' -differences which are related
solely to age - only when time series data are available, when, if such
effects are present, the cultural consistency of given cohorts may be
traced. Evidence for cultural lag is, in other words, more convincing if
32 The Concept of Political Culture

its presence can be measured over time, where socialization theory would
lead us to expect not only its gradual fading away in the aggregate, but its
relationship to the arrival and departure of generations.
In most of the cases we will consider in this chapter, evidence of the
latter type is absent; indeed evidence of the former type is not always
present Cultural lag is in these cases a somewhat speculative explanation
for observable divergences in outcomes among cases supposedly subject to
the same stimuli. In the present section the stimuli we will consider are a
variety of processes grouped under the beading of 'modernization' and the
related category of 'political development'.
Modernization bas been defined as 'the process of change from an
agrarian to an industrial way of life that bas resulted from the dramatic
increase in man's knowledge of and control over the environment in recent
centuries' .3 Political development theory posits links between this process
and increased participation in politics, increased government 'capacity' and
increased structural differentiation. 4 These ideas experienced their greatest
popularity contemporaneously with the heyday of bebaviouralist political
culture research. As Raymond Grew writes:

A short time ago almost any study of an industrial or industrializing soci-

ety could be expected to make heavy use of the term [modernization].
Sociologists and political scientists were perhaps the most enthusiastic,
but anthropologists employed it to evoke the sense of a world-historical
process, historians (in introductions and conclusions) to show that they
shared in scientific discourse. 5

In more recent times, the theories of political development and mod-

ernization have been subject to opprobrium on the scale of their former
popularity, suffering from a more general change of intellectual mood away
from the optimistic, confident assertion of Western values and political and
social structure of which they now appear to have been a part. For this
reason, many subsequent writers have been careful to distance political
culture from the concept of political development While acknowledging
a debt to the early studies, Archie Brown commends the subsequent
separation of the two concepts, arguing that 'In the literature of the
1960s ... the characteristics of a developed political system frequently
bore an uncanny resemblance to the principal features of the American
polity, though often in a somewhat idealised form.' 6
However, this charge of value-laden teleology, characteristic though it
is of critiques of both modernization and political development theory,
confuses the two ways in which political culture was implicated in them.
 Political Culture and Modernity 33

These two modes of implication relate, as already suggested, to the two

uses of political culture within behavioural political culture research that
we discussed in Chapter I. In the comparative use, political culture is
relativized to nations, and is used to explain divergences in institutional
implementation and outcome from the universal assimilating pressure of
modernization. The sociological use is concerned not with the differences
in outcomes, but with the similarities; that is, it considers political culture
as an aspect or sometimes as an effect of the modernization process. In the
latter use, to the extent that a typology of development is illegitimate, so
too is the associated typology of political culture. Such guilt by association
cannot, however, be· asserted for the comparative use. In this use, as Grew
notes, modernization theory draws attention to culture, and allows it some
autonomy of the modernizing process. Or, as Almond has more strongly
expressed it, political culture was in part a response to the failure of
simplistic liberal theories of political development. 7 Such is the use to
which the concept has been put by Black:

Societies vary a great deal in their political culture, and these vari-
ations account for significant differences in the ways in which they
react to common problems caused by the scientific and technological
revolution . . . . Levels of achievement certainly tend to converge in
developed societies, but due to differences in political culture, modern
institutions are likely to vary considerably. 8

Political culture, then, in its comparative use, has been invoked precisely
to save modernization theory from accusations of illegitimate teleology.
Cultural lag is the means by which this rescue is attempted. But of
course it is one thing to distinguish the comparative and sociological uses
analytically; it is another to separate them in practice.
The tension between them is illustrated by a recent revival of modern-
ization theory undertaken by Lucian Pye, who applies it to what he calls
the 'crisis of authoritarianism', not only in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union, but also in China, East Asia, Southern Europe and Latin America. 9
He sees in these events a 'vindication' of modernization theory, suggesting
that the only mistake of early writers on the subject (of whom he was in the
vanguard) was to underestimate the extent to which 'factors of change' -
'economic growth, the spread of science and technology, the acceleration
and spread of communications, and the establishment of educational
systems' -would develop. Among the universalizing tendencies that have
thereby been liberated, he asserts, are the movement into government roles
of technocrats ('people who see governing as technical problem solving'),
34 The Concept of Political Culture

the demand of the 'information revolution' for 'decentralization and a

diffusion of power throughout the society incompatible with centralized
authoritarian rule', and the decreasing plausibility of 'the instinctive
understanding that inferiors can expect benefits from yielding to the will
of benevolent superiors'. Despite all this, Pye recognizes a

fundamental clash between the culture of modernization (what I have

called the world culture) and the various national cultures . . . . The
outcome of this clash (and hence the outcome of any particular crisis
of authoritarianism) will depend on the character of the political culture,
and the extent to which it either moderates or accommodates the conflict
or exacerbates it.IO

Thus the 'vindication' of modernization theory is no more than a

reiteration of the same equivocal claim that its more careful proponents
always made: that modernization accounts for a growing similarity between
societies, but also that the deus ex machina of cultural lag is waiting
in the wings, ready to account for whatever exceptions might appear.
Modernization theory states that, other things being equal, nations will
tend to conform to the universal characteristics of modernity. Political
culture provides the ceteris paribus clause. The combination, as we just
saw in Pye's example, is a theory that could predict anything; that is, a
scientifically useless one.
It is, of course, likely that advocates of this theory would assert that
national and world political cultures could in principle coexist. This may
be true, but to call them both 'political cultures' introduces a confusion that
is far more than merely terminological. It implies similar origins for these
cultures; a similar theory as to bow they came into being. It is incumbent
upon the advocate, therefore, not only to show bow national and world
cultures form distinct sets, but further to show what distinct socialization
processes lead to their formation. This has seldom been attempted.

STAGES OF MODERNITY

As just observed, political culture bas been implicated in modernization

theory not just as an explanation of deviations from the outcomes the latter
would predict, but as a means of characterizing the outcomes themselves.
This is true, indeed, not just of modernization theory narrowly conceived,
but of a number of different accounts of processes of secular change.
'Modernity', in its several versions, replaces the 'democracy' of our
 Political Culture arui Modernity 35

previous chapter as the social formation whose cultural aspects are exposed
by the sociological use. Analogously, political culture is not in these uses
ascribed the status of independent variable, nor indeed necessarily that of
dependent variable either. The analogy with The Civic Culture may be
taken even further, as we will see when we consider criticisms of theories
of stages of modernity.
In one of the classic studies of modernization, Almond and Coleman
combine the notions of cultural lag and the cultural impact of moderniza-
tion ('traditional' and 'modem' components of political culture, as they
term them) in the idea of 'cultural diffusion'. 'Traditional' components
are 'diffuse, affective, particularistic, and ascriptive', while 'modern' ones
are 'universalistic, specific, instrumental'. In fact, while differences in
the 'particularistic' cultures - cultural lag - might be taken to account
for differences in outcome, Almond and Coleman give an example that
raises comparison to a higher level: they distinguish between Britain and
France on the basis of the degree to which, in each country, 'traditional'
and 'modem' components are 'fused'; in Britain there is 'a homogeneous
political culture, secular and traditional in content', while in France
there is 'a polarization of political culture, with some elements and
regions manifesting traditionality and others manifesting rationality' .1 1
But whatever the level of comparison (and there is obviously some scope
for equivocation between these two levels), it is clear that political cultural
description is being made not only ot' the setting for modernization, but of
modernization itself.
This simple dichotomy of 'traditional' and 'modem' political cultures is
of course only a rephrasing in political cultural terms of the dichotomous
distinctions made by nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociologists such as
Tonnies and Durkheim.1z It is, however, only one of several typologies
that relate political culture to levels or stages of modernization. An extreme
example - extreme in the sense of maximizing the number of stages - has
been produced by Stephen Chilton. Although his definition of political
culture as mutually accepted 'ways of relating' differs from that used by
the writers we have been considering, the categories he derives can be
seen as a more elaborate version of Almond and Coleman's. He describes
six 'stages' of culture- from 'Domination; physical compulsion; threats;
seizure by force; extortion' through 'Mutual respect; rational debate; fair
competition, and scientific testing' (the fifth stage, similar in some ways
to Almond and Coleman's 'modernity') to the as yet unrealized sixth stage
of 'undistorted communicative action; mutual care'. Various social and
political institutions are associated with each stage, although, unlike the
'culturally universal sequence of organizing structures' ('ways of relating'),
36 The Concept of Political Culture

the variation of forms appropriate to each stage of culture means that 'there
is no universal sequence of specific social forms' . 13
More typically, culture has been related to the idea of 'industrial society'.
An example is Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer's emigre-based study of
The Soviet Citizen. While asserting that no unilinear path of development or
specific government structures are implied, Inkeles and Bauer nevertheless
conclude, 'The substratum on which the most distinctive Soviet features are
built is after all a large-scale industrial order which shares many features
in common with the large-scale industrial order of other national states of
Europe and indeed Asia.' Accordingly, 'The patterning of values about
the occupational structure, of opportunities for mobility, of the evaluation
of education, of ideas about child-rearing, of communications behavior,
and many other realms of experience is broadly similar in the Soviet
Union and other large-scale industrial societies.' This 'suggests that the
industrial social order carries with it certain inherent propensities which
influence individual values relatively, if not completely, independently of
the political setting' .14
The notion of industrial society is, as Margaret Archer has pointed out,
one of several descriptions of modernity that have been successively
advanced in the last several decades. 15 'Postindustrialism' is another.
This concept is most strongly associated with Daniel Bell and his thesis
of the 'end of ideology', the latter indeed being the chief characteristic of
this putative social formation. It is, of course, a cultural characteristic, but
one that in Bell's account follows from the increased level of materialism
and potential for its satisfaction, and the corresponding decline of utopian
or revolutionary thought in modern society. As is well known, this thesis
began to look somewhat implausible shortly after its appearance in 1962,
amid the later upheavals of the 1960s; nevertheless, it has continued to be
developed, by Bell and others. The distinct and somewhat more plausible
variant developed by lnglehart will be examined in greater detail in
the following section. A third example cited by Archer is the notion
of 'information society', advanced primarily by Alvin Toffter, which
emphasizes the scale of the changes being wrought by the development
of information processing, telecommunications and cybernetics technology.
Industrial society theorists point to the worldwide spread of General
Motors; theorists of information society to that of CNN. The former would
cite East European enthusiasm for the market as a motivator of the collapse
of communism in that region; the latter would allege an avalanche effect
caused by uncontrolled public knowledge of the breakdown in adjacent
states, giving Nicolae Ceau~escu' s downfall as the most graphic illustration
of the power of the media.
 Political Culture and Modernity 37

As Archer observes, what is common to all of these sociologies of

modernity is their 'impoverished' view of culture, which 'consists prin-
cipally in the progressive subordination of culture until it becomes an
epiphenomenon of structure'. She also observes that criticisms of these
accounts, in concentrating their attacks on the structural claims, have
perpetuated this impoverishment: 'what was remarkable for its absence
was an extended discussion of culture as an independent variable in
the modernization process or the relative autonomy of culture to direct
industrial societies in different ways - not just at the beginning but in
perpetuity' . 16 This diagnosis appears simply to recommend a return to
the comparative use of political culture; its phrasing very much recalls
Black's. However, this is not the main follll her reaction takes. Instead, she
emphasizes that the impoverishment of culture has removed a basis, other
than their own 'instrumental rationality', for criticizing these modernization
processes. In response, she proposes that sociology regain a connection
with moral philosophy, with the idea of the 'Good Life', and set itself
up not as 'value-free' recorder of modernization processes, but as critic of
them. To this end, she suggests that the notion of culture as an integrated
whole be abandoned. This notion, she alleges, conceals critical resources
within culture itself, and hence the fact that 'cultural contradictions make
just as important a contribution to social change as anything going on in
the structural domain' .17
Here we can observe a sociological response to a sociological use of
political culture that follows the same contours that we traced in Chapter
1. Attempted empirical descriptions in telllls of culture - in this case
of modernity, in the previous one of democracy - are countered by
challenging their claim to value-freedom, and exposing their mobilization
of the concept of culture in support of that claim. And like the sociological
critics we discussed in Chapter I, Archer responds by pointing to cleavages
in culture. Thus, far from rejecting the notion of political culture, Archer,
like Pateman, Jessop et at., reappropriates it for critical, rather than
'empirical', purposes.
The notion of 'postmodemism' is a recent entry to the ranks of the
sociology of modernity. It differs from the ones criticized by Archer in
its origin, which is not only 'cultural', as opposed to 'structural', but is
indeed aesthetic. John Gibbins points out that the term itself was used
first in architectural criticism to denote a 'deconstruction' ofLe Corbusian
modernism with 'an eclectic usage of old and new styles involving pastiche,
nostalgia and an awareness of citizens' real needs'. 18 This architectural
prototype of postmodemism is amply suggestive of the sociological mean-
ing of the concept It suggests the postmodern emphasis on play and
38 The Concept of Political Culture

hedonism, and in rejecting the modernist architectural premise that form

should follow function it metaphorically dissociates culture from the
basis in class politics it supposedly had in the now defunct 'modem'
period. Rejecting architectural modernism also means, for instance,
rejecting bleak, high-rise public housing, and hence, by implication,
social homogenization and social engineering, and possibly even the
welfare state - all of which are reactions characteristic of the politics
of the 1980s in many Western countries. The architectural metaphor is
therefore a fruitful one, and it is not surprising that it has extended
across a wide field of cultural criticism into sociology. There, we find
'postmodem culture' pictured as 'fragmentation, multidirectional change
and a psychedelic collage of contemporary attitudes, values and beliefs'.
Postmodemism, we are told, 'does not recognize a gradual change in value
priorities in the contemporary world but a turmoil of values and preferences,
the byproduct and waste of centuries of the modernizing process' .19
It is also easy to see how the aesthetic origins of the postmodem
perspective have contributed to excesses in its sociological formulation.
The bright colours, redundant shapes and playful historical allusions of
postmodem architecture have their analogues across the entire range of
aesthetic activity; in pop music 'sampling', in music proms, in haute
couture. Wandering into a video arcade it is difficult to avoid a sense of
being drawn into a dizzying techno-hedonistic vortex; and such wandering,
metaphorically speaking, i.s what postmodem cultural critics engage in. It
is unsurprising that they identify only 'turmoil' and a 'psychedelk collage'.
However, apart from momentarily wondering whether such reactions are
not typical of people who have reached an age at which they might write
and publish academic papers, we cannot avoid serious doubt when this
perspective is made into a fully sociological one. Even in Gibbins's own
formulation we may notice a contradiction between the denial of gradual
change and the claim that postmodemism is the product of 'centuries of
the modernizing process'. Perhaps, instead, these disturbing phenomena,
many at the level of popular culture, have always been present, but have
only just become the subject of academic attention. Such, certainly, is
the implication of Bryan Turner's observation that postmortem culture
has much in common with the culture of the Baroque, which featured
"'kitsch" cultural frivolity' and an awareness of 'the crisis of religion,
the differentiation and fragmentation of culture, the emergence of new
sensibilities, the erosion of an overarcbing ideology, and the necessity to
discover a new basis for moral order'. 20
Whatever the degree of novelty of postmodern culture in aesthetic
terms, the attempt to relate it to the traditional concerns of sociology
 Political Culture and Modernity 39

necessarily introduces a sense of more gradual change. Many cnucs

have indeed doubted that postmodernism is so very different from mod-
ernism itself. Gibbins's response that such claims of 'faulty periodiza-
tion' may be countered by noticing the distinctive self-consciousness of
postmodem theorists, 21 amounting as it does to no more than the claim
that postmodernism exists because some analysts say so, is not of much
help. Indeed it hints that the danger of postmodemism descending into
self-referential self-absorption may not be confined to architecture. Gradual
change is suggested both by Turner's attempt to relate postmodernism to
Bell's analysis of postindustrial society and by the attempt to integrate
it with Inglehart' s concept of 'postmaterialism'. Neither of the latter
analyses admit to anything like the degree of disorientation posited by
postmodemism.
The sociological extension of postmodemism provides a good illustra-
tion of the argument by Archer that the holistic view of culture derived from
anthropology has had a detrimental effect on sociological uses of the term.
While that argument, as we will see in Chapter 6, ignores debates within
anthropology over precisely this issue, its suggestion that the result was an
attempt to 'grasp' cultures as wholes in the manner of aesthetic appreciation
is partly true. The idea of postmodemism is in a sense the limiting case of
this approach, where not only aesthetic methods, but aesthetic objects, have
been used to characterize culture and by extension society. The attempt to
achieve such 'grasp' exposes the analyst to the danger of 'psychedelia',
with effects on the analyst's sociological conclusions opposite to what the
true meaning of that word would suggest

POSTMA1ERIALISM

Many of the approaches we have considered so far in this chapter have

the character of 'speculative sociology', particularly in regard to their
treatment of culture. In contrast, the work of Ronald Inglehart has a solid
foundation in survey research. 22 Moreover, this foundation consists of the
largest database so far used in political culture research, covering a large
number of countries and a lengthy time period. As such, Inglehart' s work
merits more extended discussion.
The findings of Culture Shift are many, and are given persuasive and
sometimes elegant support from the statistics. It is unnecessary to mention
all of them here. The thrust of Inglehart' s argument is as follows:

The values of Western publics have been shifting from an overwhelming

emphasis on material well-being and physical security toward greater
40 The Concept of Political Culture

emphasis on the quality of life. The causes and implications of this

shift are complex, but the basic principle might be stated very simply:
people tend to be more concerned with immediate needs or threats
than with things that seem remote or non-threatening . . . . Today,
an unprecedentedly large proportion of Western populations have been
raised under conditions of exceptional economic security. Economic
and physical security continue to be valued positively, but their relative
priority is lower than in the past. (p. 5, quoting from p. 3 of Silent
Revolution)

This claim - essentially that materialism declines as material security

increases - is combined with a second major thesis, that the effects of
improvement in material security are not immediate, since the relevant
values are learned during 'pre-adult' years (p. 68). The combination of
these 'scarcity' and 'socialization' hypotheses yields a theory that may be
tested by observing the rise of 'posunaterialist' values, and moreover their
gradual movement through the population in the course of generational
replacement. Inglehart' s data. unusually in political culture research, are
sufficient at least to draw preliminary conclusions regarding the latter,
which is part of what gives his findings their weighty plausibility.
Culture Shift, like other behavioural studies we have looked at, makes
both a comparative and a sociological use of political culture. This claim
needs some qualification, because throughout the book the term 'political
culture' is reserved for the comparative use only; it is invoked when
national deviations from the general patterns associated with increasing
posunaterialism are found. But we cannot overlook the book's title; and
moreover 'values' are, of course, a central part of most definitions of
political culture. Thus to reserve the term 'political culture' for national
cultural variation and to speak elsewhere only of values is somewhat
artificially to suggest that no problem of conflict between comparative
and sociological uses exists. The conflict, such as it is, is less apparent
than the one we identified in The Civic Culture and in many versions of
modernization theory. This is because the comparative element is largely
recessive. Emphasis is on common trends and outcomes, not, as in the
explanation of stable democracy, on differences. The comparative use
arises in the explanation of divergences, but these are rather few in number,
and are paid relatively little attention when they arise. (Chapter 1 of the
study is an exception, concentrating on national differences in an attempt,
which we evaluated in our first chapter, to reassess Almond and Verba's
comparative theory.) Thus Culture Shift deserves to be evaluated primarily
as a contribution to the sociological use of political culture. Even so, this
 Political Culture and Modernity 41

does not mean that no problem of conflict arises; indeed we will argue
later that the very recessiveness of the comparative element is a serious
weakness.
Postmaterialist values are measured by questions inviting respondents to
list a range of national goals in order of importance- sometimes twelve
choices were given, more often a subset of four of these, namely 'maintain
order in the nation; give people more say in the decisions of government;
fight rising prices; protect freedom of speech' (pp. 74f.). The results
indicate, firstly, that respondents did tend, as expected, to group the first
and third, or the second and fourth, of these goals together, and similarly
with the twelve-item question, demonstrating the existence in most of the
countries surveyed of a materialist/postmaterialist dimension in values.
This dimension is then used as a variable which is statistically compared
with many other measures in the course of the study, in an attempt to
discover both the source of postmaterialist values and their effects.
So far as the source of the materialist/postmaterialist dimension is
concerned, the scarcity and socialization hypotheses are confirmed by the
discovery of cohort effects and of a relationship between postmaterialist
values and what Inglehart calls 'formative security', a measure derived
from the occupational and educational level of the respondent's father,
the educational level of the respondent's mother, and the respondent's own
educational level (p. 122) - a measure, in other words, of the economic
security experienced by the respondent in the pre-adult period.
Inglehart reports several effects of the growth of postmaterialism.
Postmaterialists, while coming from secure backgrounds and thus being
likely themselves to be economically successful, in fact underachieve
economically relative to materialists, as their values would lead one to
expect. Postmaterialism is found to be correlated with declining 'tradi-
tional' religious observance, and with what might be termed 'progressive'
attitudes regarding social issues such as homosexuality, abortion and
divorce. Postmaterialism is also found to dispose people towards the
appeals of the so-called 'new politics', which emphasizes issues such
as nuclear power, disarmament and the environment, and to lead them
away from allegiance to the traditional economic or class concerns of
existing major political parties. Accordingly, postmaterialists have both the
ability (deriving from their higher educational levels) and the disposition to
participate in political movements such as the European peace movement
of the early 1980s and more generally to engage in 'elite-directing' rather
than 'elite-directed' political activity.
As might be expected of survey research (since we, of course, have an
unscientific exposure to other people's opinions in everyday life), some of
42 The Concept of Political Culture

these findings are unsurprising. Some of them, on the other hand, are quite
surprising, such as the finding that 'yuppies' are actually less materialistic
than the population as a whole. A study such as Inglehart's does not in
general rely for its force on the novelty of its findings, but on the firmness
with which they can be demonstrated, and in this respect it is difficult to
find fault with it Furthermore, it interconnects with other political cultural
observations we have recorded, such as Roberts' and Lemke's of the rise
of what they call 'alternative political culture' in the former West and East
Germany. Whereas Bell's 'end of ideology' thesis was thrown into doubt
by the events we group under the label of 'the 1960s', lnglehart' s thesis
provides some explanation of these events and indeed would predict that
such unconventional forms of political activity would continue whenever
the political context demanded them. To the argument that the relatively
conservative 1980s do for his thesis what the 1960s did for Bell's, Inglehart
points out that, in Europe, the reaction to the installation by NATO of new
theatre nuclear weapons followed the 'new politics' pattern, and further
argues that the rise of the 'moral majority' in the United States is best
seen as a reaction to the relentless emergence of postmaterialist values by
an increasingly isolated, and ageing, minority.
In emphasizing value cleavages, lnglehart also escapes to some extent
the charge of using empiricism to justify the status quo - indeed his thesis
is a radical challenge to that part of the status quo that is constituted by the
traditional political parties. The empirical theory of democracy, according
to which political elites contend for the allegiance of passive voters in a
political marketplace, using the techniques appropriate to the marketplace,
describes just that 'elite-directed' politics that lnglehart claims is under-
going terminal decline. Where perhaps the kind of complacency that the
radical critics object to can be identified is in Inglehart' s argument that
redistributive policies are becoming less attractive to voters precisely
because of their success in the past, and hence of their diminishing
returns. It may be true that the majority no longer stands to benefit from
the growth of government and the welfare state and from the· resulting
increased taxation, but the inference from this that the continuing needs of
certain substantial minorities will fall out of consideration is questionable
- especially when one considers the impact that the allegedly beleaguered
minority of materialists had through conventional political action in the
1980s.
To some extent this is a question of timescale, since postmaterialists
have not yet penetrated certain key sectors of society, such as corporate
business and political leaderships (as contrasted, for instance, with the
media). When they do, such backlashes may be more difficult to organize,
 Political Culture and Modernity 43

and the postmaterialist world will have dawned. At present, however, as

we observe various election campaigns following their customary course,
and despite the formidable evidence marshalled in Culture Shift, the dawn
seems hard to discern. Indeed, it is a significant problem of the study that
when it descends to the particular it does not always seem on target. A
minor example is lnglehart's treatment of British politics in the 1980s,
which identifies the breakaway Social Democratic Party as postmaterialist
and the Labour Party as traditional leftist. This has some truth, but it is
worth noting that it was the Labour Party that adopted unilateral nuclear
disarmament and most strenuously opposed modernization of the NATO
nuclear arsenal - and which later abandoned that policy in the face of its
obvious unpopularity. The SDP's popularity was short-lived, and the party
no longer exists.
Part of the explanation for such events may be deviation on the part
of Britain from the general trends lnglehart records - such deviation is
noticed, for instance, in the British relative lack of enthusiasm for European
integration (pp. 418f.). This brings us to the general problem of the
explanation of such deviations - the problem of the recessive comparative
element of the study. It surfaces at several points. For instance, it is noticed
that in Japan, an item that in Western countries is found to be one of the
components of the postmaterialist syndrome (in the twelve-item measure),
dealing with 'a less impersonal, more human society' (translated into
Japanese as 'a society with harmonioas human relations') is given priority
by everyone, not just postmaterialists. The proposed explanation for this
is the persistence in Japan of preindustrial values, which emphasized a
sense of belonging: 'the transition from preindustrial to industrial values
has been superimposed on the shift from Materialism to Postmaterialist
priorities' (pp. 146f.). Low Japanese anxiety about crime is traced to the
low crime rate in that country, which is in turn explained by reference to
traditional culture (p. 150). In general, 'Items that have one consistent
meaning throughout the West sometimes have a quite different significance
in Japan' (p. 151).
Another example is Belgium, which somewhat unexpectedly stands out
as an exception to several of Inglehart's generalizations (e.g. on p. 410). In
Denmark, uniquely, the percentage of people claiming to 'be religious' is
higher than the percentage who believe in God, suggesting that the former
question possibly had a distinct meaning there (pp. 190f.). But outside the
opening chapter, national variations come most to the fore when Inglehart
(ch. 7) sets out to address two problems: why does greater wealth not
lead to greater happiness, and why do nations vary in overall levels of
happiness? The first problem is answered by the thesis that 'aspirations
44 The Concept of Political Culture

adapt to situations', supported by the finding that those situational factors

that are most susceptible to rapid change account for the greatest amount
of variation in levels of life satisfaction and happiness, income not being
such a factor. An exception to this is however the variable of nationality,
which is a highly stable characteristic that nevertheless produces wide and
consistent variation in happiness levels - indeed it is the strongest predictor
of such variation. Inglebart's explanation is that 'given societies may have
different cultural baselines for the normal response to questions about bow
well one is doing' (p. 243). Some other evidence is presented to justify this
claim, including the stability .of national suicide rates. But this 'enduring
cultural component' (p. 246) is not further explained: the second of the
'problems' lnglehart set out to address is far from solved.
Inglebart is, of course, quite open to the idea of national cultural
variation; indeed his first chapter is aimed at demonstrating it, so
these findings do not represent contradictions in his theory. But the
way they are handled reveals that, for all the sophistication with which
the sociological project of describing the origins and consequences of
the rise of postmaterialism is handled, political culture as a national,
comparative, attribute is treated just as it bas been in modernization
theory, as a catch-all residual category. The crucial problem of
what accounts for 'enduring cultural components' is not addressed.
This chapter has further demonstrated the utility of analyzing political
culture research in terms of use, in that the deficiencies of many of
the examples considered have been traceable to their combination of
comparative and sociological uses. Broadly speaking, when modernity
is examined in conjunction with political culture the problem arises of
whether the latter is to be regarded as a context for the former (the
comparative use) or as an aspect of it (the sociological use). Resolving
this problem would not necessarily involve excluding one or the other
use; but recognizing the tension between them, and accounting for the
contradictory etiologies of political culture that they suppose, is necessary.
Perhaps, however, the frequency with which each use contaminates the
other tells us that something is fundamentally wrong with political cultural
explanation. Chapter 4 presents theoretical arguments to this effect, while
the next chapter discusses attempts to relate political culture to cases of
more rapid political change.
3 Political Culture
and Communism

Following the initial surge of interest in political culture research in the

early 1960s, the concept fell relatively out of favour, a fact which is partly
explained by its 'guilt by association' with the theory of modernization,
whose decline in popularity was precipitous. In the 1970s, however, the
concept underwent something of a revival, this time in the political science
subfield of communist studies. This subfield was always somewhat isolated
from the mainstream of political science, and for this reason its use of
political culture, although occasionally noticed, was seldom paid serious
attention as a contribution to the theoretical development of the concept
(Gabriel Almond, as we will see, is an exception to this statement). But,
in the 1970s, in this out-of-the-way scholarly environment, the concept was
indeed not only being preserved but also developed. In the hands of some
authors, this development took political culture beyond the constraints
of its behavioural use, whether comparative or sociological, and into
interpretivism - an outcome that it is difficult to avoid at least partially
attributing to the relative scarcity of attitude survey data in communist
states, and the difficulty of conducting surveys there. 1 That development
will be pursued in Chapter 5. This chapter will instead concentrate on
uses of political culture that continued to mine the comparative vein. As
such, it will continue and enhance the critique of the comparative use that
has been presented so far. But even within this vein, the peculiarities of
the communist cases led to peculiarities of use, as well as to certain
deficiencies. One significant peculiarity of the communist context is
that the political change that took place there was revolutionary, not
gradual, making these cases distinct from the instances of secular change
discussed in Chapter 2. Another is that communist states were the sites of
a self-conscious attempt by political authorities to change political culture
directly. And a third is provided by the recent collapse of communism
in Eastern Europe, offering the chance to assess a political cultural
explanation of sudden political change. In view of these circumstances
it is indeed surprising that political culture research within communist
studies has not been more closely examined from a theoretical perspective.
The first section of this chapter elaborates the theoretical significance of

45
46 The Concept of Political Culture

these circumstances in connection with the comparative use of political

culture, while the second looks closely at two settings for political cultural
explanation: the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. The third considers the
prospects for and problems of a political cultural explanation of the collapse
of communism.

THE CONSONANCE/DISSONANCE THEORY AND

RESOCIALIZATION

The absence of an adequate general theory relating stability and change to

political culture has been pointed out by Harry Eckstein. 2 Noting that, in
political culture theory, 'continuity is an expectation akin to that of inertia
in the Galilean conception of motion', he suggests that the 'window'
for contingent explanation opened by this approach allows varieties of
ad hoc adjustments - such as emphasizing adult rather than childhood
socialization, and de-emphasizing the need for consistency of individual
outlooks- that weaken the theory. Eckstein's proposed 'culturalist theory
of change' considers three types of political change: 'pattern-maintaining
change', 'social trauma' and 'political transformation', and discusses these
in relation to political culture. In the first case, orientations are adjusted
minimally, or come to fit the new circumstances; or if change is frequent,
they become more abstract and flexible, turning into 'fonns' rather than
'contents'. In the case of social trauma. Eckstein states that rapid general
reorientation is prohibited by cultural theory, and that 'ritual conformity'
or 'retreatism' (into family life) are likely initial reactions, suggested by
research on children's reaction to novel experience. Political transfonnation
is a special case of social trauma. having a more deliberate and planned
quality. Here 'brute power' or 'legalism' can compensate for cultural
formlessness, with the expectation, through family resocialization, of a
long-tenn return to the pre-transfonnation culture: 'the short-run effects
of attempted transformations are greater than the longer-run effects'. But
of these three cases, the first two are accounts of the impact of political
change on political culture; only the last case is a true 'culturalist theory of
change'. It gives political culture an independent role in cases where rapid
political transformation has been attempted.
Unlike the case of West Gennany, where the transfonnation was per-
haps, a defender of this theory might say, not rapid enough for such a
cultural lag to come into effect, in communist states it was rapid and
radical. In addition, they were states in which overt and extensive attempts
at 'resocialization' of the populations were made, through education, the
 Political Culture and Communism 47

activities of youth organizations, workplace agitation and propaganda;

thus providing useful test cases for the theory. The theory, in a slightly
different fonn, bas indeed been the main vehicle of comparative political
cultural explanation in these cases. For instance, Samuel Huntington and
Jorge Dominguez write: 'Political change is not likely under conditions of
congruence between political culture and political structures ... [it] occurs
when congruence between political culture and structures erodes or breaks
down.' 3 Barbara Jancar, in a discussion of the literature on communist
states, goes further: she proposes 'operationalizing' the study of political
culture by defining political change as the movement towards congruence
between political culture and political structure. 4 Archie Brown provides a
more careful fonnulation. At any time after a revolutionary change in the
political system, be writes,

there can be dissonance between the political culture and the political
system . . . . In such cases, a crisis triggered off by other stimuli
(frequently but by no means always economic) may produce a more
open political situation in which the strength and direction of political
change may be strongly influenced by the dominant - and no longer
donnant - political culture. s

We will tenn this version of comparative explanation the 'conso-

nance/dissonance theory'. Adopting it bas implications for the definition
of political culture that have occupied a good deal of debate in this field.
A definition of political culture that, like Almond's, is 'subjective', that
is, psychological, bas been proposed by Brown and justified on the basis
that it facilitates the analytic distinction between culture and structures that
the consonance/dissonance theory requires. 6 Brown, however, while allied
in this regard with the mainstream in political culture research, bas found
himself in a minority in its communist subfield.7 Those who employ
a 'comprehensive' or what is usually called, misleadingly (because the
subjective definition is more clearly connected with behaviouralism), a
'behavioural' definition, incorporating patterns of behaviour as well as
subjective factors, have fonned the majority. We noticed above that
the circumstances of communist states led some analysts to eschew
comparative explanation altogether, and adopt interpretivism. Tbe situation
is, however, not so clear cut, because some authors have produced what
we tenned in the Introduction 'hybrid' analyses, combining an interpretive
rubric with a comparative use of political culture. This exposes them to
Brown's criticism, and to some others that we will consider shortly.
We can illustrate this somewhat confusing situation by referring to
48 The Concept of Political Culture

two arguments for a comprehensive definition. Richard Fagen, who has

been cited to this effect by several authors, argues that a subjective
definition misses the essential content of resocialization, namely mass
mobilization, by construing 'the efforts of the regime as a kind of political
advertising' .8 A strict distinction between attitudes and behaviour, in
other words, presents a 'thin' picture of the resocialization effort. This
interpretive use of political culture predominates in Fagen's study, though
it is worth pointing out that scope for the consonance/ dissonance theory
is offered by his conclusion that a modification in the value system
is 'perhaps the most important long-term consequence of attempts to
transform the political culture' and that 'the revolutionary environment
makes considerable disjunction [between behaviour and attitudes] both
possible and probable' .9 Stephen White's monograph Political Culture and
Soviet PoliticslO illustrates a similar ambiguity, but much more obviously.
While espousing a comprehensive definition White nevertheless directs a
good deal of attention to resocialization in the narrow sense (what Fagen
would call 'political advertising'), noting low levels of interest on the part
of the population in official political education, inappropriate reasons for
attending ideological classes and general popular scepticism about official
values.n Not only that, but White elsewhere, as we will soon see, makes
clear the comparative aims of his study. White therefore comes much
closer than Fagen to a position that makes him vulnerable to Brown's
argument These conclusions, with their emphasis on 'dissonance', would
justify Brown's argument in favour of a subjective definition. However,
what is most apparent from these disputes is that the decisive issue is not
the definition itself, but whether the comparative use which a subjective
definition facilitates is viable. That is our present concern.
White's account of the failure of the Soviet resocialization effort intro-
duces the question of the contribution of this particular kind of dissonance
to political cultural explanation. Gabriel Almond has emphasized this
finding of failure in studies such as White's. He asserts that, hence,
an attempt to 'falsify' political cultural explanation has beeri refuted.
Needless to say, communist leaders did not initiate the resocialization
programme in order to falsify any theory of Western political science;
nevertheless, had their attempt to inculcate new values been successful,
the claim that political cultures persist and exert a pull on the more quickly
changed political structures would indeed have been undermined. Political
culture would have become 'a weak variable at best'. Instead, the failure
appears to show that 'a prior set of attitudinal patterns will tend to persist in
some form and degree and for a significant period of time, despite efforts
to transform it' . 12
 Political Culture and Communism 49

However, there is an important distinction between showing that an out-

come that would invalidate political cultural explanation bas not occurred,
and validating such an explanation. The failure of the resocialization effort
is a necessary condition for the validation of the consonance/ dissonance
theory, but not a sufficient one. Unfortunately, in much of the writing on
communist states, the distinction is elided. To be sure, the finding is a
useful corrective to earlier assumptions, connected with some versions
of the 'totalitarian model', of the success of resocialization or 'brain-
washing'. Indeed that assumption is not confined to the 1950s, when the
totalitarian model was most prevalent. Huntington and Dominguez, who
define political culture subjectively as 'empirical beliefs about expres-
sive political symbols and values and other orientations of the members
of the society toward political objects ... a society's central political
values', assert that politics in the Soviet Union became 'participatory',
so that the Soviet Union presented a 'successful case of planned pol-
itical culture change', in which 'a consummatory value pattern, linking
all spheres of life, is ... established in a modernizing polity' . 13 No
evidence of attitude change is presented to support this claim. Within
the polemical environment of communist studies, therefore, it is easy
to understand the stress which has been placed on findings such as
White's. But, again, they do not demonstrate the causal efficacy of
political culture. To pre-empt somewhat the detailed discussion below,
the example may be given of Almond's comment that Czechoslovakia
provides 'the strongest support for political culture theory' among com-
munist states. 14 This exceeds the more reticent causal claim made by
Brown and Gordon Wightman, whose findings contribute to Almond's
conclusions: 'the dominant Czech political culture came much closer
to changing Czechoslovak Communism than Czechoslovak Commun-
ism came to procuring acceptance of its official political culture' .Is
Since, as Brown and Wightman demonstrate, communism came nowhere
near procuring acceptance, that is not making much of a causal claim.
We noted above that the scarcity of attitude survey data prompted many
of the peculiarities of the analysis of political culture in communist states.
This observation needs some qualification. While in many cases, such as
the Soviet Union, official admissions of the inadequacy and poor results
of attempts to inculcate new values were available, these provided only
characterizations by default of the attitudes that were, in fact, present.
Such admissions could, until recently, be supplemented in the Soviet case
only by surveys applied to emigres, of which several examples exist. 16
In other cases, notably Czechoslovakia, but also Poland and Hungary,
conditions in the communist period facilitated the publication of somewhat
50 The Concept of Political Culture

richer survey research. Political culture analysts thus had an easier time
in some communist states than others adhering to the requirements of
the consonance/dissonance theory. The Soviet Union, as we have seen,
presents difficulties in this regard, while Czechoslovakia is perhaps the
case where the consonance/dissonance theory has its most straightforward
application. These two cases therefore provide a good basis on which to
assess the viability of the comparative use of political culture.

TilE SOVIET AND CZECHOSLOVAK CASES

White's historical survey is not designed to be a new contribution to

historical scholarship; indeed, as he frankly admits, 'if anything it reflects
too faithfully the mainstream of scholarly consensus' .17 It is intended to
expose the main themes of Russian 'historical experience'. One such
theme, according to White, is the 'absence of institutions in any way
constraining the exercise of monarchical power' and a 'highly personalized
attachment to political authority, and in particular to the person of the
Tsar', which was apparent in the lack of a clear distinction between
the Tsar's ownership and rule. Government was distinctively centralized
and bureaucratic, with a wide scope of responsibility that extended to its
citizens' moral and material welfare. Church and state were integrated,
as expressed by the slogan 'Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality' . 18 As
continuities in the social fabric, White stresses the underdevelopment of
industry, commerce and the bourgeoisie. and the prevalence of the village
commune as a social organization. An analysis of the redistributive and
regulatory functions of the commune prompts tbe conclusion 'it would
be surprising if [the commune] failed to reinforce the disposition of its
members to resolve their affairs in a collective, consensual and broadly
egalitarian manner' .19
A wide range of evidence concerning political institutions, social
structures and ideology contributes to this description of Russian pol-
itical culture. White's conclusion from it is that 'there was much in
an inheritance of this kind which the Bolsbevik.11 could adapt for their
purposes'. However, 'there was much ... at the same time, to which the
new Soviet government could not but take exception' .20 The remainder of
the monograph discusses these two parts of the Bolsheviks' 'inheritance'.
Emigre surveys show widespread support for state ownership, a degree
of egalitarianism, approval of state action in social and cultural affairs
and approval of political institutions. This is the 'adaptable' residue of
Russian political culture. 'Exceptionable' elements are those that official
 Political Culture and Communism 51

resocialization efforts have failed to eradicate, such as low interest in

politics and surviving religiosity.
The inconsistency between White's historical methodology and his
methods for assessing 'contemporary political culture' has been noticed
by several critics. Jancar argues that White's conclusions 'relate not to con-
tinuity and change in political culture under the impact of a revolutionary
ideology, but to the legitimacy of the regime and propositions regarding
the strengths and weaknesses upon which its claims to legitimacy rest' ,21
while Mary McAuley asserts

authors who claim that today' s dominant ... political culture - as

discovered in surveys - is not the offspring of existing government
practices can in no way suggest that it is appropriate to seek an earlier
period's dominant political culture in that period's political practices.22

There does indeed seem to be a lacuna between White's historical survey

and his focus on the resocialization effort in the remainder of the book.
Moreover, these two components produce different, indeed opposite, con-
clusions when plugged in to the consonance/dissonance theory.
That White intends his findings to be so used is not hard to demonstrate.
His first contribution to this subject was to the colloquium Political Culture
and Political Change in Communist States, published in 1977. Although
it was not clearly expressed in ever; contribution, the main explanatory
thesis presented by the collection was the consonance/dissonance theory.
The comparative purpose was established in the editorial commentary, and.
of course, by the very fact of juxtaposition. White, moreover, defending
his account against criticism of its accuracy by McAuley, has emphasized
its comparative intent by making explicit comparisons between political
developments in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, concluding, despite
an acknowledgement that the original contrast may have been drawn
too sharply, that Russian historical experience was indeed distinctive. 2 3
The consonance/dissonance theory would lead us to conclude that the
Soviet Union was, in view of White's historical account, a case of political
stability. Such a conclusion was implied by Brown, who pointed (in 1984)
to the existence of three 'cultural supports for the status quo' in the Soviet
Union: the fear of chaos, patriotism, and agreement on the identity of
national heroes, notably Lenin. 24 Continuity even in the face of attempts
at resocialization has indeed been stressed by many writers, suggesting,
as Stephen Burant does, paraphrasing Marx, that 'the traditions of all the
dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living, even
if they have been exposed to intense ideological re-education' .2s Others,
52 The Concept of Political Culture

attending more to the Soviet period itself and its impact on political culture,
have written of a 'Stalinist' or 'communist' political culture, in which
elements of traditional authoritarianism are compounded and reinforced
by the Soviet, particularly Stalinist, experience.26 Brown writes:

Because political cultures are historically conditioned, the long-term

authoritarian character of the Russian and Soviet state constitutes a
serious impediment to political change of a pluralizing, libertarian,
or genuinely democratizing nature . . . . Such elements as acceptance
of strict political hierarchy; the taking for granted of political police
powers, administrative exile, and restrictions on travel; great deference
to the top leader; loyalty to a person rather than to political, and
particularly legal, institutions; and reluctance to engage in autonomous
political activity could only be strengthened by the Soviet experience
and, above all, by what happened in Stalin's time.27

As we will see, the consonance/ dissonance theory produces a sharp

contrast in the case of Czechoslovakia. where no such agreement or
continuity obtains. This would appear to demonstrate its utility as a
comparative theory. But in this interpretation, White's account of the
failure of official resocialization plays no useful role. Whereas in the
Czechoslovak case (and other cases of dissonance), findings regarding
the penetration of official values have the same implication of instability
that historical analysis might suggest, in the Soviet Union they do not.
Incorporating them therefore necessitates a more complex theory than that
of consonance and dissonance.
White's solution is to make use of Inkeles and Bauer's distinction of
support for the Soviet system from that for the regime, his evidence
pointing, he avers, to a high level of the former combined with a low
level of the latter. This is not equivalent to the distinction often made in
accounts of the legitimacy of liberal democratic states between support for
the democratic process and support for a particular government. Such a
distinction was not available in the Soviet Union and other communist
states, where, instead of the process legitimating the power of a party,
the party's power was justified in ideological terms and all other political
processes were legitimated with respect to it. The objection that this was
only an official claim may well be valid, but this would still not make
it possible for political institutions to be assessed by the population in
abstraction of the party dominance to which they were so obviously
subject. White, indeed, counts institutions, as well as ideology, as part
of the 'regime'. On the other hand, the attributes of the 'system' for
 Political Culture and Communism 53

White include 'public ownership of the means of production and the

comprehensive provision of welfare'. On the basis of this distinction, he
concludes:

Liberal democracies, buttressed by the 'come rain or come shine'

legitimacy which their political institutions confer upon them, may
find it possible to survive a period of static or even falling living
standards; a regime whose legitimacy is based rather more narrowly
upon 'performance' criteria may find it rather less easy.2s

Thus while from the consonance/dissonance theory we would predict

stability in the Soviet Union, as several writers did, consideration of the
failure of resocialization leads White to a conclusion of at best fragile
stability. The theory seems to allow the explanation of either outcome,
which, to say the least, undermines its plausibility.
In fact, in the course of perestroika and its aftermath, the Soviet
Union did turn out to be unstable, to the rather dramatic extent of
self-destructing. The loosening of constraints on free expression, organ-
ized protest and formal political opposition opened a Pandora's box
of contending parties and factions, expressions of economic discontent
such as strikes, and centrifugal national tendencies. The anti-communist
sentiments that were manifested first in elections and then by prohibition
of the Party and republican secession would appear to indicate that failure
to instil widespread belief in Marxist-Leninist values and in Soviet political
institutions was indeed decisive. But while such alienation was revealed by
political culture researchers' examination of the resocialization effort, the
phenomena provoked by Gorbachev' s reforms can hardly be claimed as
a vindication of political culture theory. And in view of the ambiguity
to which we have just drawn attention, a conservative reaction to these
reforms such as occurred in August 1991, and cannot for that matter be
ruled out for the successor states, would not decisively validate the theory
either.
Yet more ambiguity is introduced when some of the more optimistic
prognoses of Soviet writers, asserting the possibility of change in the
political culture and thus of escape from its constraints, are considered.
Brown cites Fyodor Burlatsky's view that 'a new Soviet political culture
has begun to be formed to a significant degree before our eyes'. Brown
wrote, in 1989:

although political cultures do not change overnight, or even within a

year or two, they are not immutable. From the perspective not only of
54 The Concept of Political Culture

the continuing reality and prospects for success of the reform process
now under way in the Soviet Union but also from the standpoint of
the deeper imprint it might make on Russian political culture, it is
of crucial importance that glasnost' be maintained and developed.
If openness becomes 'not a campaign, but a norm' [Gorbachev's
phrase], that in itself will constitute change in the Soviet political
culture and pave the way for other changes - institutional as well as
cultural.29

Thus the consonance/ dissonance theory was not taken to be falsified

by the transition from stability to instability in the Soviet Union. The
incompatibility of recent events with earlier predictions of stability
has simply been ignored, and Russian/Soviet political culture given a
new role as a brake on the process of change and, indeed, a locus
of blame for its slow pace under Gorbachev. Opposition to reform
undoubtedly came from conservatives who had not abandoned the old
values, particularly the fear of chaos (which was voiced in justification
of the August 1991 coup attempt), as well, of course, as from those
who felt it to be moving too slowly, or to have been heedless
of national aspirations. Once, however, the values of these diverse
social and possibly occupational groups are invoked, political cultural
explanation in the simple form of the consonance/dissonance theory is
invalidated. Yet no attempt to devise a more sophisticated form of political
cultural explanation has accompanied the recent uses of the concept.
We can gain a further understanding of the deficiencies of the con-
sonance/ dissonance theory by looking at the cases to which it applies
paradigmatically - that is, where describing the failure of resocialization
has not led to contradictory conclusions - namely the states of Eastern
Europe. The Czechoslovak case is a useful one not just for the reason
Almond gives - that the failure of the communist attempt to 'falsify'
political cultural explanation by resocialization can be demonstrated - but
also because it offers evidence that can yield a very clear picture of the
attitudes and values that the regime failed to replace. As in the Soviet case,
historical analysis has been used in characterizing Czechoslovak political
culture; but this evidence, distinctively, has been supplemented by attitude
surveys taken in relatively free conditions in 1946 and 1968, enabling a
limited comparison over time.
The 1946 surveys pre-dc'lted the communist takeover, while the 1968
ones were applied in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, within the period
when 'political conditions in Czechoslovakia were such that people could
be relied upon to answer honestly the most sensitive political questions' .30
 Political Culture and Communism 55

A survey on the 'relationship of Czechs and Slovaks to their history'

conducted in Autumn 1968 provides the main resource for Brown and
Wightman's account of Czechoslovak political culture. The survey found,
in the Czech case (where the results could be compared with a similar
1946 survey), considerable continuity in evaluations of the 'most glorious
period', one notable discontinuity being the move from fifth to first place
of the interwar First Republic, a move counter to the direction pressed
for by the communist authorities. The Slovaks in 1968 were somewhat
less positive towards the First Republic (they put it in fourth place), but
they shared with the Czechs a hostility towards the 1950s period and the
Soviet invasion of August 1968. Support for the 1968 reform programme
was expressed in surveys tracing support for various politicians who were
identified with reformism or conservatism.3 1 The symbol of Thomas
Masaryk (President of the First Republic) was powerful, especially among
Czechs, in both 1946 and 1968- indeed his popular esteem (according to
the 'history' survey) increased in that period. Slovaks placed him fourth
in a list of esteemed personalities in 1968 -behind various Slovak figures
including Dubeek. 32 Results recording the extent of identification with
other nationalities (again from the 'history' survey) show the destruction
of the goodwill Czechoslovaks bad previously shown to the Soviet Union
as a consequence of the Second World War.
For all the richness and specificity of the 'history' surveys, issues of
interpretation still arise. H. Gordon Skilling bas pointed out that the
political experience of the First Republic was by no means unambiguously
pluralistic: that pluralism was distorted by authoritarian or bureaucratic
tendencies, and that nationalism was a 'corrosive influence' upon it, often
leading to the subordination of dissident elements.3 3 David Paul bas placed
somewhat more stress than Brown and Wightman on the distinctiveness of
the interwar political experience of the Slovaks.34 Brown and Wightman
argue, on the basis of analyses by Czechoslovak historians and politicians
of both the reformist and conservative persuasions that, whatever its
possible range of connotations, 'Masarykism' was construed by all sides
in Czechoslovakia as expressing 'social democratic' values.35 The fact
that 'Masarykism' and, in general, the interwar period as a symbol, have
a range of possible values, from the 'normative assumption of pluralism' 36
to what might be seen as the oligarchy represented by the almost permanent
dominance of the group of five coalition parties, the 'petka', indicates that
the values expressed in 1968 involved a degree of reconstruction of the
past. This reconstruction, to be sure. bore some connection with historical
reality, but at the same time it was pushed in a certain direction by
the political circumstances of the time of its expression. As Brown
56 The Concept of Political Culture

and WighUnan put it, 'the timing of the 1968 survey (two months after
the armed intervention in Czechoslovakia ... ) doubtless added to the
emotional appeal of the First Republic' .37
At a first glance, the failure of the Czechoslovak communist authorities
to suppress values inimical to their rule seems to open the way for the
occurrence of 'deviations' from communist rule such as the Prague Spring
to be explained on the model of deviations from the universal process of
modernization; that is, in terms of cultural lag. But any of the several theo-
ries of socialization on which the notion of cultural lag depends imply only
that attitudes change gradually; hence that older ones will only gradually
fade away. The Czechoslovak evidence, looked at more closely, rather than
demonstrating the mere resilience of values, can be read as demonstrating
their responsiveness to political circumstances (though certainly within
the constraint of the ways in which the interwar period could plausibly
be evaluated, a constraint which the government's resocialization effort
exceeded). Support for this point may be gained from surveys conducted
in Poland. In their summaries of this survey-based work, both Stefan
Nowak and Janina Frentzel-Zagorska38 argue that the communist regime
had considerable and diverse effects on values, in one respect reinforcing
them - 'the lack of any opportunity to articulate the dominant political
culture on a day to day basis adds to its "moral orientation"' 39 -but in other
respects weakening them. Nowak speaks of an 'almost random statistical
aggregate of values', that is, the dissociation of values from their expected
correspondence with social classes and groups, a result, he avers, of the
rapid social changes of the Stalinist period. 40 Frentzel-Zagorska endorses
this 'social vacuum hypothesis'. Where Nowak speaks of 'latent values',
she speaks of 'recessive' ones, which may 'sink into the unconscious
or semi-conscious'. In the 1980-81 Solidarity period, recessive values
re-emerged, and intermediate affiliation also began to appear. The crushing
of Solidarity again impinged on values, increasing apathy and resignation,
but at the same time creating a myth, which 'may serve to organize the
social imagination on a very wide scale' .41
In the Czechoslovak case, Brown argues that no explanation of the
events of 1968 could avoid mentioning the dissonance between popular
perceptions and official norms that the surveys reveal. 42 But, as we have
seen, looking closely at political culture as measured by surveys makes a
simple model of cultural persistence seem questionable. Some proponents
of political cultural explanation have acknowledged the element of creativ-
ity, but have not seen it as problematic for such explanation. For instance,
regarding the creative element in evaluations of the First Republic, Kristian
Gerner has written:
 Political Culture and Communism 57

The point is that when utopias and ideological blueprints of the future
are hopelessly discredited by the actions and policies of the communist
rulers, the peoples have sought inspiration and guidance in the past -
that it is an idealised and even romanticised past seems likely, but this
does not affect the validity of the assertion. People can be mobilized
even with the help of pure myths and historical symbols. 4 3

But these admissions- valid ones, we have seen -surely do make a dif-
ference to political cultural explanation. The straightforward transmission
of attitudes and values from one generation to another (which even White,
despite his comprehensive definition of political culture and his account
of 'institutional continuity', takes to be the main mechanism of political
cultural persistence) 44 is rendered inapplicable. And the more general
claim of the consonance/dissonance theory, that through the influence of
political culture, nations that have undergone rapid political transformation
eventually return to the pattern of their past, is put in doubt by the question:
which past?

THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM AND THE MULTIVALENCE

OF HISTORY

The question 'which past?' becomes even more significant in the face of
the events of 1989 and 1990 in Eastern Europe. Having failed to inculcate
new values, the communist party regimes found themselves toppling, to
be replaced, in the new, more open situation (for which the withdrawal
of support by the Soviet ·leadership for repressive measures must be
seen as providing much of the explanation), by a belated 'eruption of
genuine history' .45 The process of collapse and replacement was achieved
at different speeds and with varying degrees of disorder and violence,
and the immediate outcomes also showed wide divergences, from the
electoral victory of a broad anti-communist coalition in Czechoslovakia to
the continuation of the former communists in a new guise as the National
Salvation Front in Romania.
The notion of an 'eruption of genuine history' as an analysis of events
in Eastern Europe is appealing because it draws attention to the obvious
'falsehood' of the claims to legitimacy upon which the Soviet-backed
regimes rested. The speed with which the regimes crumbled once the
ending of Soviet support for repressive reaction was signalled (in 1988)46
lends plausibility to the claims of dissident writers, who caricatured this
58 The Concept of Political Culture

fragility in metaphors such as the 'emperor's new clothes' or the outbreak

of laughter at a funeral.4 7 It is true that some writers also emphasized the
penetration of the regimes into society. Vaclav Havel, for instance, has
characterized cqmmunism as a system in which everyone was implicated,
by virtue of the necessity of each member of society's 'living under a
lie', that is, publicly manifesting his or her subjugation by means such
as the display of blatantly false slogans.48 Havel's claim, though, is that
truth corrodes falsehood; that despite universal complicity, the system
and its psychological effects could be thrown off in an instant. Thus
the penetration, although socially comprehensive, was psychologically
shallow, just as the metaphors of fragility would have it. In terms of
morale and self-esteem, the utility of this position for those who, like
Havel, suffered considerable hardship for their attempts to preserve 'truth'
is obvious. Whether it is a correct analysis is a different matter, not least
because the very notion of a single truth must soon come into question
when the single falsehood in contrast with which it is defined ceases to be
promulgated. Thus it is possible to see the related ideas of 'genuine history'
and 'living within truth' as responses to - that is, products of - a moral
environment that was radically simplified by the communist experience,
especially in its later stages, when the bankruptcy of ideological claims
and dependency on Soviet military power were most apparent.
In fact the continuity between events since the fall of communism and
the pre-communist history of Eastern Europe is somewhat limited. Calls
for democracy have been voiced throughout the region, and democratic
governments widely, though not universally, established. Little in the
interwar experience of Eastern Europe would lead one to expect this. In
what he correctly describes as a generous estimate, Cyril Black counts as
'experience with free competition among political parties under reasonably
stable conditions' '1918-23 and 1931-34 in Bulgaria, 1918-26 in Poland,
1918-19 in Hungary, 1918-34 in Yugoslavia, 1925-28 in Albania, and
1918-37 in Romania', Czechoslovakia providing the only example of a
less ambiguous experience of democracy.49
In the immediate aftermath of the communist collapse, 'the West' has
become the 'single truth' of East European political culture. Hostility to the
Soviet Union has been accompanied by a desire to join the supranational
structures of Western Europe and a widespread endorsement, at least in
theory, of capitalist economics, particularly the redemptive power of the
market. Enthusiasm for the latter is reflected both in popular demand for
Western consumer goods and in the somewhat uncritical endorsement
of market economic solutions by East European economists. Increasing
scope for free expression among East European (and Soviet) scholars in
 Political Culture and Communism 59

recent years has yielded ample illustration of this tendency. For instance,
summarizing the results of a 1986 conference on the Yugoslav economic
crisis, Dennison Rusinow observes: 'The need for a genuine market
economy in solving the economic crisis and mitigating internationality
conflicts went virtually unchallenged, although the Yugoslav participants
were more optimistic about its potential contribution than most of the
Americans. Perhaps this is because the viewpoint of the Yugoslavs . . . is
entirely theoretical.' 5o Rusinow' s suggested explanation may well be appli-
cable to many of the Western enthusiasms currently on display in Eastern
Europe; and if it is valid, the very opposite of political cultural explanation
-that lack of experience of the political and economic structures now being
created accounts for their creation- is suggested.51
Upon travelling to Eastern Europe, as Karen Dawisha has observed, 'It
is impossible not to be impressed by the richness of culture and historical
tradition binding the peoples of Europe together despite its division after
1945.' Moreover, quoting a phrase of Milan Kundera's, she continues, 'It
was not just Americans or West Europeans but also and even primarily
the East Europeans themselves who regarded their region as having been
"driven from its destiny".' 52 But she also notes the claim of communist
leaders in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to have rescued the region
from its history of despotism, and endorses Hugh Seton-Watson's claim
that, before the communist takeover, 'the social structure of Eastern Europe
more closely resembled that of Russia, or even of Asiatic countries, than
that of France, Britain, or Germany' .53 According to the latter view (and
notwithstanding the claims of communist ideologues), the communist
phase in Eastern Europe marks a continuation of the region's history. Such
a claim has been made by several writers, sometimes explicitly in terms of
political culture. Black writes, 'The success of the USSR in establishing
an orbit of predominant influence may also be attributed in considerable
degree to the political culture of this region.' 54 Joseph Rothschild, while
asserting that diversity was preserved in that 'at a minimum, the citizens of
each East Central European nation perceive their particular state as having a
moral and historical significance far beyond being a mere unit in a supposed
"socialist fraternity" of states and peoples', nevertheless concludes that
'The Communist apparats have inherited, adopted, refined and intensified
a deplorable tradition of conducting domestic politics not as an exercise in
compromise and consensus building among fellow citizens, but as a mode
of warfare against enemies.' 55
It was probably in order to escape such uncomfortable conclusions that
a tradition of dissident writing quite distinct from Kundera's, asserting
instead East European exceptionalism, arose during the communist period.
60 The Concept of Political Culture

The values of this tradition are summarized in terms of political and

economic programmes by the idea of the 'Third Way' (the title of a
book by leading Prague Spring reform economist Ota Sik), and in terms
of political culture by the idea of 'Central Europe'.
The third way- or 'socialism with a human face' - is the rather vaguely
defined and far from even imperfectly realized path upon which Czecho-
slovakia was thought by its reformist leaders to have embarked in 1968.
Whether its programmes are economically feasible or politically consistent
is an interesting question, but more relevant to the present discussion is the
critical element that the idea contains. Its critique of the failure of East
European command economies and political systems is apparent enough
from its origin, but its critique of the West should also be noticed. The
individualism, materialism and consumerism of the West, as well as
its social problems, were phenomena from which some reformers and
dissident writers of Eastern Europe recoiled. Their aspiration was to create
systems in which both these social ills and Soviet totalitarianism would be
avoided. Frequently, dissidents approached this goal by eschewing political
activity altogether. Havel, for instance, declared that 'traditional political
activity' was irrelevant to the East European situation, that political
protest had to be freed from utopian and Western categories, and that
the confrontation of truth and lies had to be addressed directly. 56 George
Konrad's appropriately titled Antipolitics goes furthest in this direction.
'Antipolitics' consists mainly of opposition to the nuclear arms race and
profound cynicism about politics and politicians. In a typical passage,
Konrad writes: 'The career of Adolf Hitler was an extreme paradigm of
the politician's trade .... there lives in every politician more or less of
the delirium that was Hitler's demon.' 57
These ideas were historically grounded in the traditions allegedly char-
acteristic of 'Central Europe'. Timothy Garton Ash has examined the
expression of this idea in the work of several writers.58 He quotes
Havel's characterization of the Central European mind as 'skeptical,
sober, anti-utopian, understated' and Konrad's description of Central
Europe as a 'cultural-political anti-hypothesis'. Geographically, the notion
was somewhat problematic. One of its main deficiencies was its implied
exclusion of Germany, whose historic links with its Eastern neighbours-
expressed not least by the presence throughout the region, until the forced
migrations of the immediate post-war period, of a large German-speaking
diaspora - would appear to necessitate its being counted part, perhaps the
centre, of Central Europe, if the concept is to claim historical accuracy.
Historical accuracy, however, has very little to do with it, as Garton
Ash makes clear. The idea was a rhetorical response to that of 'Eastern
 Political Culture and Communism 61

Europe' - a toponym that was seen as expressing Soviet domination over

the region.
It is not implausible to see in the notions of the third way and Central
Europe an attempt to put a positive gloss on the fact of Eastern Europe's
economic and political backwardness relative to the West Be that as it
may, it is noteworthy that (even though the labels 'Central' and 'East
Central Europe' have become fashionable among western analysts) both
have somewhat faded from view amid recent events. Their nature as an
artifact of the communist period, rather than as an expression of regional
traditions or 'genuine history', is thereby implied.
There can, it is clear, be no doubt as to the accuracy of Dawisba' s
conclusion that 'a fundamental problem always bas been manifest in
the political culture of these states, in so far as there bas never been
any consensus between the communist leaders and the people regarding
whether or not they are indeed "beyond" their history' .59 Indeed the
dissensus is far more complex than one between elites and populations.
This is very far from suggesting the irrelevance of history to East European
politics: the contrary is instead suggested. But the manner in which history
intrudes on current political developments is not adequately captured by
the consonance/dissonance theory. Historical experience does not provide
a single tendency to which the liberated polities of Eastern Europe may now
return. It is multivalent. We can illustrate this fact at a more specific level
with an example from Polish politics of the divergent appeal to history by
political actors.
Kristian Gerner bas described the use made of the historical symbol of
Joseph Pilsudski, Prime Minister and leading progenitor of the independent
Polish state of 1918-39 by Solidarity leaders and activists in 1980-81.60
In his first public appearance as leader of Solidarity, Lecb Wal~sa bad
a portrait of Pilsudski on the wall behind him. In 1981, the anniversary
of the Republic's founding on 11 November was marked by a speech
given at Pilsudski's tomb in Cracow, and the Solidarity weekly newspaper
featured on its front page a facsimile of his decree of 1918 founding
the Republic. A shipyard in Gdansk was unofficially renamed after him
by its workers. Pilsudski, however, is a highly ambiguous historical
symbol. While his positive legacy includes the creation of the Republic
and his leadership of the successful war against the Soviet Union in
1920, be was also responsible for the coup of 1926 which brought
the brief period of democracy to an end and installed him as leader
of an increasingly authoritarian regime. It is therefore as a symbol of
the assertion of Polish nationhood against Soviet aggression, and not
as a representative of democracy, that Pilsudski most plausibly serves.
62 The Concept of Political Culture

At the same time, the virtual military coup of December 1981, which had
been presaged by increasing military domination of government, recalls,
as Gerner notes, the Pilsudski precedent Indeed, the latter takeover was
justified by Wojciecb Jaruzelski in terms of the preservation of Polish
national identity. He made this justification explicit and invoked another
resonant symbol from the Polish past when, in 1982, he told a Central
Committee plenum that, in the Solidarity period, 'The spirit of Liberum
Veto triumphed, the times of lone wolves returned. . . . The authorities
announced that they would not hesitate to use the constitutional measures
of defending the state if this were inevitable.' 61 Here Jaruzelski made
reference to the collapse of the fragile democracy of the Polish-Lithuanian
Republic, which bad been paralyzed in its time of greatest danger by the
practice whereby a single member of parliament - a 'lone wolf' - could
bring its proceedings to a halt. That Russia was one of the partitioning
powers which benefited from this paralysis was for Jaruzelski's audience
also, presumably, a resonant fact: again, he was implying, national survival
was being risked because of an obsession with democratic procedure at the
expense of prudential action.
Thus two contending parties claimed to be the representatives of Polish
identity, and marshalled highly potent symbols accordingly. Of course,
in the end it was Solidarity's appropriation of history that prevailed
(though one might speculate that Jaruzelski's was plausible for some
of the population, since the external threat was indeed quite palpable).
But since both sides were making essentially the same appeal to historical
symbolism - the struggle of Poland to maintain or regain statehood - the
outcome cannot be explained on the basis of the greater historical accuracy
of one claim or the other.
Explanation of political developments in Eastern Europe in terms of
political culture within the framework of the consonance/ dissonance theory
is rendered impossible by such historical multivalence. Its effect on pol-
itical cultural explanation is illustrated by Paul's attempt to incorporate
qualifications of his earlier diagnosis of Czechoslovak interwar politics
as 'pluralistic' into the description of political culture itself. His revised
opinion is that 'Czechoslovak political culture, in both its Czech and
Slovak variants, is both pluralistic and unpluralistic, both democratic and
authoritarian', so that 'the predominant character of the political culture
is incoherence' .62 This state of affairs, with all the difficulties it creates
for comparative explarmtion, is not unique to Czechoslovakia, we have
argued.
This chapter has looked at a body of political culture literature whose
existence but little else has been noticed by writers in the 'mainstream'.
 Political Culture and Communism 63

Application of the political culture approach to communist states has

offered the possibility of testing the assertion that political culture exerts
a 'pull' on rapidly changed institutions or structures- what has been termed
the 'consonance/dissonance theory' of political cultural explanation. Con-
firmation is indeed available for the claim that mass values are not readily
changed by government re-education and resocialization efforts. Evidence
for this striking failure has often, however, been taken to support the wider
claims of political cultural explanation, instead of merely establishing a
necessary condition for it The failure of resocialization plays a role too
in the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989
and 1990, but again this lends support only to the most minimal of
political cultural explanations. Many factors speak against the viability of
the consonance/dissonance theory even in this apparently most propitious
context: the ambiguity and multivalence of historical experience and the
diverse manner in which it has been invoked by political actors, as well
as the obvious impact of present circumstances on the way in which
history is perceived, revealed as clearly by surveys as by any other
method. Communist states therefore appear to offer little help to the
attempt to establish political culture as a tool of comparative politics. In
the next chapter, that attempt will be examined from a more theoretical
perspective.
4 Political Culture and
Comparative Explanation

The preceding chapters have attempted to show, by examining in detail

some classic attempts at comparative political cultural explanation and
the cases to which they have been applied, in what ways political culture
falls short of its putative comparative use. The present chapter aims to
summarize and reinforce this critique of 'comparative political culture'
as a subfield of political science by addressing the same problems at a
more theoretical and general level. Apart from exposing more clearly the
common threads of the earlier more detailed discussion, this chapter will
introduce some further examples of political culture research, and will
discuss several existing theoretical critiques of the concept.

CAUSE AND EFFECf

Stated briefly, the comparative use of political culture is to place the

concept in a theory which asserts that variations in political culture cause
variations in political outcomes, where the latter may take the form of
structures (as in the comparative theory of The Civic Culture) or events
(as in some versions of modernization theory). To be sure, this theory is
usually hedged around with acknowledgements of the reciprocal influence
of events and structures on political culture, as in Almond's assertion that
political culture is 'both an independent and a dependent variable' .• But
such statements are caveats, if important ones, to the main proposition, that
political culture has causal and hence explanatory power.
As we saw in the Introduction, the concept of political culture was
a leading token of the 'behavioural revolution' in political science, a
revolution, we suggested, whose chief features were aspirations to the
status of a science and to the territorial expansion of that science. Several
critics have used the first of these aspirations as a basis from which to
criticize political culture research as failing to live up to the promise
inherent in characterizing political culture as an independent variable. For
instance, in a critique of The Civic Culture, Brian Barry suggests that, as the
'beginnings of an answer' to the question 'what is the connection between

64
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 65

attitudes such as [those described by Almond and Verba] and the existence
of democratic politics in a country?',

We should first need an hypothesis relating the prevalence in a country's

population of the 'civic culture' (to a specified extent) with [sic] the
existence in that country of (a certain amount of) democracy. (The
criteria of 'democracy' would, of course, have to be spelt out.) Then
we should have to test this hypothesis by seeing whether the two kinds
of variable- 'cultural' and 'institutional' -were related in the data in
the way required by the hypothesis. And finally, we should have at
least to face the question of causality .... [E]ven if the relationship
does exist, is this because the 'culture' influences the working of the
'institutions', or is it merely that it reflects them?2

Mary McAuley, in the course of her critique of Stephen White's study of

Russian political culture, poses the question 'what might be the significance
of the views expressed in response to surveys?', and gives the answer:

We could advance some predictive hypotheses whose testing would

enable us to see whether they are a critical set in influencing activities.
For example, the existence of a particular set of views at time A will
lead to a particular pattern of disturbance at time B if official policy
offends these views. The testing of such a hypothesis would be very
complicated - it would have to be done comparatively and this in turn
would engender the cross-cultural problem - but it could be set up now,
for the future. It obviously could not be asked of the past.3

The mere statement of these putative explanatory programmes empha-

sizes not just how far existing political culture research has fallen short
of the behaviouralist promise, but also how it must fall short. There is an
obvious impracticality in the proposals, arising, as Brown has noted, out
of the complexity, unpredictability and lack of controllability of events.4
Are these critiques too demanding? We might suspect that their status
as critiques enables them to seize the methodological high ground, not
themselves being burdened by any data. A distinction introduced by Arend
Lijphart in 1971, and much cited since then, might be invoked in defence
of the theory we are considering. 5 Lijphart locates the comparative method
between two methodological poles. At one pole lies the case study method,
whose chief deficiency is its lack of contribution to theory-building. At the
other are the experimental method and the slightly softer statistical method,
deficient, Lijphart thinks, for the difficulty of ensuring experimental control
66 The Concept of Political Culture

and of collecting adequate amounts of data. given limited resources. Charac-

teristic of the comparative method is the problem of 'many variables, small
N' - a problem which can readily be seen to obtain in most of our examples
of political culture research. Numerous innovations aimed at mitigating this
problem have subsequently been made, such as the use of a greater number
of cases, 6 focusing on more closely comparable cases (in effect introducing
a scientific control), focusing on widely different cases, with a view to
highlighting their common elements, and reducing the number of proposed
variables. 7
We will see below that some of these responses have indeed been made
in political culture research (Inglehart' s work, we can already see, is an
example of the first response). But though Lijphart's distinction offers
some protection for political culture research against the more extreme
of behaviouralist demands, it is not by any means the end of the story.
Even under the 'comparative method' so defined, the causal claim to which
we alluded at the outset is made; as David Collier in a review of Lijphart' s
article observes, new accounts of the goals of comparison notwithstanding,
assessing hypotheses remains a paramount goal of comparative politics.s
The viability of this causal claim is what we need to focus attention on.
We can begin to do this by looking at what for our purposes seems
to be the aptly-titled article 'A Cause in Search of its Effect, or What
Does Political Culture Explain?' 9 Its authors, David Elkins and Richard
Simeon, define political culture as 'assumptions about the political world'.
They provide a list of such possible assumptions, and discuss various
means by which political culture might be measured. They argue that the
'unconscious' or 'taken for granted' quality of political cultural 'assump-
tions' prohibits their direct measurement, while at the same time making
short-term deviation less likely. Therefore the investigative methods they
recommend are the study of 'specialized respondents' -politicians, artists,
malcontents - and of emigrants and immigrants, as well as the ways in
which societies as a whole appear to differ in political cultural terms, and
even, on the model of demonstrations of the cultural origins of optical
illusions, the carrying out of laboratory experiments to test for the effects
of cultural assumptions.1o
Elkins and Simeon also set out a methodology by which 'cultural expla-
nation' may be compared with 'structural' and 'institutional' explanations
of political outcomes. A phenomenon, they argue, has a cultural explana-
tion when, by 'controlling', structural and institutional factors can be ruled
out This procedure identifies the 'culture-bearing unit' for each variable;
that is, where the data reveal variations that are not eliminated when
structural or institutional factors are controlled, the geographic or ethnic
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 67

units in which these variations inhere are taken to be 'culture-bearing',

or to have distinct cultures that explain the variations. Examples of this
procedure are given, based on data drawn from The Civic Culture.n
Where Elkins and Simeon's account is deficient is in effecting a link
between its descriptive and explanatory facets, the definition of political
culture and the method for identifying 'culture-bearing units'. No evidence
is given to demonstrate that the culture-bearing units, defined through the
purely formal method of positing them as the substrate of a variation for
which non-cultural explanations have been ruled out, possess distinctive
'political cultures' in the sense derived from the definition and method of
investigation. Rather, it is assumed that these will overlap; that political
cultures, specified as certain sets of political assumptions, will be what
formally-specified culture-bearing units actually bear. What they call the
'explanatory' component of their methodology does no more than identify
the need for 'cultural' explanation by demonstrating the inadequacy of
'structural' explanations. There is a large gap between this and the
description or 'measurement' of political cultural 'assumptions'. Elkins
and Simeon's title is, therefore, not an entirely accurate guide to the
content of their argument. Not only is political culture, as defined by
them, a 'cause in search of an effect', certain effects are also in search
of a cause. Far from depicting this longed-for coupling, Elkins and Simeon
show cause and effect poignantly passing each other by.
This argument merits such detailed examination because it contains,
in microcosm, two essential problems faced by the attempt to develop a
comparative theory of political culture: we will term them the problems
of the 'retreating cause' and of the 'retreating effect'. In political culture
research, we will argue, when investigation begins by specifying the effect,
it becomes difficult to discern the cause; and when it begins by specifying
the cause, it is hard to discern the effect. These generalizations need to be
illustrated with examples.
Elkins and Simeon's recursive method for identifying 'culture-bearing
units' is in fact a formal variant of a way of looking at political culture that
is quite common, namely treating it as a residual category, an 'explanation'
for variations for which no other explanation can be found. The variables
with which, in this usage, political culture is in competition are in general
more accurately and easily specifiable and measurable. This means that
they are more readily controlled, in the scientific sense. To be sure, the
variable 'nationality' can be controlled too, but doing so would contradict
the whole purpose of gathering cross-national data: to control for national-
ity is simply to undertake an intra-national, non-comparative investigation.
In comparative research, therefore, political culture will typically play a
68 The Concept of Political Culture

secondary role in the competition between variables. The role becomes not
just secondary but residual because of the fact that such research, when it
cumulates, tends to discover further socioeconomic or structural factors,
pushing political culture further into the background. The concept comes
to serve as a place-holder for an anticipated explanation in terms of more
easily specified factors, or as Fransisco Moreno has aptly if inelegantly put
it, 'A political phenomenon explained on the basis of the cultural forces
motivating it is often the same as stating that an explanation for it is not
available.' 12
Even as sophisticated a study of political culture as Inglehart' s, Chapter
2 made clear, manifests this problem of the retreating cause. The problem
accounts for the 'recessive' nature of the comparative element of the study.
Inglehart' s account of national differences in life-satisfaction levels, we
saw, illustrates this best. The fact that levels of happiness and life satis-
faction vary in a stable manner across nations was not so much explained
as restated, receiving scanty treatment compared with the 'sociological'
theory that 'aspirations adjust to circumstances'. The very term 'political
culture', we observed, is reserved in Culture Shift for use in such cases,
adding to the implication of its residual status.
Another good example of this mode of specifying political culture is
found in Geert Hofstede's study, Culture's Consequences. 13 His study is
not specifically of political culture, but his definition of 'culture' as 'the
collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of
one human group from another' 14 suggests an affinity with the comparative
studies we have been considering. It differs in that cultural explanation
is arrived at not by a progressive exclusion of competing factors in a
series of statistical operations but in a sense all at once, by examining
an environment in which all the relevant 'controls' are already present; in
other words, taking the second of the routes we noted above to be ways
of escaping the constraints of 'many variables, small N'. Hofstede uses
survey methods, but instead of trying to ensure statistical representativeness
of a whole population, he selects his respondents only from particular job
categories within a certain multinational corporation. He thereby controls
not only for general factors such as level of education, but also for highly
specific ones such as job description and position in the firm's hierarchy.
He assesses responses in four 'dimensions': 'power distance', 'uncertainty
avoidance', 'individualism' and 'masculinity' .ts From statistical analysis
of the data he derives a set of 'country clusters' or 'culture areas' . 16
Despite Hofstede's ambitious-sounding title, his conclusions are very
modest, not seeking to go beyond the highly limited scope of his evidence.
He argues for the 'cultural relativity' of organizations and the need for a
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 69

'cultural' or relativistic approach in organization theory. He makes no

argument for the more general relevance of his 'culture areas', and little
attempt to characterize these areas other than in the terms provided by his
data. Like Elkins and Simeon's 'culture-bearing units', his 'culture areas'
are formally or statistically derived. Now these findings are undoubtedly
suggestive in the sense that one is tempted to generalize beyond them and
speculate, for instance, about the sources of these distinct cultures, or their
other implications beyond the operation of a multinational corporation. One
might even be tempted to regard political systems themselves as universal
structures on the model of Hofstede's corporation, in the manner of David
Easton's 'systems theory', and to infer the effect on them of Hofstede's
culture areasP But as they stand, Hofstede's findings represent culture
purely residually. Thus we cannot assume that findings such as this will
necessarily cumulate, giving us a progressively clearer and fuller picture
of the political cultures of the world. That Hofstede's areas are 'country
clusters', not countries, gives us one indication of this, suggesting that
different sets of controls will yield different sets of 'culture-bearing units'.
Perhaps Hofstede's corporation is a stimulus that provokes responses that
vary at a certain level; other stimuli might provoke a different set of
responses. Each new stimulus, if this is true, would represent a new
experiment in cultural relativity. The mere juxtaposition of Hofstede's
and lnglehart' s findings, with their different levels of cultural variation,
should alert us against the assumptio!l of cumulation.
A more specific example of the retreating cause is provided in the field
of communist studies by John Miller. The variation for which he wants
to consider a political cultural explanation is the deviations of Kazakhs
and Baits from the norm among Soviet republican nationalities whereby
high levels of party membership are correlated with various indicators of
socio-economic development. The latter factors having in these deviant
cases been ruled out, a speculative explanation would point to 'cultural'
factors - the individualism of the Baltic Protestant tradition, the tribal,
nomadic traditions of the Kazakhs. But Miller points out that equally
plausible 'explanations' could have been adduced had the pattern been
reversed - Protestant political quietism, the politically engaged Islamic
tradition of Jihad. A better explanation relates differential membership
levels to different perceptions of interests, on the basis of differing
degrees of disadvantage for the titular nationalities in access to sought-after
professions. Such an 'index of perceived opportunity' does correlate with
the party saturation difference between Kazakhs and Baits. However it
fails in the case of a third group, the Uzbeks, who suffer even greater
disadvantage in career access than the Kazakhs, but show no corresponding
70 The Concept of Political Culture

excess of party saturation beyond what the socio-economic criteria would

suggest. Miller's explanation for this disparity is that the Uzbeks, being,
unlike the Kazakhs, a majority in their republic, 'feel relatively relaxed
about their position in Uzbekistan and feel no need to compete for their
place in it' .1s
Although this explanation forsakes the concept of individual self-interest,
and eliminates some putative structural explanations, it is some way from
vindicating comparative political cultural explanation. It focuses, as Miller
asserts, on the structural circumstances that help to maintain a certain
pattern of values, not on the values themselves. Political culture as an
independent cause drops out of contention at an early stage in this procedure
owing to the vagueness with which it is specified. The suspicion necessarily
arises that it could meet the same fate in many of the other cases in which it
has been employed in this residual manner, if they were subject to the same
careful examination.
A mode of investigation that might seem to escape the problem of the
retreating cause is that which has been termed 'inductive' or 'heuristic'.
This approach also begins with the observation of effects that seem to call
for a political cultural cause, but it does not arrive at the latter by a process
of elimination. It considers the central problem to be what Lucian Pye has
called the 'bountifulness' of survey data and the difficulty of showing that
attitudes that are revealed in surveys are actually the 'critical' ones in
determining the nature of politicallife. 19 Arguing from the assumption that
political culture gives meaning to the political system,2o Pye suggests that
research should proceed by hypothesizing orientations that would provide
meaning for a given political system, and then trying to find them. A
method similar to this has been used by Bradley Richardson in a study
of the political culture of Japan. Richardson's 'inductive approach', as he
calls it, 'seeks out the political culture patterns or attitudinal correlatives
of actual behaviour in a particular place, and endeavours to link identifi-
able correlations with socialization processes or historical experience' .21
Recognizing that this approach requires guidance in targeting 'attitudinal
correlatives', Richardson recommends developing hypotheses from extant
research.
The problem here, as Miller's discussion brings out clearly, is that
hypotheses, as well as attitude survey data, are bountiful. More than
one set of values and attitudes might be thought to provide 'meaning'
for the observed phenomena: how are we to decide between them? As
Glenda Patrick has put it, 'Pye ignores ... the mode or process for the
construction of the model and especially the whole issue of "validating"
the model itself.' 22 In fact, writers using this approach usually present
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 71

only one hypothesized 'meaning', for which evidence is then gathered

from the bountiful range available. If more than one alternative were
presented, then deciding between them would necessitate a more scientific
form of comparative study, with the consequences we are in the course
of describing.
The problem of the retreating effect, we suggested, arises when attention
is focused first on the supposed cause. What this rather vague statement
means is that the investigative effort is stimulated by a perception of some
fairly obvious and comprehensive distinctness or individuality. In its most
extreme form, this perception leads to the adoption of a holistic definition
of culture and hence to interpretivism, an outcome whose ramifications
will be discussed in the next two chapters. This outcome, we will now
argue, is in fact impossible to avoid; the attempt to avoid it, to continue,
in other words, to see political culture as a separable factor in comparative
explanation while beginning with an account of cultural differences, is
doomed. The more fully cultural differences are specified, the less easy
it is to separate them from their putative effect.
In one form this point merely reiterates the debate over the definition
of political culture that bas been prominent in theoretical discussions of
the concept among students of communist societies. Stephen White is the
best example of an analyst who wants to claim the advantages in terms of
evidential omnivorousness of 'thick description' while nevertheless adher-
ing to the comparative consonance/dissonance theory. This combination is
not feasible. Another example, more clearly illustrating the phenomenon of
the retreating effect, is based on a study of American political cultures by
Daniel Elazar.
Elazar's theory, first set out in his American Federalism: A View From
the States, describes three subcultures, which be labels 'individualistic',
'moralistic' and 'traditionalistic', and whose geographical distribution be
accounts for by migrations of the early colonial groups in which they
originated.23 What is interesting from our present point of view is not
that account itself, but a more recent attempt by Ira Sbarkansky to 'test'
its explanatory potency. Sharkansky constructed the three types as a scale
and located each state on the scale using Elazar's account of the types'
geographical distribution. He then tested the correlation of this scale with
'23 dependent variables that are likely correlates of political culture',
for instance 'percentage of voting age population voting for Governor',
'number of state and local government employees per 10,000 population',
and 'percentage of citizens' personal income that is paid in taxes to state
and local governments'. Fifteen of the twenty-three variables did indeed
'pass a test of statistical significance', and, moreover, many of these
72 The Concept of Political Culture

relationships were independent of socio-economic variations in personal

income and urbanism.24
Sharkansky' s is a careful statistical analysis using a simple typology
of political culture. Its deficiency arises, however, in the initial specifi-
cation of the typology, rather than in any point of detail. Elazar's three
subcultures are not derived from survey data but from observation and
interpretation. They describe differences. The problem lies in ensuring
that the differences that contributed to the original descriptions are distinct
from the ones held to be the 'effects' of these subcultures.25 Since Elazar's
original descriptions were somewhat abstract, we cannot tell exactly what
differences contributed to them, which makes it impossible to ensure the
necessary separation. The effects retreat from view as effects in proportion
to the fullness of the description of the cause. No amount of mathematical
sophistication can compensate for this deficiency.
That the comparative use of political culture is subject to the dilemma
of the retreating cause and the retreating effect has one quite obvious
implication. If neither cause nor effect can be given primary attention
without the other fading from view, the explanation that the two are not
in fact distinct presents itself rather forcefully. We will return to this claim
shortly.

CULTURE AND CONTEXT

An experience familiar to all academic students of politics is of the mention

of 'political culture' being accompanied by a deprecatory and apologetic
phrase such as 'for want of a better term'. Despite many times having been
pronounced dead by purportedly comprehensive and conclusive critiques,
the concept apparently refuses to lie down. The familiar situation is this:
the impact of a common event, a general trend, or a proposed policy is
being discussed, and almost ritualistic, but apparently necessary, obeisance
to national variation is made via the concept of political culture. It is
impossible, it would seem, to avoid the elementary observation that events,
trends and policies work out differently in different settings, an observation
that, as was pointed out in the Introduction, initially provoked the coinage
of the term.
The general appeal of the concept is aptly summarized by Judith
Shklar:

Political culture is a notion that serves policy-makers well even if

its scientific standing is poor . . . . Political culture as a concept
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 73

may not explain social conduct. but it can be used by an informed

political observer to devise intelligent questions about what the likely
and unlikely consequences of political actions will be. 26

A similar view is expressed by John Miller's suggestion that political

culture is more appropriately seen as a teaching aid than as a research
tool,27 and it is indeed likely that a large proportion of uses of the term
nowadays are in the introductory chapters of area studies and comparative
politics textbooks.
There remains, however, something disconcerting in the claim that a
concept whose 'scientific standing is poor' could 'serve policy-makers
well'. Policy-makers are, after all, usually confronting much more directly
than political scientists the brute facts of causal relations: they are not
people who will for long remain vulnerable to the seduction of metaphor
or a fashionable-sounding phrase. They are, in fact. a species of engineer.
Surely, then, the 'usefulness' to them of the concept of political culture is
inconsistent with its poor standing among political scientists. This section
will provide an explanation of this puzzling state of affairs.
The dilemma of the retreating cause and the retreating effect can be
diagnosed from another perspective as the result of conflict between the
two aspirations of behaviouralism, scientific explanation and territorial
expansion. The latter aspiration, reaching its maximum fulfilment in the
concept of political culture, comes to contradict the former. Political culture
was coined as a means of describing an important part of the environment in
which political systems operate, namely the attitudinal environment As a
behaviouralistic concept, it was to be construed as a variable. The problem
has been that territorial expansion has progressed beyond the point at which
it makes sense to regard political culture as a variable, a progression
facilitated by the concept of culture itself. If the utility of political culture
was suggested by the observation that the practice of politics differs widely
across nations, the attempt to limit the concept to one part of the context
that accounts for these differences was bound to be somewhat artificial.
When a political scientist labels that which leads to differential outcomes
after a common stimulus (event. tendency or policy) the 'political culture',
the implications within the behaviouralist framework of so doing are these:
that the same type of factor or factors, though of course with different
values, is found across the range of cases, affecting the outcomes in the
same types of ways; and that the same types of factor are applicable to
the explanation of outcomes across the range of possible stimuli. The
tension that is fundamental to political culture is that the idea of culture,
in amply and intuitively satisfying the expansionist tendency towards the
74 The Concept of Political Culture

broadening of coverage, offers itself as a label for the entire context,

without these commitments necessarily being met. We must suppose
that these connotations of the concept of culture were originally found
to be suggestive. But Almond, in 1956, uncorked a genie whose appetite
was far too voracious to be held in check by the feeble constraint of his
insistence upon the 'certain autonomy' of political culture from the 'general
culture' .28
'Sensitivity to context' has come to be widely recognized as a virtue in
political science and elsewhere since the 1950s. The concept of political
culture has been the political scientific manifestation of this virtue. From
the point of view of the scientific aspirations of behaviouralism, the
dilemma of the retreating cause and the retreating effect casts serious doubt
on the usefulness of the concept. But when 'political culture' is recognized
as being useful to policy-makers, what is in fact being commended is an
undefined 'sensitivity to context'. Similarly, it is helpful to writers of
textbooks, and increasingly to journalists, because of its implications of
comprehensive difference. No amount of scientific embarrassment is likely
to deter the use of such a bandy term.
Hofstede's investigation of 'cultural relativity' in a multinational cor-
poration is, of course, pitched at a level that is of the greatest interest to
policy-makers. If they seek to impose some stimulus that is closely related
to the one Hofstede considers, his findings might be of direct relevance.
But even if the stimulus is different, the fact that Hofstede bad any findings
of cultural relativity at all is significant. It demonstrates the need for
'sensitivity to context', which, at its broadest, involves not the expectation
of a specific variation at a specific level, but simply the expectation of
some variation, and preparedness for it. We suggested above that studies
such as Hofstede's do not necessarily cumulate; but if the policy-maker
approaches foreign countries and regions in the spirit of conducting a
similar experiment to test for cultural relativity, then whether or not the
results tally with existing research and thus contribute to a cumulative
description of political cultures, the requirement of sensitivity to context
will have been met. Thus political culture research may be useful less as
a set of findings for the policy-maker than as a model for his or her
conduct.

PROBLEMS OF COMPARABILITY

We may conclude this chapter, and our treatment of the comparative use of
political culture, by reviewing the various barriers to comparison in terms
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 75

of political culture that this and preceding chapters have exposed. We will
first consider three problems of comparability, which will be labelled
the problem of complexity, the problem of salience, and the problem of
indexicality, before discussing bow these and previously discussed issues
relate to the problem of the separation of culture and structure.
The problem of complexity is an exacerbated case of the problem of
'many variables, small N'. It is exhibited by Almond and Verba's The
Civic Culture, where, as we saw in Chapter 1, the sociological and the
comparative uses of political culture are in tension. The sociological use
develops a theory of democracy in which many factors, such as levels
of citizen and subject competence, a group-forming style of political
behaviour, and the notion of 'cycles of involvement', are combined.
Not only are many variables involved in this enterprise, but degrees of
correlation between some of them are held to be significant, giving rise, in
effect, to a second order of variation. We have seen bow this sociological
theory can be challenged on its own ground. but our point here is that the
comparative element of the study provides no refuge from such challenges,
since the possibility of useful comparison is eliminated by the complexity
of the phenomena to be compared. A theory of democracy such as this
is not validated by comparison of the sort undertaken by Almond and
Verba; all that is achieved by such comparison is to make clearer the
politicocentric relativity of the theory to the American and British cases.
The problem of salience also bas some manifestation in the work of
Almond and Verba and in other political culture studies that have used
their framework. It refers to the fact, to which Moshe Czudnowski
bas drawn attention, that politics and political objects themselves have
varying 'salience' across nations, which means that attitudes towards them
cannot be directly compared. 29 In their contribution to The Civic Culture
Revisited, Ann L. Craig and Wayne A. Cornelius give two examples of
this problem in relation to the measurement of Mexican political culture.
One is that Almond and Verba's measures of political knowledge are based
on questions that in the Mexican context would be somewhat esoteric,
owing to the regional nature of political conflict there. Another is that
measures of ability to influence political outcomes ignore the fact that,
in Mexico, inflpence is usually directed to the 'rule application' rather
than the 'rule making' stage.30 A point very similar to the latter one
bas been made in connection with the study of Soviet political culture.
Frederick Bargboom bad characterized Soviet political culture as 'subject-
participatory', a modification of Almond and Verba's typology designed
to draw attention to the combination of low levels. of 'subject competence'
combined with 'participation directed ultimately from the political center
76 The Concept of Political Culture

at the top of the [Communist Party] command structure' .31 Taking issue
with this characterization, Wayne DiFranceisco and Zvi Gitelman, on the
basis of emigre survey evidence, demonstrate the use of informal channels
and means of influence, such as the use of connections and bribery. Local
rather than state agencies were seen by the respondents as being more
responsive to these techniques, again marking the inappropriateness of
the Abnondian categories. 32 Outside the Abnond and Verba framework,
Richardson's 'inductive method' encounters the same problem. Regarding
one of the attitudinal dimensions he examines be notices that 'Ambivalence
may have quite different consequences in different countries as a result of
different backgrounds and varying intensities in both idealism and cynicism
that may not be reflected in our measures.' 33
Czudnowski's response to the problem of salience is to formulate what
be calls an 'index of salience' by which attitudes towards political objects
may be weighted according to the salience of these objects. The index
would thus provide a 'filter variable' enabling comparison to proceed.3 4
Such proposals, apart from applying the term 'variable' to categories
that are clearly not variables, and thus unjustly appropriating the term's
scientific aura, overlook the depth of the problem.35
Czudnowski' s quantitative talk of 'weighting', in particular, assumes
that differences of salience are merely differences of degree, whereas
we have seen that they can be qualitative, and involve differences of
the meaning of notions such as 'participation'. It is true however that,
when such differences have been identified, comparison can proceed
at a higher level, with 'levels' of participation being replaced by
'forms' of participation, for instance. Indeed, lnglebart's theory of
postmaterialism, for one, very much depends on such distinctions being
made. But it is not true that the mere recognition of the problem of
salience enables it to be overcome simply by some kind of statistical
adjustment. A theory of which levels of participation counted as an
independent variable would have different explanatory targets than one
in which forms of participation had this role; for the latter would not
simply be a more quantitatively accurate version of the former.
The problem of indexicality is a particularly severe form of the problem
of salience. In philosophical logic, 'indexicality' refers to phrases such as
'my hat', whose denotation is indexed to the utterer, and possibly to the
time and place of utterance also. Indexical responses to questions clearly
necessitate, on the part of the inquirer, an act of contextualization if they
are to be understood. We will use the term 'indexicality' in a somewhat
extended sense, to refer to responses that require a degree of contextual
interpretation that threatens their comparability. For instance, a response
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 77

that indicated a high level of participation in politics would, as we just

saw, need to be contextualized in order to make it comparable; we would
need to know whether the decision-making stage or the implementation
stage was the more usual target for participation in the context we were
studying. But suppose that response to a question refers to a specific event
or figure from, say, Mexican history. Then the problem becomes one of
indexicality. An even larger, potentially prohibitively large, amount of
interpretation is necessary in order to render such responses comparable.
Because of the difficulties presented by indexical responses, for com-
parative purposes questions are usually phrased in such a way as to avoid
them. But by the same token, indexical responses can yield the greatest
insight into the peculiarities of the context to which they refer, that is, to
which they are indexed. A good example from the research that we have
looked at is provided by Brown and Wightman's analysis of Czechoslovak
political culture. The surveys on which Brown and Wightman drew, on
'the relation of Czechs and Slovaks to their history', immediately suggest
indexicality. One of their key findings, that of Thomas Masaryk' s ranking
as the most esteemed figure from Czech history (among Czechs) is used to
demonstrate not only the failure of the government's attempt to eliminate
him from history, but also the prevalence, in 1968, of 'social democratic'
values. 36 With this claim some degree of comparability is achieved, but of
course arriving at it requires a large interpretive effort; one not, as we saw
in Chapter 3, invulnerable to challen6e.
'Indexical' measures of political culture, therefore, provide the richest
information but ipso facto require the greatest amount of interpretation and
are most subject to challenge. They provide a more substantive characteri-
zation of political culture than that yielded by more rigorously comparative
methods, which, we saw, in specifying political culture formally lead to the
problem of the rett:eating cause. Thus we find, even in The Civic Culture
and Culture Shift, repeated examples of ad hoc historical, and hence
indexical, explanations being inserted to account for otherwise unaccounted-
for national variations: an attempt to give substance to formally-derived
national political cultures. Such interpolations, whether concerning the
heritage of the Mexican revolution or the impact on Germany of defeat
in the Second World War (to give examples from each of these studies)37
are, by virtue of their indexicality, not testable comparatively.
Indexical descriptions or measurements of political culture, moreover,
bring to our attention the issue of the contestability of history and historical
symbolism, discussed in Chapter 3. This is an issue of a quite different
type to the problems of comparability that we have been discussing in
this section. It is not a methodological problem, but an ontological one.
78 The Concept of Political Culture

As such, it is a further manifestation of the fundamental issue unearthed

in this chapter: that of the separation of political culture from its supposed
explanandum.
By way of elucidating how political culture can be both a dependent
and an independent variable, Stephen White draws an analogy which is of
some interest here. The relationship between political culture and political
structure, he suggests, parallels that within Marxist theory between the
categories of superstructure and base.38 This analogy is, in fact, more apt
than he realizes, when we take into account the debate in Marxist theory
that the latter distinction has provoked. A contribution to that debate
by Raymond Williams throws light on our current topic. In Marxism,
the idea of temporal lag has been invoked in the explanation of the
relationship between superstructure and base, in particular the imperfect
correlation between them, just as cultural lag has been invoked in political
culture research. But Williams asserts that 'superstructure' was a .metaphor
intended by Marx to express relation, not separation, and that subsequent
usage which emphasized separation was indeed attacked by him. What
is damaging about this translation of analytic categories into substantive
descriptions, in Williams's view, is that it makes the categories seem fixed,
concealing their own internal contradictions. 39
In just the same way, the separation of culture and structure simplifies
the relationship between them and underemphasizes internal contradictions
within each. The hypothesis of cultuml lag, for instance, suggests that
the whole of political culture, originally a reflection of the whole of
structure, is left behind when the structure shifts, changing only at a
slower pace. But the East European examples of the reconstruction of
indexical values, and the multivalence of 'historical experience' that we
saw to be revealed by its use by contending political actors, suggest
both a more dynamic relationship between culture and structure and one
complicated by the cleavages within each. Historical experience and the
attitudes and values associated with it do not, it appears from these
examples, merely 'survive' en bloc; they are recreated to serve specific
purposes in political conflict That a historical fact has a certain meaning
in current politics does not mean either that all contemporaneous historical
facts are equally well remembered (which no one actually claims, although
the hypothesis of cultural lag would imply it) or that only one meaning can
or did attach to it.
Evidence that culture and its 'effects' cannot easily be disentangled
comes also from the sociological use of political culture that we have
been examining in tandem with the comparative one, especially from
its critical variant. In the latter, as we saw, cleavages in both culture and
 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 79

society are emphasized in several different ways. In some views the

utility of cultural consistency for the internal cohesion of the political elite
is asserted; in others, the nature of the civic culture as a 'mystification'
of elite hegemony. What these views have in common, whether or not
they are mutually consistent, is a refusal to represent political culture as
separable from political structure.
For reasons presented in this chapter, the comparative use of political
culture is likely to continue, and indeed to predominate, if not always in
the most scientific form, despite the inevitable difficulties it encounters.
The ultimate source of these difficulties is the reification of the analytic
distinction between culture and structure, which diverts attention from the
relationship between the two. So far, however, we have seen only the
symptoms of that relationship, and have diagnosed them only as problems
for the comparative use. In the following chapters, a more positive view
will be adopted, offering pointers and not just warning signs to future
political culture research. We will argue that the concept of political
culture contains the potential to transcend the dichotomy of culture and
social structure, a dichotomy which we have hitherto presented only as the
source of many of the deficiencies of existing uses of the concept Arriving
at that conclusion will necessitate turning our attention more directly to the
interpretive use of political culture, and particularly to what was termed in
the Introduction its idealist tendency and its phenomenological potential.
5 Political Culture and
Stalinism

If a large variety of ways of operationalizing the concept of political

culture is found within the behaviouralist idiom, the same is al1 the
more true within interpretivism. While the stringent scientific standards
of behaviouralism are not always adhered to in political culture research, at
least standards exist. Interpretivism begins, as we saw in the Introduction,
by denying the need for such standards. Accordingly, a wide range of uses
of political culture could be marshalled as examples of interpretivism, from
historiography as well as political science. But rather than beginning with a
broad survey, we will follow a procedure similar to that adopted in earlier
chapters, of looking in detail at a representative example. In this case,
however, we need to go further; we will examine a use of political culture
that to some extent has to be inferred and constructed from a number of
sources. The initial and main source for this use is Robert C. Tucker's
political cultural interpretation of Stalinism. However, the use we will
develop and assess goes beyond Tucker's in some ways and limits it in
others. Our purpose in so doing is twofold: to present interpretive political
culture research in its most persuasive light, and to distinguish it clearly
from the hybrid uses with which, the Introduction argued, it is often
intertwined, as it is in Tucker's work. Although vulnerable to criticism,
the interpretive use that we will develop is, therefore, far from being a
straw man.
One respect in which we will limit Tucker's analysis is to exclude his
explicit and implicit commitments to the project of comparison. He has,
for one thing, correctly observed that the activity of theorizing itself has
comparative implications. 1 For another, in one of his first contributions
to this field he observed that the typical use of the concept of political
culture had been comparative, and far from differing from that precedent,
suggested the formulation of the idea of 'Soviet political culture' as a
'paradigm concept' and the tracing of the 'diffusion' of this 'donor political
culture' to 'receiving political cultures' .2 We will also see that his analysis
sometimes includes implicit comparative claims. But our interest in Tucker
is in his elaboration of an approach to political culture which denies that
it is an isolatable phenomenon and instead regards it as a context for

80
 Political Culture and Stalinism 81

interpretation. In common with many of those who have used political

culture as an interpretive tool, Tucker declares a debt to Clifford Geertz
and his method of 'thick description'. Tucker, in turn, bas been widely cited
by political culture researchers in support of a 'comprehensive' definition
of the term. His own understanding of the implications of this use would
appear to prohibit the project of comparative explanation:

Might not the central importance of a concept like that of political

culture be that it assists us to take our bearings in the study of the
political life of a society, to focus on what is happening or not
happening, to describe and analyse and order many significant data, and
to raise fruitful questions for thought and research - without explaining
anything?3

There is, of course, a quite conventional meaning of 'explanation' that

would see it as tantamount to 'description, analysis and ordering of data'.
What Tucker must have in mind is the sort of explanation using political
culture that bas been criticized in previous chapters; explanation in which
political culture appears as a variable. Just what sort of explanation remains
possible when this bas been ruled out will be exemplified in the following
discussion and elaborated in succeeding chapters.

THE 'PREFIGURATION' OF STALINIST POLITICAL CULTURE

In the same article in which be endorses Geertz, Tucker makes use of

another anthropologist, Ralph Linton, and his distinction between 'ideal'
and 'real' culture. The notion of an 'ideal', we will see, is of central
importance to Tucker's analysis. However, the label, rather than Linton's
specific definition of it, is what Tucker borrows. Linton's 'ideal culture'
referred to 'consensus of opinion on the part of society's members about
bow people should behave in particular situations', as opposed to their real
bebaviour. 4 Utilizing the concept in this form would of course necessitate
finding evidence about the ideals held by society's members- but this is
just what is impossible for most of the period Tucker proceeds to discuss.
A major theme of our discussion, therefore, will be what sense of 'ideal'
Tucker bas in mind, and what its implications are.
Tucker's description of communist political culture begins with an
analysis of Lenin's revolutionary writing. He construes Lenin's Bolshevism
as a 'culture in the making', arguing that Lenin's What Is To Be Done?
82 The Concept of Political Culture

(1905) was not simply a treatise on party organization, as it bas usually

been considered, but in fact expressed 'an implicit design for the new
socio-political world, the party-state political culture' .5 Lenin's 1917 State
and Revolution asserted: 'only socialism will be the beginning of a rapid,
genuine, truly forward movement, embracing first the majority and then
the whole of the population, in all spheres of public and private life' .6
Lenin, according to Tucker, 'was putting into words the central, sustaining
myth of Soviet society, laying the foundation of Soviet Communism as
a culture. In the Leninist canon, to be a Soviet citizen was to be a
member of a goal-oriented all-Russian collective of builders of socialism
and communism.' 7 Thus communist revolutions are 'cultural revolutions',
'attempted transformations of national cultures' ;s in this respect they differ
from coups or palace revolutions. 9 Another idea central to Tucker's
analysis of Leninism is that of a 'movement'. A movement is, for its
participants, a 'culture', consisting of 'organizational structure, doctrine,
ideology, ritual, on occasion uniforms and insignia' .to Also of importance
is the idea of a 'sustaining myth', 'a notion or concept of that society as a
common enterprise' . 11 'In a certain sense the myth is the society; or to put
it otherwise, the society bas its real existence in its members' minds.' tz
Tucker argues that it was the comprehensiveness of Lenin's aspiration
to cultural revolution that placed him in opposition to the more class-
based position of Bolsheviks such as Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly
Lunacbarsky .t 3 Bogdanov emphasized the necessity and possibility of
radical change in the ideological or cultural superstructure (be used
the terms 'spiritual culture' and 'ideology' interchangeably). According
to Zenovia Sochor, he 'expressed dismay at the "startling tenacity" of
ideological forms that bad long since lost their meaning in the life
of society' .1 4 Lunacharsky's organization of radical artists, Proletkult,
announced similarly:

In questions of culture we are immediate socialists. We affirm that

the proletariat must now, immediately, create for itself socialist forms
of thought, feeling, and daily life, independent of the relations and
combinations of political forces. And in that creation, political allies
- the peasantry and the petty bourgeois poor - cannot and should not
control its work, t5

Several scholars have drawn the contrast between Lenin and these
opponents in terms of pragmatism versus radicalism. 16 Lenin's pragmatism
interacts with what Alfred Meyer diagnoses as 'a tendency in Marxist usage
to endow the term "culture" with a meaning of achievement or culturation
 Political Culture and Stalinism 83

reminiscent of the use which the Enlightenment made of it' .11 Thus, Meyer
asserts, 'The "culture" Lenin had in mind when he preached the cultural
revolution entailed technological skills, political maturity, and other aspects
of westernization.' Furthermore, 'The adjective "uncultured" was ... used
very often to characterize the rough-shod methods of Soviet and party
bureaucracy, its authoritarian degeneration and its corrupt abuses.' In
1927, Pravda was using the idea of cultural revolution in this sense as
a critique:

Industrialization - our general course - is unthinkable without ration-

alization. But rationalization, in its turn, is unthinkable without a raising
of the cultural level: both the cultural level of 'cadres' and the cultural
level of the masses. The demand to raise the cultural level of the
worker-peasant masses, the demand to carry out a broad and profound
'cultural revolution' in the country is evident: it is now really 'in the
arr.
. ' 18

But whether the emphasis is placed on the unorthodox non-class

comprehensiveness of Lenin's proposed cultural revolution, or on its
relative pragmatism, it is clear that at the time of these debates cultural
revolution remains just an idea in the minds of political elites, not an
actual social process. This implicit elite-level focus is maintained in
Tucker's account of the events of the 1920s. He writes of 'weighty
testimony' that 'the militarist, voluntarist political culture and mystique
of War Communism lived on [through the NEP period] among many
Communists' .1 9 Other writers, too, have stressed the cultural impact of the
civil war and War Communism on the political elite. Jonathan Adelman
refers to the isolation of the Bolsheviks, to their lack of national appeal
(in contrast with the Chinese communists who were allied with the largest
social class, the peasantry), and to the consequent greater role of the secret
police.20 Sheila Fitzpatrick has referred to the increasing importance to
the Bolsheviks of their Russian identity through the Civil War in general
and the Polish campaign of 1920 in particular, although she qualifies the
impact of the events themselves by noting their consonance with existing
Bolshevik principles, concluding that the Bolsheviks 'had the formative
experience they were looking for in the Civil War' .21
The NEP period is regarded by Tucker as a culture in its own right,22
and a model of gradualist reform that was available to Gorbachev and
his supporters.23 However, it is an ambiguous model, as is attested to by
Stephen Cohen's assertion that 'The atmosphere of relaxation fostered
in the country by NEP triggered an opposite course inside the party'
84 The Concept of Political Culture

- an 'uncertain economic policy' was concurrent with 'an increasingly

authoritarian, bureaucratic pattern of decisionmaking'. 24 At the same time,
Tucker asserts, the 1920s saw the 'breakdown of revolutionary culture',
post-Lenin disputes being best seen as 'divergent offshoots of Lenin's
Bolshevism as a culture' .25 Here we should pause again to ask what role
the idea of 'culture' is playing. It appears, once more, as if the debates
Tucker is referring to are debates over what ideal should be asserted. So
his use of the term 'culture' shades over the distinction between real and
ideal. Moreover, if the NEP was short-lived, anomalous and ambiguous,
does it even merit the denomination 'model', let alone 'culture'? Does the
interpretive use of political culture allow for a distinction between the two?
These questions will recur.

THE 'REALIZATION' OF STALINIST POLITICAL CULTURE

It is in the period after Stalin's consolidation of power in the late 1920s that
the comprehensive social movement Tucker sees as having been prefigured
in Leninism comes into existence. In Tucker's analysis, the collectivization
of agriculture, the drive for industrialization under the five-year plans,
and Stalin's attack, in the late 1930s, on the Party itself, are aspects
of the 'society in movement'. To avoid confusion, it should be noted
that in recent scholarship the label 'cultural revolution' bas tended to be
restricted to the period 1928-31. Largely under the influence of Sheila
Fitzpatrick, the outbreak in that period of radicalism in academia and of
attacks on 'bourgeois specialists' (the trial of several such in 1928 - the
'Shakhty trial' - was the trigger of this outbreak) bas come to be seen as
a 'class war' in which a new generation of radical Bolsheviks displaced
the residue of the old regime whose participation Lenin had deemed vital
to the success of the revolution. The ideas put forward in this ferment
similarly reflected the radicalism of Bogdanov and Proletkult. There was
talk of abolishing academia itself and of the merger of town and country,
education and industry (Fitzpatrick writes that 'these predictions were a
kind of running commentary on contemporary processes of institutional
disintegration and social flux' ),26 and a proletarianization and politicization
of education, including the appearance of the idea of the 'withering away of
the school' .27 In law faculties, Pashukanis' s critique of law as a regulator
of commodity exchange which would wither away under socialism became
prominent, and opponents were purged (as was Pasbukanis himself, more
conclusively, in the authoritarian reaction of the 1930s).28
Construing the phenomenon of cultural revolution mainly in terms of this
 Political Culture and Stalinism 85

'class war' and as an instance of rapid 'upward mobility', in Fitzpatrick's

phrase,29 would imply that when its 'excesses' were criticized by Stalin
in 1931, leading to an abrupt cessation of the activity of radicals, some
kind of normal, non-revolutionary condition was restored. That would be
to take the condition of academia and the activities of intellectuals as
representative of society at large, and also to construe 'radicalism' as the
preserve of left-wing Bolsheviks. But since 1929, when collectivization and
the First Five-Year Plan got under way, Soviet society had been convulsed
across its entire spectrum, and it would continue to be (not exempting
intellectuals and academics) after the 'cultural revolution' narrowly defined
bad been called off, the convulsion reaching into the upper levels of the
Party itself by the time of the 'Great Purge'.
In this broader, more Tuckerite, sense, the Stalinist cultural revolution
was characterized, in the countryside, by the elimination of the wealthier
peasants and by the impoverishment of the remainder, especially, though
not exclusively, the uncollectivized edinolichniki (individual peasant farm-
ers), through coerced procurement and punitive taxation. 'Impoverishment'
could result in starvation and death, or migration to the cities. By 1933
peasants had been denied mobility by the internal passport system. Influx
into the cities up to 1933 resulted in their 'ruralization', reflected in
high labour turnover and low levels of discipline, themselves provok-
ing further harsh responses from the authorities. 30 Conditions in the
cities were economically severe, and in the wmi<:place the institution of
edinonachalie (one-man management) gave managers autocratic powers
in the enforcement of discipline. The initial, already implausible, targets
of the First Five-Year Plan (1928-32) - which included increases of
250 per cent in industrial and 150 per cent in agricultural production3t -
were repeatedly and substantially revised upwards: the Plan, Mosbe Lewin
has said, was a plan in name only, in reality being an agglomeration of
implausible exhortations, falsifications and ad hoc responses to failure. 32
Throughout society, new forms of hierarchy were created or imposed,
having (as Fitzpatrick claims) a purely Stalinist, and neither Bolshevik
nor traditional cbaracter. 33 The scale of repression and terror, affecting
the peasantry, workers and the party and non-party intelligentsia, was also
novel, as were the tactics and technologies that facilitated it.
In the realm of the arts and sciences, following the 'cultural revolution'
of 1928-31, a more stable period set in; but that revolution bad facilitated
the extension of central control, and the stability was of a new type. In
science, fundamental assumptions were made to conform to the politi-
cal emphasis on rapid and comprehensive transformation, amounting, as
Tucker puts it, to the 'projection of totalitarianism upon nature' .34 Many
86 The Concept of Political Culture

tokens of this projection can be found, for example the supersession of

Darwinism by Michurinism (a doctrine that posited the adaptation of the
individual organism to its environment in place of adaptation by natural
selection) ingenetics, 35 and the shift to an emphasis on organic disorders
and the transition to Pavlovianism (again implying the malleability of
individuals) in psychology.36
'Culture as myth', Robert Williams writes of the avant-gardism of early
post-revolutionary Bolshevism, 'sought to transcend reality; under Stalin
culture as science sought to transform it entirely. '3 7 But myth was, in fact, a
salient feature of Stalinist politics also. In the doctrine of 'socialist realism',
promulgated in 1934, we can observe a further manifestation of the Stalinist
claim to totality. Max Hayward writes that the common denominator of
socialist realist canonical works was

their authors' attitude to the historical process. It did not matter whether
they were Marxist, or even whether they wrote from inner conviction
(some probably did not), as long as they presented the course of events
and the development of society in such a way as to lead the reader to
conclude that ultimate victory was certain.3s

Similarly, Katerina Clark argues that the central theme of socialist realism
in literature, underlying its 'biographical master plot' of heroic victory
against various forms of adversity, is the struggle between consciousness
and spontaneity. Through consciousness, often acquired from a mentor, the
hero is able to overcome the 'elemental', the spontaneous, which is repre-
sented in numerous ways, for instance by the forces of nature or by natural
symbols, or by ignorance, backwardness and other politically undesirable
phenomena. Additional, secondary, themes include ritual sacrifice, both of
the hero himself and of the personal, non-heroic aspects of his life, the
idea of society as a family, and (part of the developing cult of personality)
the appearance in the role of mentor of Stalin.39 The form of the socialist
realist novel was also distinctive. Clark relies on Bakhtin's theory of
the distinctness of the novel and epic forms of literature, and identifies
socialist realism as containing a preponderance of epic elements. 40 As
such, the genre is distinguished by the absence of self-consciousness (not
to be confused with political consciousness), an underlying heroic sense
of 'Great Time' to be compared with the present 'profane time' and, in its
fully developed state, by its complete resolution and lack of doubt and by
the hagiographic treatment of its heroes.
Literature, and the arts in general, thus provided through socialist realism
a mythic rendering of the movement towards communism that was actually
 Political Culture and Stalinism 87

taking place. Concomitantly, real political events had an obviously heroic

quality. Moreover, the sense of 'closure' of Stalinist politics, reinforced
by its co-option of science and indeed historiography (through a degraded
Marxist historical materialism according to which Soviet communism was
seen as the end point of world history), recalls Bakhtin's distinction of the
epic and the novel. Stalin's appearance as a character in many socialist
reallsl novels is sigrtificant in this respect No doubt it contributed to the
Stalinist cult of personality, but the cult, as Graeme Gill has argued, served
not just to glorify Stalin but as a direct channel of communication and
authority from the leadership to lower administrative strata, in a situation
where normal, hierarchical channels would have been overwhelmed. 4 1
Thus along with the politicization of myth marked by Stalin's appearance
as mentor in socialist realist novels, there occurred the mythicization of
politics: mass mobilization was effected not just through conventional
political means but also through mythic representations.
But although the Stalin period appears to offer support for Tucker's
broad conception of cultural revolution, in his writings on Stalinist politics
several new factors are introduced that complicate the political cultural
account Tucker is offering. One of these is his assertion of continuity
between Tsarist and Stalinist political practice. He sees Stalinism as a
combination of the 'culture' of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin's ambition
to absorb the whole of society into a movement and the 'Bolshevik mores
of War Communism', with the Stalinist elements of construction and
state building, themselves having precedents in the Tsarist period. Tucker
argues that the first phase of Stalinism, the frenetic period of the First
Five-Year Plan, served to absorb the peasantry (through collectivization)
and the proletariat (though rapid expansion of industry) into the state's
constructive purposes; and that the second phase, of which the Great Purge
of 1937-38 was a novel element, extended this process of the 'binding
of society to the state' to groups closer to the centre: the intelligentsia,
and the party itself. 42 Thus, 'the Stalinist revolution of 1929-39 yielded
an amalgamated Stalinist Soviet culture that, paradoxically, involved at
once the full-scale Sovietization of Russian society and the Russification
of Soviet culture' .43
Tucker's assertion of continuity between Tsarist and Soviet politics
is one of many such assertions, not all of them compatible or equally
plausible. Stephen White, for instance, despite asserting continuity, largely
ignores Stalinism,44 while Edward Keenan's thesis is that the true nature
of pre-revolutionary political culture was oligarchic rule, which was
'destabilized' by the process of industrialization, making Stalinism part
of an 'aberrant' period: 'Stalin's brief disturbance of that balance may be
88 The Concept of Political Culture

considered a vestige of the period of turbulence' .45 Both views clearly

contradict Tucker's claim that Stalinism represents continuity. 46
The usual basis for a claim of cultural continuity such as Tucker's
and its competitors, as we saw in Chapter 2, is the idea of cultural lag.
But this notion requires an analytic separation of culture and structure,
which Tucker in his theoretical preamble was careful to avoid. Perhaps
there remains in Tucker's account an implicit acceptance of the idea of
cultural lag, and if so his account is vulnerable to some criticisms that have
been made in previous chapters. However, the only mechanism of cultural
continuity about which he is explicit provides another of the distinctive
features of Tucker's account: the role of Stalin himself.
Tucker attempts to render an emphasis on Stalin's personality compatible
with his political cultural approach by drawing on the work of the 'culture
and personality' school of anthropology, by which cultural and personal
explanations may supposedly be assimilated. Whatever the fate within
anthropology of this now rather outdated perspective, its introduction by
Tucker is problematic. On the basis of Stalin's political 'coming of age' in
the period of War Communism, 47 Tucker argues that his personality was
the mechanism by which its 'Bolshevik mores' were combined with a Tsar-
ist heritage of state building with which Stalin identified himself. 48 This
emphasis on personality, an unsurprising one from Stalin's biographer,49
contains highly dubious assumptions. One is contained in the idea of
'coming of age'. Tucker does not provide any justification for its use from
psychology, and in view of the brevity of the period involved (three years,
when Stalin was aged 38-41), it would be surprising if any could be found.
An alternative justification might be that War Communism was the kind of
experience that would bring about a coming of age. This claim encounters
the objection that the other leading Bolsheviks do not seem to have been
similarly affected (despite their similarity of age), as the debates of the
1920s show. Although Stalin's personal role in the politics that go under
his name clearly should not be downplayed, Tucker's desire to account
for this role in terms of a somewhat underdeveloped psychologiCal theory
merely exposes his argument to obvious counter-examples. Therefore, this
part of Tucker's argument also needs to be set aside if we are to focus on
his interpretive use of political culture - his attempt to provide a 'thick
description' of Stalinist politics.
It is, of course, a somewhat ungenerous procedure to knock away from
the part of Tucker's argument we are most interested in, and will shortly
proceed to criticize, the props of his continuity and biographical claims. But
these, we have argued, are unsound props; and in any case we do not have
to follow Tucker's assimilation of what in fact are a number of quite distinct
 Political Culture and Stalinism 89

arguments. On the contrary, for the purpose of analysis it is necessary that

we do the opposite. We can, moreover, offer some compensation by way of
reinforcement of Tucker's argument that Stalinism marked the realization
of the Leninist ambition to incorporate the whole of society into a single
movement. This reinforcement takes the form of pointing out the ways in
which Tucker's analysis is consistent with others'. It is, firstly, consistent
with the theory of totalitarianism advanced by Hannah Arendt. For Arendt.
the idea of a 'movement' was also of central importance:

a movement ... can have only a direction, and ... any form of legal or
governmental structure can only be a handicap to a movement which is
being propelled with increasing speed in a certain direction .... [I]t is
not accurate to say that the movement, after its seizure of power, founds
a multiplicity of principalities in whose realm each little leader is free to
do as be pleases and to imitate the big leader at the top . . . . The direct
dependence was real and the intervening hierarchy, certainly of social
importance, was an ostensible, spurious imitation of an authoritarian
state. 5°

For Arendt, therefore, the idea of a movement leads to a distinctive view

of the resulting organizational form, which is in fact a form of permanent
disorganization. This view is echoed by T. H. Rigby, who argues that the
Stalinist political system bad an 'organic mode of operation' which differed
from the 'classical bureaucratic model' in featuring parallel hierarchies
and the blurring of roles, the irrationality and inconsistency of demands
and the salience of mobilizational methods. In such a situation, politics
becomes 'crypto-politics', masquerading as the performance of assigned
roles. Where a system is operating 'organically', Rigby asserts, its 'organi-
zational culture' can become crucial to successful performance, with, in this
case, the construction of communism in the role of all-embracing 'basic'
goal.51
These phenomena, however, manifest themselves only within the admin-
istrative mechanism. So far as society as a whole is concerned, Arendt's
portrayal makes use of the idea of 'atomization', a precondition of the
incorporation of society into a movement She argues that 'totalitarian
movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals' ,52
and a 'mass' can only be created from 'a highly atomized society whose
competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual bas
been held in check only through membership in a class' .53 Disorder
is thus exactly what the imposition of totalitarian rule demands and
creates:
90 The Concept of Political Culture

The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from

reaching the point where a new way of life could develop .... [other-
wise] totalitarianism would lose its 'total' quality and become subject
to the law of nations, according to which each possesses a specific
territory, people, and historical tradition which relates it to other nations
- a plurality which ipso facto refutes every contention that any specific
form of government is absolutely valid. 54

This passage indicates Arendt's conviction that totalitarianism is not only

novel but necessarily cuts itself off from tradition, a view that is clearly at
odds with Tucker's claim of continuity between Tsarism and Stalinism. Her
view, at the same time, closely parallels Tucker's claim of the 'binding' of
successive layers of society to the Stalinist state. Moreover, Arendt's idea
of 'atomization' receives some apparent support from observations such as
Lewin's that the chaotic circumstances of the First Five-Year Plan created
a 'quicksand society', and Daniel Brower's that 'In conditions of disorder,
the meaning that individuals give to power relations, to notions of truth and
good, to their very identity, can change rapidly and substantially.' ss
Thus, by bringing to bear other writings on totalitarianism and on the
social history of Stalinism, Tucker's perspective on 'cultural revolution'
may be amplified and refined. The link between social historical obser-
vations of chaos and Tucker's 'binding' is Arendt's claim that the very
prevalence of chaos exposes society to incorporation into a single move-
ment destined for a single all-embracing goal. In Tucker's terminology,
the destruction of regularity enables the ideal culture outlined by Lenin to
become real. Or, as Geoff Eley has put it,

the aspiration was in itself fundamentally important, because it deci-

sively ordered the public and private environment by certain repressive
principles of conformity and mobilized 'consent'. To neglect this overall
context- not just the coercive state, but the political culture of Stalinism
-is to discard the baby of analysis with the bathwater of the [totalitarian]
model. 56

Thus our amplified version of Tucker's political-cultural description

portrays the induction under Stalin of the entire society into a movement
whose chief characteristic (contrary to some versions of totalitarian theory)
was its direction rather than its structure. It argues that induction was
achieved, not only at massive cost, but through massive cost, to society.
Atomization and disorganization left individuals open to the assertion of the
total claim, to co-option into a social movement whose operating principles
 Political Culture and Stalinism 91

were rationalized by science and displayed as myth. Putting it another way,

the dichotomy of real and ideal was transcended through chaos. A cultural
revolution in the full sense that Tucker sees prefigured in Leninism was
achieved.

AGAINST IDEALISM

Since we have arrived at the political-cultural interpretation of Stalinism

just presented by abstracting somewhat from Tucker's analysis, it is worth
making clear where its appeal lies. Tucker, we have seen, essentially
makes two arguments in favour of seeing Stalinism as a culture. One
is an argument in terms of continuity or revival of culture, mediated
through Stalin's personality. The other places emphasis on the idea of
cultural revolution, and draws attention to the comprehensiveness of both
the aims of that revolution and its implementation under Stalin. The two
arguments are not entirely compatible, in that the second bas implications
of novelty that sit uncomfortably with the first. While this is a problem for
Tucker, for the present analysis it is less significant because we have chosen
to focus on the second argument. The weaknesses of the first have already
been described. The strength of the second, more consistently interpretive,
argument is its integrative power. By integrating the manifold ways in
which and massive extent to wbic!l Stalinism penetrated society, the
interpretation offers us what appears to be an enriched understanding of
the phenomenon.
Michael Waller bas argued that while Tsarist ideology may be termed a
'culture', because of a close connection between it and 'social memory',
Soviet ideology, as a 'project ideology', is merely imposed on society and
is unrelated to 'social memory': 'the results are susceptible to discussion
in terms of culture. For the programmes we dispose of another term that
allows us to preserve the distinction, and that term is ideology.' 57 Putting
aside the fact that one of Tucker's two arguments does assert a connection
between Stalinism and 'social memory', we can see that in light of the inter-
pretation we have presented, Waller's labels 'ideology' and 'programme'
seem misleadingly thin. They lack the descriptive richness of the idea of
Stalinist political culture, into which can be incorporated the complex
combination of organizational form and doctrine, scientific rationalization
and artistic mythicization to which Tucker and others have alerted us.
But the 'richness' of a description is a measure not just of the breadth
of its content. It is a measure also of our own response as analysts. Once
this important point is acknowledged, we can separate out an important
92 The Concept of Political Culture

question. To be sure, the political-cultural interpretation of Stalinism as the

realization of Lenin's cultural revolution is rich: it is thought-provoking,
it integrates many phenomena, and it seems to bring us as observers more
closely in touch with Stalinism in all its enormity. But is it true? Was the
Leninist ideal realized: did an ideal culture become a real one? Clearly, in
one sense, the ideal was realized: the 'total claim' was asserted against
the whole of society, and the whole of society was mobilized by it. But
is this the same as showing that the above description is a description
of the political culture of the Soviet Union in the Stalin period? Was
the meaning and effect of these comprehensive and radical exhortations
really to absorb the members of society into a single movement? Is this
description meaningful for the participants, or only for the political or
historical analyst? To suppose that only the latter is necessary would mean
that no further evidence is required. But if the former, then it is noticeable
that the evidence we have looked at so far is skewed somewhat towards
the agents of mobilization rather than its subjects. We have plenty of
information about the nature of the total claim, its institutional setting, and
its extension into the realm of the arts and sciences. We have information
about its objective effect on society at large. But for its subjective effect
- the question of the meaning of its assertion - we need to depend on
a theory such as Arendt's, that chaos and atomization in society led to
incorporation of the mass of the population. There is no real evidence about
the response of the masses. Despite the superiority of Arendt's theory of
totalitarianism over others in its more realistic depiction of organizational
chaos, in its analysis of the response of the population it is equally subject
to a criticism that Daniel Bell bas expressed thus: 'From such heights the
terrain of politics, its ridges and gullies, become flattened and the weary
foot-traveler finds few guides to concrete problems.' 58 We are, however,
in a position to take the perspective of the foot traveller, thanks to a recent
piece of political ethnography. 59 1t is a perspective that entails considerable
modification of the description we have been considering.
Vladimir Andrle provides an account which suggests the existence of
islands of regularity and normality within the chaotic setting of Stalinism.
Drawing on ethnographic studies carried out in the 1940s and 1970s in
a factory in Chicago for his conceptual framework, and on official Soviet
writings on factory organization as well as material such as remuneration
claims submitted by workers for his evidence, Andrle argues that, despite
the chaotic setting, local 'shopfloor culture' emerged in factories. It
involved the subjective experience of work, 'local knowledge' and 'a
sense of values around the self-consciousness of giving effort'. This culture
was 'the informally organized response of workers to the managerial
 Political Culture and Stalinism 93

organization of "industrial culture"' .60 Foremen played an important role

as 'bearers of shopfloor culture', colluding with workers in signing false
work claims.6t The contradictory demands of 'industrial culture' (whose
central feature was the organizational theory developed in the United States
by F. W. Taylor in the early twentieth century) and 'taut planning', in
other words the oscillating, confusing and potentially atomizing impact
of Stalinist policy, were projected on to the workers from the managerial
level. For this reason, shopfloor culture can also be seen as a response to
the chaotic conditions of Stalinism itself.62
More such studies would no doubt be advantageous, but from this one
alone we can draw an important conclusion: that however rich and com-
pelling an interpretation such as the one we have termed 'Stalinist political
culture', the question of its truth does arise. Hence the peril of idealism,
of substituting what is meaningful for the analyst for what is meaningful
for the subjects of analysis, is revealed. In particular, we discover from
Audrie's work that Arendt's thesis of 'atomization' and Tucker's of a
'society in movement' are overstated. Their deficiency is not just that they
overlook the existence of such islands of regularity. If Andrle's analysis is
correct, the very imposition of exhortations provoked 'shopfloor culture'
as a response. Far from atomizing, therefore, Stalinist policies at 'ground
level' may have led to the emergence of a culture: not the inclusive culture
of the Stalinist 'movement', but a form of counter-culture.
'Atomization' is a speculative diagnosis of the effects of imposing the
'total claim'. It is liable to inaccuracy because, in Bell's metaphor, of
the great height from which it is made, and because of a failure to
appreciate the possibility of a defensive reaction against it on the model
of the organization of shopfloor culture against the managerial elite's
demands, couched in terms of 'industrial culture'. This example raises
again, in microcosm, the question of the utility of the concept of 'culture'.
Andrle notes the inappropriateness of the managers' 'industrial culture',
which required stable conditions to facilitate the analysis of tasks, 63 to
the environment of 'taut planning' .64 But if 'industrial culture' was an
implausible set of demands drawn from an alien organizational theory65
that was quite inappropriate to the circumstances, in what sense was it a
culture? It is tempting to answer: in the same sense Tucker uses to justify
his more general concept of 'communist political culture'; that it contained
a cultural model or ideal.
However, we can say more than this. 'Industrial culture' was not only an
ideal, but was one that was continually asserted, its assertion comprising
a political process to which shopfloor culture was the response. But we
should also notice that the managers were themselves a group subject
94 The Concept of Political Culture

to pressure from both sides: from recalcitrant workers and from impa-
tient supervisors whose injunctions, under 'taut planning', were likely to
be contradictory. It might therefore be suggested that industrial culture
provides a basis for group self-identification whose extreme claim of
rationality is a response to the extremity of the irrational pressures to
which the group was subject.
This hypothesis triggers a similar one for the administrative elite as a
whole. In the coercive environment of Stalinism many such situations must
have arisen of power relations between groups giving rise to new bases for
group identification and for boundary-setting between antagonists. Since it
is implausible to see the entire coercive mechanism as flowing from one
person throughout society, it must be acknowledged that something has
to motivate the possessors of the means of coercion. Hence the role of
exhortation in terms of the 'basic goal' of communism. It can further be
suggested that the party and state aktiv, as the agents of mass mobilization,
were themselves most in need of mobilization. This view is reinforced
when we consider that they were the most exposed to 'deculturation', tnany
of them having moved abruptly into the expanding party-state machine and
rapidly up its hierarchy into vacancies created by Stalin's purges. 66
The extravagance of the total claim, the radical extent of social upheaval,
the heroic nature of political goals, the disorganization of the adminis-
trative mechanism, the direct communication offered by the Stalin cult,
scientific rationalization and literary mythicization may all be seen, from
this perspective, as interrelated aspects of an elite culture. This culture
is a real culture, not an ideal, in the sense of providing a basis for
self-understanding and group cohesion - a way of iife. To be sure, an
element of speculation is involved in this proposal, raising the possibility
that, like Arendt's speculations about atomization on the mass level, it will
be contradicted by detailed evidence. But, as already noticed, accounts
such as those of Arendt, Rigby, Tucker, Gill and Clark provide evidence
which addresses this elite level. The claim is therefore less vulnerable to
evidential contradiction than Tucker's inferences from the argument that
Stalinism marks the incorporation of the whole of society into a Leninist
'movement'. It allows us to retain the advantage of the integr11tive power
of Tucker's account without succumbing to its idealist excess.

POLITICAL CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY AFIER STALIN

The advantages of the interpretive use of political culture we bave been

developing may be pointed up by looking at some interpretive accounts
 Political Culture and Stalinism 95

of post-Stalinist Soviet politics, and by contrasting these with the political

culture research of comparative communism, already discussed in Chapter
3. In that research, a distinction has been drawn between 'official political
culture' and 'dominant political culture'. Official political culture is not
simply the political culture of officials: 'the status of the concept, "official
political culture" is different from political culture in the normal sense
of subjective orientation to politics . . . . In principle, ... it is easier to
identify ... since it represents the official standards for a political culture
which may, up to a point, be located in authoritative texts'. As such, it
overlaps with official ideology, though it includes features, such as the
leadership cult, which are not plausibly regarded as part of Marxist-Leninist
thought 67 Despite this qualification, the concept clearly has affinities rather
with Waller's 'ideology' or 'programme' than with Tucker's 'communist
political culture' - although it contains a 'model', it is one that resolutely
remains in the 'authoritative texts'. Indeed, the concept was suggested by
the findings, discussed in Chapter 2, of the failure of official attempts at
resocialization; the values failing to be inculcated being 'official', and
different ones surviving among the population. It might be argued that
such a concept, providing a thin description of Soviet ideology, is more
appropriate to the post-Stalin period, where, certainly, the full panoply
of interrelated assertions of the total claim was absent. But it should be
noticed that the implication of such a usage is that the question of the
meaning for the administrative elite of their exhortational activities became
an insignificant one; it is a usage that, unlike Tucker's, is consistent with
an assumption of complete cynicism on the part of officials.
That assumption did indeed probably approach closer to truth as the
'heroic' phase of communism receded into the past, to be replaced by the
more mundane task of 'consolidation' .68 But this does not mean that the
area of 'elite political culture' is lacking in interest or content. Investigating
it requires the techniques exemplified in this chapter- and is also subject to
their deficiencies.
The organizational confusion noticed by Arendt and Rigby has been
described also by Michael Urban in terms of a 'double bind', where para-
doxical injunctions such as 'obey the law, and fulfil the plan' reinforced
the power of the state in that the threat of physical force was associated
with an inability to avoid becoming subject to it. For Urban, this process
is not just an ideological one, but is facilitated organizationally by the
phenomenon of overlapping or dual control and the confusion of authority
relations represented by the nomenklatura system.69 Rachel Walker has
developed this analysis by examining the 'deep structure' or 'internal logic'
of a set of ideological texts, namely reports by the General Secretary of
96 The Concept of Political Culture

the Communist Party to a number of Party Congresses. The paradoxical

injunction inherent in this deep structure is the insistence on loyalty to the
principles of Marxism-Leninism as well as on their 'creative development':
'To defend the "purity" of Marxism-Leninism is to risk being labelled a
"pendant" [sic!] or a "dogmatist". To develop creatively it is to risk being
labelled a "revisionist" or some sort of "deviationist". To be seen doing
neither is to risk the accusation of not being Marxist-Leninist at all.' 1o
Urban has also written of a generalized 'ideology of administration'
which, while emphasizing 'rationality', 'efficiency' and 'effectiveness'
nevertheless supports certain class or power relations, since these notions
are not 'defensible in the face of abstract or reasonable standards' .11 Rigby
bas applied his perspective of the 'mono-organizational society' to the
post-Stalin period, continuing to emphasize what be calls, in a modification
of Weberian terminology, 'goal-rational legitimation' .12
Although having different emphases, these accounts are coherent with
the one we developed from Tucker's description in that they stress the
assertion of what in the Brezbnev era was less than a total claim, but
was still a very comprehensive one. They also share the deficiency of
Tucker's idealism in that they provide no evidence of the impact of this
claim: Rigby frankly notes that his approach 'differs sharply from the
frequently encountered view of political legitimacy which more or less
equates it with positive popular acceptance or support' .73 A critique of
Rigby by Christel Lane fixes upon this admission, charging that since 'The
goal of a communist society is too vague, abstract and distant to provide an
impetus for action for the mass of Soviet citizens' ,74 Rigby's 'goal-rational
legitimation' becomes a purely formal or legal matter.75
In depicting the Soviet Union as a 'mono-organizational society', Rigby
assumes the total absorption of society, exposing his argument to Lane's
criticism. But while some advantage might be claimed for characterizing
the Brezbnevite Soviet Union as a single vast bureaucracy, as a preliminary
means of distinguishing it from Western societies, this metaphor should not
be reified. To Soviet citizens, there was no doubt who was a bureaucrat and
who was not. Thus we may suppose that Rigby's analysis is most appro-
priately directed at real, not just metaphorical, bureaucrats: that is, at the
political elite. It was, moreover, against bureaucrats in this conventionally
narrow sense, and not against ordinary people, that accusations of 'revi-
sionism' or 'dogmatism' or the prohibition of 'metacommunication' were
directed. As with Tucker's political-cultural interpretation of Stalinism,
therefore, these analyses of post-Stalinist political culture should not be
given unlimited scope.
Just as for the Stalin period we needed to supplement the cultural
 Political Culture and Stalinism 97

description derived from Tucker with a speculation as to the significance

for society's members, at different levels, of the claims asserted - their
response - so in this case must these potentially idealist arguments be
supplemented. In the idea of 'bureaucratic culture' we can find at least
the beginnings of such supplementation. 'Bureaucratic culture' has been
given the narrow and somewhat Almondian definition of 'the pattern of
orientation towards the political system and towards political action on
the part of public officials' .76 In Soviet usage, Ronald Hill reports, the
concept acquired a somewhat pejorative meaning as a culture 'lacking in
sophistication and sensitivity' 77 whose 'level' needed to be 'raised' .1s But
the approach to bureaucratic culture that best meets our needs is that of
George Yaney (in fact an analysis of Tsarist bureaucracy). For Yaney,
bureaucracy is itself not a 'system', a fact which is revealed by the lack of
complete co-ordination of its parts. Instead, it is a 'state of mind': 'people
in a bureaucratic culture are dependent on system as a basis for conceiving
of their interests and rights' .79 In this view, the components of the 'ideology
of administration' do not only conceal the power of senior bureaucrats, they
provide the cohesion of the bureaucracy as an organization and a culture.
But Yaney's position has the advantage that it can account for conflict
as well as agreement, and hence can contribute to an explanation of the
persistent criticism of bureaucracy that Hill takes to be something separate
from (and indicative of the resilience of) bureaucratic culture. For Yaney,
monitoring of one organization by another 'can dramatize the contradiction
between legality and purposeful operation', and conflict is 'a necessary
element for binding the members together around a common habit of
appearing to be people who act rationally within a systemic framework' .so
Criticism, in this view, strengthens bureaucracy, since it reinforces the
meanings that underpin it. Or, the practice of monitoring by the party
and repeated attacks on bureaucracy (a feature of the Brezhnev period, not
just of Gorbachev' s 'reconstruction') 81 is itself part of bureaucratic culture.
It is no great leap from this perspective to seeing criticism of ideological
'deviation' as serving a similar purpose of group reinforcement.
Although a complex period of history and numerous approaches to it
have been considered in this chapter, its central concern has been with the
utility of the denomination 'culture' or 'political culture' for the purposes
of historical interpretation. We have approached that question by looking
in detail at one example of such a usage. The example has offered a
particularly rich field for theoretical discussion, though its construction
in the first place required that we substantially modify and supplement
the analysis of its main progenitor, Robert Tucker. The confusing mixture
of approaches in his analysis of Stalinism illustrates a deficiency that we
98 The Concept of Political Culture

are becoming familiar with iu political culture research. Iu the examination

of Tucker's writings, we have been led to see both the temptations and
the dangers presented, for the interpretive use of political culture, by
idealism. This danger, we will see, originates in 'thick description' itself,
and in Geertz's own ethnography there is a failure to maintain a clear
distinction between using cultural description as an interpretive aid and
positing its existence among and use by the ethnographic subjects. In
Tucker's analysis, the danger has been of conflating a description of an
ideal or model of culture, or the assertion of certain claims, with a real
culture, or the acceptance of these claims. The danger arises most acutely
because of the somewhat self-referential nature of the ideal: it aspires
to its own totality, so that it is tempting to see its total imposition or
comprehensive assertion as, ipso facto, its realization. While demonstrating
as fully as possible the ability of cultural description -thick description- to
broaden our understanding of Soviet, and particularly Stalinist, politics, this
chapter has nevertheless drastically qualified that description, eliminating
its idealist tendency by relating it to 'ground level' ethnographic findings.
To do this, it has been argued, is not to reduce 'communist political culture'
to a mere programme (to 'official political culture'), since relating culture
to concrete social processes enables us to assess more precisely the function
of the claims and goals, particularly in connection with the cohesiveness
and identity of various sections of the elite.
The nature of the argument by which these relationships have been
suggested is in essence phenomenological. What it means to say so is one
of the themes of the next chapter. Chapter 6 will also address from a more
philosophical perspective the confrontation between phenomenology and
thick description and the importance of insisting on the study of concrete
social processes.
6 Political Culture and
Interpretation

The use of political culture that was considered in the previous chapter
differed from those considered in earlier chapters both in its methodology
and its purpose. 1 Both method and purpose were interpretive. Contrary to
what Tucker at times suggests, interpretivism does not exclude explanation;
but it does exclude the particular type of explanation that bas been criticized
under the beading of 'comparative political culture research'. What sort of
explanation, then, is provided by the interpretive use of political culture?
Answering this question is the main purpose of this chapter. We will
approach the answer in a series of steps, some suggested by analyses
already considered and some introduced for the first time. As in the
previous chapter, not all of the writings we will consider explicitly use the
concept of political culture. However, within interpretivism it is artificial
to draw firm boundaries between culture and concepts such as ideology.
In the first stage of the argument of this chapter, a range of anthropological
sources will be used to illustrate what may be termed a broad 'movement
of thought', by which is meant a very general rearticulation of concepts and
explanations. The movement may in a preliminary manner be characterized
as one from an emphasis on culture to an emphasis on interests and
social structure. The relationship of this movement to the arguments of
preceding chapters is already apparent, and will be made clearer in the
following pages. In the second stage of the argument we will look at the
philosophical foundations of 'thick description', with the aim of exposing
both its idealist tendency and its phenomenological potential. Then we will
turn to a more thorough discussion of phenomenological social theory itself,
and the related ideas of social constructionism and ethnomethodology. The
phenomenological potential of interpretive political culture, we will argue,
offers a means of transcending the dichotomy of culture and interests, and
in more particular terms offers a resolution of some of the problems in
political culture research that we have already discussed.

CULTURE AS A RESOURCE

Robert Tucker's concept of political culture, we observed, was distin-

99
100 The Concept of Political Culture

guished from the one which had been current in political science by
drawing, as he saw it, more fully on the anthropological concept of culture.
Among other things, Tucker saw anthropology as licensing a definition of
political culture which included patterns of behaviour as well as attitudes.
Archie Brown has questioned Tucker's reading of anthropology in this
respect, and demonstrated its partiality, in a survey of recent definitions
of a more 'subjective' or psychological character.2 But conducting this
debate in terms of definitions distracts attention from the broader and more
important question of uses. Both because it has been taken to inform an
interpretive use of political culture - Tucker's - and because it will raise
important general questions, the anthropological use of 'culture' needs to
be investigated further.
Historically, as illustrated by the definitions surveyed by A. L. Kroeber
and Clyde .Kluckhohn in 1952 (162 of them), anthropology had tended
towards a holistic definition of culture, of which E. B. Tylor's (1871) defi-
nition of 'culture, or civilization' as 'that complex whole which includes
knowledge, beliet~ art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities
acquired by man as a member of society' 3 is the often-cited archetype. It
might be argued that such holism was provoked by the confrontation with
what seemed the comprehensively alien to which the fieldwork journey
led. But in recent decades, anthropology bas been subject to considerable
change. For one thing, it has undergone a degree of what might be termed
'deromanticization'. Numerous tokens of this can be found, such as
Derek Freeman's denunciation of Margaret Mead's ethnographic study
of Samoa. 4 the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries, in which
he expressed his frank doubts about the 'participant observer' methodology
that he introduced in his pioneering ethnography of the Polynesian islands, s
and various ironic descriptions by anthropologists of fieldwork as a 'cult'
and a 'fetish'. 6
More is in play than simply a change of mood, however; or rather that
change is itself the symptom of a deeper one. From the 1950s onwards,
the phenomenon of urbanization began to impinge on anthropology in
two distinct ways: as the traditional communities they had hitherto studied
began to be disrupted by urbanization, anthropologists turned to the study
of migration to towns; and, additionally, the application of anthropological
methods to the study of urban life itself - urban anthropology - began to
be developed.
In the face of these trends, a holistic conception of culture has proved
difficult to maintain. Urbanization, in both senses, involves rapid social
change, the formation of new social roles and increasing differentiation,
exposure to a vast range of new influences - phenomena that must come
 Political Culture and Interpretation 101

as a particular shock not only to the anthropological subject, but also to the
anthropologist him- or herself. In a review of anthropological approaches
to culture, Roger Keesing bas expressed this impact as follows: 'standing
amid the swirling tides of change and individual diversity, we can no longer
say comfortably that "a culture" is the heritage people in a particular society
share'. He rejects the holistic view distilled by Kroeber and Kluckbobn as
being too broad and diffuse. 7 On urban anthropology, Richard Basham and
David DeGroot write:

Urban research quickly alters the meaning of the concept of 'culture' for
the urban anthropologist . . . . One reason for the apparent disutility
of the traditional culture concept among highly urbanized populations
is the tremendous variety of discrete social roles which characterize all
cities and the fact that the complexity of role juxtaposition make [sic] it
extremely unlikely that significantly large segments of the community
will occupy the same roles and have the same understandings of their
positions to give even the idea of a modal cultural pattern consistent
utility. 8

Concurrently, anthropologists - notably of the 'Manchester School',

who, typically of British social antbropologists, 9 gave less prominence
to the notion of 'culture' and instead preferred to speak of 'ethnicity'
or 'identity' - paid increasing atte!ltion to the realm of the political,
specifically to the relationship between tribe and class among migrants
to towns. J. C. Mitchell and A. L. Epstein, for instance, have both studied
the persistence of tribalism in the urban settings of the Zambian copperbelt
Mitchell distinguishes between the structure of tribes and the category, with
only the latter, be asserts, surviving into the urban setting. to Epstein writes
of the 'military ethos' of the Bemba tribe surviving in terms of individual
pride and ethnic ranking between groups - a persistence explained by the
continued utility of the former values and identity, and the more general
importance to Africans of a martial reputation as a psychic response to
colonization. 11 Another anthropologist of the Manchester school, Max
Gluckman, in a more general survey, writes: 'the moment an African
crosses his tribal boundary to go to the town, he is "detribalized", out
of the political control of the tribe', a view he justifies as follows:

in the rural areas membership of a tribe involves participation in a

working political system, and sharing of domestic life with kinsfolk;
and ... this continued participation is based on present economic and
social demands, not merely on conservatism. On the other hand tribalism
102 The Concept of Political Culture

in towns is a different phenomenon entirely. It is primarily here a means

of classifying the multitude of Africans of heterogeneous origin who live
together in towns, and this classification is the basis on which a number
of new African groupings ... are formed to meet the demands of urban
life.l2

The line of thought suggested by Basham and DeGroot, and Keesing -

that urban life characteristically leads to the multiplication of social roles
-has been taken to its most extreme conclusion by Abner Cohen. His case
study describes the differential use of tribal categories by the Hausa and
Western Ibo in lbadan, Nigeria, and accounts for it by reference to differ-
ences in the socio-economic positions that members of each tribe assumed
upon migration to the city. He concludes that the preservation or loss of
autonomy by ethnic groups in urban settings is a function of the coincidence
or non-coincidence of ethnic cleavages with power or structural cleavages
in society.l3 Culture, in this analysis, is disaggregated and relativized:
cultures are defined by interest groups. Accordingly, anthropology must
shift its attention: 'the study of the informally organized interest group is
the key to the development of an anthropology of complex society' .14
An almost opposite situation has been described by Anthony Cohen in
his analysis of the 'symbolic construction of community', which empha-
sizes the creativity with which identities and boundaries can be marked. A
boundary, he argues, can be a physical frontier, but is in many cases purely
symbolic. Indeed, he argues that the erosion of the structural bases of the
boundary reinforces the symbolic ones. 15 This situation arises when, as in
the so-called American 'melting pot', modern Western society imposes its
new structures on the identities of traditional society. Cohen argues that, in
such cases, new 'alien' cultural forms may be used for traditional purposes.
For instance, among the Naskapi of Labrador, 'while Father Pieter feeds his
flock with the body ... of Christ, and gives thanks for the conversion of
the pagan, the Naskapi chew on the wafer and commune with the Caribou
Spirit. In doing so they contemplate the essence of Naskapi culture and
reaffirm the community's boundaries.' 16 He gives several further examples
of the reinforcement of identity in this way: Third World 'cargo cults',
African 'Negritude' (the use of alien art forms to express African content)
and African Socialism (the use of tribalism to justify the modem concept
of the one-party state).J?
While Abner Cohen argues that traditional forms express new identities
(roles in the urban social structure), Anthony Cohen's argument is that new
forms can express traditional identities. The difference is partly accounted
for by the fact that Anthony is describing communities which are coming
 Political Culture and Interpretation 103

to tenns with incursions, of one sort or another, of modem Western society

upon them, while Abner is describing the reactions of migrants from
traditional communities to modem Western society. In both cases, symbols
are used in the ongoing assertion of identity within an entire structural
setting, whether a new setting or an old one. In neither case are the criteria
of distinctness used directly emergent from the structural setting; they are
instead resources brought to that setting from elsewhere. In the fonner case,
they are ethnic or tribal categories which are the inheritance of an earlier
process of opposition and competition in which they emerged and served
as markers between traditional groups. In the latter, they are borrowed from
alien sources and creatively reinterpreted.
In the study of ethnicity, too, analyses that emphasize the structural
setting, and hence construe ethnicity as a resource to be used in the
struggle for power, have gained prominence in the last two decades.
In a seminal article, Nath<m Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, reflecting on
the persistence of ethnic identification in modem American society - the
inappropriateness, in other words, of the 'melting pot' metaphor by which
the supposed assimilation of immigrants was expressed - attribute it to the
use of ethnicity in the pursuit of group interests. I&
It would be absurd, of course, to represent the above short summary
as an account of the recent development of the discipline of anthropol-
ogy in its entirety. But in these examples a distinct and not altogether
unrepresentative movement of thought can nevertheless be traced. It
is a movement away from regarding culture as an all-encompassing
context, in which people are unavoidably and to some extent unwittingly
embedded, towards regarding it as a 'repertoire' or 'resource' - a range
of meanings, symbols and identities that are in some sense available
for use, and may be voluntarily selected from, on the basis of the
requirements of new situations. This movement not only suggests a
degree of alienation of culture from society, but also, as Abner Cohen's
example makes most explicit, places at the centre of the explanatory effort
these situational requirements, or what might generally be referred to as
interests. It is a movement, we will say, from 'culture-detennination' to
'interest-detennination'.
Glazer and Moynihan make the point that 'one reason that ethnicity has
become so effective a means of advancing interests is that it involves
more than interests'. This point might seem only to indicate that the
'instruments' of ethnicity happen to be particularly persuasive ones, but
the authors further claim that ethnicity facilitates organization into groups:
'It is as a group that its struggle becomes not merely negative, but positive
also, not merely against the nonns of some other group, but in favour
104 The Concept of Political Culture

of the already existing nonns of its own.' 19 Here we meet an important

point of resistance to the movement towards interest-detennination: the
hint that group formation is not wholly a product of the objective situation.
A further suggestion as to the source of the excess of content of ethnicity
over interests is suggested by Epstein's discussion of 'collective identity',
of which a 'sense of history' is a major component. 20 Anthony Cohen's
emphasis on boundary-setting forsakes culture-detennination in showing
that culture is not a phenomenon that persists by itself; but his focus on
creativity does not by any means entail the irrelevance of culture as a
basis for group cohesion. Even Abner Cohen's most extreme statements
take the form of recommending an extension of anthropological attention
to interest groups rather than the handing over of this area of research to
political scientists, which would suggest that some distinctive perspective
is to be obtained from the anthropologist. But what is the nature of this
perspective?
Anthropology, in abandoning its original holistic view of culture, has
found itself in a disciplinary crisis of confidence, and has sought help
from political science in the form of the latter's analyses of structurally or
situationally-determined interests. Was the original opening to anthropol-
ogy by interpretive political science mistimed and misplaced? To pursue
this question further, we turn to the anthropologist of choice of interpretive
political culture research, Clifford Geertz.

GEER1Z ON CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY

Among Geertz's writings, of particular influence upon interpretive political

culture research has been his idea of 'thick description'. For the purposes of
answering the questions just posed, and the broader question posed in this
chapter, it is worth delving further than has usually been done in political
culture research into the philosophical sources of this idea.
Geertz' s elaboration of thick description is itself influenced by Weber's
verstehende Soziologie and by Wittgenstein's argument about the publicity
of meaning, but draws specifically on the work of Gilbert Ryle, whose coin-
age the term is. Thick description is illustrated by Geertz with the example
of a wink. While a wink may be described in terms of certain bodily
movements - 'thin' description - an adequate description would involve
specifying whether the movements were voluntary, what their intention
was, what social conventions and cues governed their interpretation by
the audience and so on. Only such thick description would successfully
identify what was going on. 21 In other words, behaviour, while it can be
 Political Culture and Interpretation 105

described in terms of its 'objective' manifestations, cannot usefully be so

described. Geertz's assumption is that the point of describing behaviour is
to understand it. Hence the point of anthropology is to understand, in this
manner, the whole range of behaviour that is typical of a society: 'Finding
our feet, an unnerving business which never more than distantly succeeds,
is what ethnographic research consists of as a personal experience; trying
to formulate the basis on which one imagines, always excessively, one
bas found them is what anthropological writing consists of as a scientific
endeavor.' 2 2
The latter stage - the stage of 'formulation' - is where the concept
of culture is invoked. Culture, in this view, is therefore merely the
extension and elaboration of the normal process of coming to terms
with puzzling phenomena: it is 'not a power, something to which social
events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is
a context, something within which they can be intelligibly- that is, thickly
- described' .23
Thick description, in this account, is primarily a method. Elsewhere, in
the course of his well-known account of the Balinese cockfight, Geertz
elaborates further on this method, assimilating the cockfight to a text:
cultural analysis, be says, is 'in general parallel with penetrating a literary
text ... one is faced with a problem not in social mechanics but in
social semantics'. But apart from the justification already offered for
thick description, that it assists the ethnographer in self-orientation, a
further justification is offered here for regarding the cockfight as a text,
namely the role that, Geertz argues, it plays in the self-understanding of
the Balinese: 'Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretative: it
is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves
about themselves . . . . Attending cockfights and participating in them is,
for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education.' 24
Thus, it appears, the reason why cultural description enables the eth-
nographer to find his or her feet is that it is in some form part of the way
that the ethnographic subjects view the situation. What is apparent right
away is the possibility of idealism: the projection by the ethnographer of
the cultural interpretation on to the subjects: the conflation of what makes
the situation intelligible for the ethnographer with what makes it intelligible
to the participants. Just this error, Jonathan Lieberson asserts, has been
committed by Geertz in this case:

it is one thing to claim that devotees of the cockfight attribute deep

significance to it because it serves as an opportunity to express and
dramatize their individual status conflicts and rivalries; it is another to
106 The Concept of Political Culture

describe the cockfight as a 'commentary' by the Balinese on the social

order and organization that makes these conflicts possible.

There is, he asserts, 'a lack of clear and cogent evidence for [Geertz's]
conjecture about the "native point of view" of the cockfight' .25
Already, then, we can observe a pattern with which Tucker's political-
cultural description has made us familiar: an idealist failure to provide
adequate evidence about the perspective of the subjects of cultural analysis,
This is likely to occur when it is the ability of the analyst to come to
understand the situation that is regarded as the primary aim, which
is just what Geertz's account of thick description asserts. With this
aim, the possibility arises that culture will turn out to be what Roy
Wagner has termed a 'mediation': 'a way of describing others as we
would describe ourselves' .26 The threat of idealism is therefore endemic
to thick description. This does not mean, however, that the sin need always
be committed. Geertz's failure to provide evidence about the subjects' own
view of the situation, as well perhaps as his overly specific claim about
what kind of view we would find if such evidence were available, allows
the charge of idealism to be made; but his commitment to an explanation
of the interpretive method in terms of observable phenomena at least offers
the possibility of being redeemed, which would vitiate the charge, in just
the same way that ground-level ethnographic findings enables the idealism
of the Tuckerite thick description of Stalinism to be overcome.
Let us recall that the appeal of that description lay in its integrative
power; its apparent richness compared with competing concepts, par-
ticularly 'ideology'. But the fact that the Stalinist 'total claim' ramified
through so many realms of meaning - politics proper, popular culture,
the arts and sciences - threatens to seduce the analyst into confusing the
comprehensive assertion of the claim with its realization. Ground-level
ethnography enables this temptation to be resisted. However, this did not
force us back to the 'thin' description of a body of purely fonnal claims,
perhaps cynically espoused, floating above an indifferent society. We
argued that the integrative description of Stalinist political culture applies
pre-eminently to the administrative apparatus. Thus, 'ideology' would still
remain an inadequate descriptive term for the meanings contained in
Stalinist political culture - unless, that is, we choose to interpret that term
in a somewhat broader fashion. Such is, indeed, the purpose of another of
Geertz's essays that has been widely quoted outside anthropology, namely
the appropriately titled 'Ideology as a Cultural System'.
In this essay Geertz is concerned to rescue ideology from the
simplifications that he alleges it has been subject to in treatments of it since
 Political Culture and Interpretation 107

Mannbeim. What he calls the 'interest' theory follows most directly from
Mannbeim's critique of ideology: taking what Geertz calls 'pathological'
instances of ideology such as German Fascism as its paradigms, it makes
the well-known assertion that ideology is merely a screen for interests.
The somewhat more sophisticated 'strain' theory attributes various social
functions to ideology. Geertz groups these under four headings: the 'cathar-
tic' function, whereby ideology serves as a vent for social frustration; the
'morale' function, whereby it provides moral support in the face of chronic
difficulties; the 'solidarity' function, whereby it helps to knit a social group
together; and the 'advocatory' function, whereby it presses an agenda upon
the wider public consciousness.27 Discarding the interest theory on mere
empirical grounds, Geertz takes issue with the strain theory not in terms
of the social stimuli to which it points, but for its failure to describe the
formulation of ideology and to examine how ideology can come to have
these various expressive functions. His argument is that ideology is invented
by political actors, especially in the context of unfamiliar conditions, as a
means of elaborating, often in a non-literal or metaphorical manner, a route
through the unfamiliar territory. 'It is a confluence of socio-psychological
strain and an absence of cultural resources by means of which to make
sense of the strain, each exacerbating the other, that sets the stage for the
rise of systematic ... ideologies.' 28 But this new theory is not so much
a replacement of the 'strain theory' as a supplementation of it The new
element is an emphasis on the construction of ideology in particular political
conditions.
Geertz's account is somewhat skewed by his explanatory target in
this essay, which is the development of radical ideologies in the 'new
states' of the post-colonial period. Like the theorists he is criticizing,
he risks construing one form of ideology among many as paradigmatic.
The unfortunate effect of this for our present, more general, purposes is
to overemphasize cases of ideological innovation. However, once we
diagnose the cause of the imbalance, we are in a position to bypass it,
and to attend to the general implications of Geertz' s essay.
These implications can be seen, for example, in an analysis of political
thought of the Jeffersonian Republicans in late-eighteenth and early-
nineteenth century America. Lance Banning's study of The Jeffersonian
Persuasion contains the following definition:

By 'ideology' I mean the more or less coherent body of assumptions,

values, and ideas that bound Republicans· together as it shaped their
common understanding of society and politics and lent a common
meaning to events. I use the word in reference to a constellation
108 The Concept of Political Culture

of ideas - and not a fonnal 'theory' - which made it possible for

members of the party to perceive a pattern in the happenings around
them, to define a group identity in terms related to that pattern, and to
sketch a course of action that would make the pattern change. 29

Explicitly drawing on Geertz, Banning here presents a use of the term

'ideology' that relates it to group identity in much the same way that we
saw culture being related to group identity in the previous section. 30 Thus
while our anthropological examples led us to an emphasis on identity and
boundary, and on the dynamic nature of culture and the role of invention
and reinterpretation, Geertz's conception of ideology as a cultural system
does the same for the former term. There is, perhaps, some ground for
arguing that ideology should be distinguished as more formalized and
elaborate than culture. But Geertz's argument helps us to look beyond
content and instead to notice the dynamic nature and etiology of ideology,
as well as culture. It invites us not to represent ideology or political culture
as some already existing set of values, whether held by the elite or the mass
of the population, but to investigate in detail the circumstances of their
creation and modification.
We have now reached the point at which it is necessary to investigate
the philosophical basis of the use of 'culture' and associated concepts that
we have been tracing in several disciplinary settings. This will enable us
to spell out the nature of the explanation offered by such an interpretation,
and to distinguish it more clearly from the form of explanation in which,
as Chapters 1 to 3 argued, political culture has normally been embedded.
That philosophical basis lies in phenomenological social theory.

PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

The original problem of phenomenology was the explanation of the process

by which the immediate elements of perceptual experience (colours,
shapes, boundaries) are understood as distinct objects, distances and
movements. It is therefore a philosophy of the attribution of meaning
and form to experience, considered as a natural human response to
experience.31 The extension of this perspective to the analysis of the social
world was first undertaken by Alfred Schutz. Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann's elaboration of Schutz's position provides a convenient entry
to the subject of phenomenological social theory.
Their account begins by reasserting the fundamental phenomenological
 Political Culture and Interpretation 109

claim that, within some extremely broad constraints imposed by physiol-

ogy, 'man constructs his own nature'. The manner in which this occurs
begins with 'habitualization': 'Any action that is repeated frequently
becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy
of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that
pattern .... [H]abitualization makes it unnecessary for each situation to
be defined anew, step by step.' Habitualization can in principle occur in
the case of a solitary individual. The next step in the theory is to introduce
a second individual. The result is 'typification', whereby each perceives
the habitual nature of the other's action as representing a type or role.
Moreover, each assumes the other to be engaging in the same kind of
thinking, resulting in reciprocal self-typification. When a collectivity of
actors is envisaged, the set of typifications comprises an 'institution'. All
of this results from the need for economy of effort, from the advantage to
be gained by taking things for granted. 32
The origin of this view in the theory of perception is made apparent by
Schutz:

From the outset [the object of perception] is an object within a horizon

of familiarity and pre-acquaintanceship which is, as such, just taken for
granted until further notice . . . . The unquestioned pre-experiences
are, however, also from the outset, at hand as typical, that is, as carrying
open horizons of anticipated similar experiences.

Schutz arrives at a similar account of typification and self-typification.

'In defining the role of the Other,' he writes, 'I am assuming a role myself.
In typifying the Other's behaviour I am typifying my own, which is
interconnected with his, transforming myself into a passenger, consumer,
taxpayer, reader, bystander, etc.' 33
The second phase of phenomenological explanation is an account of
the inheritance of meaning; in other words of the separation of meaning
from its original sources. The development of this second phase in
Schutz's account begins with the model of face-to-face interactions. In
order to communicate, two individuals have to overcome their differ-
ences in biography and perception of the surroundings. They do this
through two 'idealizations': the 'idealization of the interchangeability
of standpoints' and the 'idealization of the congruency of the system
of relevances'. Together these comprise the 'general thesis of reciprocal
perspectives'. This thesis 'leads to the apprehension of objects and their
aspects actually known by me and potentially known by you as everyone's
knowledge, [which is] conceived to be objeclive and anonymous' .34 Thus,
110 The Concept of Political Culture

for Schutz, the 'detachment' of meaning from specific social situations is

what facilitates social interaction. Berger and Ludemann arrive at a similar
conclusion by drawing attention to the role of memory, spealdng of the
'sedimentation' of experiences, whereby they 'congeal in recollection as
recognizable and memorable entities'. When this occurs intersubjectively,
the experiences are ready to be 'objectivated' in a sign system, such as
language, and thus become 'readily transmittable' .35 Human beings come
into a world of existing meanings, consisting of types, roles, 'formulae'
(Berger and Ludemann's term) and the 'stock of knowledge' (Schutz's
term). Or, as Geertz has put it somewhat similarly, revealing his debt to
phenomenology, any particular individual finds 'significant symbols'

already current in the community when he is born, and they remain,

with some additions, subtractions, and partial alterations he may or
may not have had a hand in, in circulation after he dies. While
he lives he uses them, sometimes deliberately and with care, most
often spontaneously and with ease, but always with the same end in
view: to put a construction upon the events through which he lives,
to orient himself within 'the ongoing course of experienced things'.
[John Dewey's phrase]36

The relationship of phenomenology to thick description, which is hinted

at by Geertz's invocation of the Balinese view of the cockfight as justifi-
cation for his own account of it, has been brought out in a discussion by
Schutz of Weber's verstehende Soziologie. Schutz criticizes the abstractly
methodological manner in which Verstehen, the notion that social science
takes the form of 'understanding', has been conceived by social scientists,
arguing that it is 'primarily not a method used by the social scientist, but
the particular experiential form by which common-sense thinking takes
cognizance of the social world'. Verstehen as a method is only the
implication, therefore, of the fact that the objects of social science are
conscious; are beings who, when they are studied, have already engaged in
the task of interpretation. Social actors operate with 'constructs' with which
they interpret social reality; thus the social scientist creates 'constructs of
the second degree' in the process of observation and explanation. 37
Phenomenology thus contributes to the methodology of Verstehen or
thick description an explanatory component an explanation of the origins
of social meaning, and hence an explanation of the utility of the interpretive
method. Essentially, because 'culture', in the form of an assemblage of
emergent typifications, is a creation of social actors tbemselves, it becomes
of use to the investigator in reaching an understanding of their behaviour.
 Political Culture and Interpretation 111

What we have called the two 'phases' of phenomenological explanation

are distinguishable only in the abstract. The situation of two people forming
'typifications' in the complete absence of existing meanings never occurs:
it is an abstraction, like the 'social contract' of liberal theory. But just as
that latter notion structures our understanding of the real social arrange-
ments supposedly justified by the imaginary contract, so the idea of the
construction of meaning is embedded in the Schutzian concept of 'stock
of knowledge at hand'. In conceiving of that knowledge as objective, social
actors push into the background the fact of its constructed nature, but it is
important for the analyst to keep that background condition firmly in sight.
Failing to do so leads to an implausible claim of culture-determination.
For instance, Berger and Luckmann assert that the origin of meanings can
become unimportant, and that 'the tradition might invent quite a different
origin without thereby threatening what has been objectivated' .3s The
suggestion that 'tradition' itself, not social actors, creates meaning is a
claim of culture-determination. It is also meaningless.
Thus, although phenomenology allows and accounts for 'inherited'
meaning, that is for the fact that social actors conceive of meaning as
objective, it makes the fundamental claim that any such conception of
objectivity is necessarily provisional. In fact, the activity of construction
of meaning is continuous. Evidence for this has been provided by the
sociological school of ethnomethodology, which has gone so far as to
argue that no commonly accepted 'culture' or set of background con-
ventions exists, and instead that one has to be continually constructed
in individual social encounters. Demonstration of this claim was the
purpose of Harold Garfinkel's 'disruption' experiments, in which he and
his students would violate established conventions of social interaction in
order to test the effects. Contrary to the claim that social life is predicated
on pre-existing common understandings, Garfinkel found that interaction is
resilient to such disruptions; that, in response to them, various negotiations
and circumnavigations usually occur.39 Disruption experiments are, from
the point of view of phenomenology, necessarily imperfect attempts to
replicate the formation of 'typifications': they demonstrate the provisional
nature of existing meaning.
It is, of course, an often-noticed characteristic of ethnomethodology that
its studies are almost a parody of detail and small scale - one famous
example concerns the sequence of contributions to the first five seconds of
telephone conversations. 4 °From this kind of basis it is notoriously difficult
to regain the level of analysis that political culture is concerned with.
Indeed the claim that there is no need to do so is part of the programme
of ethnomethodology- hence its disparagement by mainstream sociology.
112 The Concept of Political Culture

But for our purpose, studies at this intimate level do serve to show how fun-
damental is the application of the phenomenological idea of construction.
Another of the central figures in ethnomethodology, Harvey Sacks,
was the pioneer of a subfield of sociology that has become known as
'conversational analysis'. Sacks's own interest in the detailed examination
of conversations was in establishing rules for 'tum-taking'; but the methods
he introduced, such as the detailed transcription, codification and study
of tape-recorded conversations, have been used also in less technical
investigations, for instance in the investigation of the social construction
of memory. Social psychological interest in the phenomenological idea of
'construction', invoking the methods of conversational analysis, has led to
the proposal of the theory that memory is not an attribute or activity of
individual minds, but the product of a collective effort at reconstruction.
David Middleton and Derek Edwards have illustrated this theory with
several examples, including the analysis of a conversation in which the
details of a film were reconstructed by students in a process of negotiation
and adjustment. They conclude, 'Collective versions of past events are
available as grounds for justifying current and future action; and because
they are so "useful" it is quite ordinary to find them being reconstructed
and contested.' 41
Phenomenology offers a clearer perspective on the deficiencies of
culture-determination by showing how meanings are in principle anchored
to the detailed and concrete processes of their creation; that their 'objectiv-
ity' is a provisional assumption that may break down in conditions of dis-
ruption, exposing to view their constructed nature. Culture-determination
overstates the resilience of that assumption of objectivity, and hence the
stability of meanings. It is no coincidence that culture-determination within
anthropology has been brought into question by processes and events that
may also be seen as 'disruptions', on a somewhat larger scale than those
created by Garfinkel and his students. In a social setting disrupted, for
instance, by urbanization, social meanings do not simply press froward
under their own steam, as they might mistakenly have been taken to do
in the earlier stable setting. Social actors can instead be seen grasping for
meanings as they seek to understand and reorient themselves within the
new situation.
Does phenomenology, then, simply endorse the movement from culture-
determination to interest-determination? Grounds for thinking so might be
implied simply by its critique of the former. It might further be argued
that meanings, once 'objectivated', are available for use as a resource and
that, in disrupted settings, it is interests that account for the uses that are
made of them, as ethnographic findings such as Abner Cohen's would
 Political Culture and Interpretation 113

suggest. But to draw this conclusion would be to underestimate the radical

extent of the claims of phenomenological social theory. Phenomenology
does more than challenge the 'givenness' of values, history and memory
- though these are radical enough claims. In its analysis of typification
it asserts also the constructed nature of social roles, hence of the entire
social structure, and hence of the interests that flow from it. Interests,
from the phenomenological perspective, are no more primordial and no
less constructed than culture. While culture is the medium of understanding
the social environment, interests are the medium of acting within it, but this
does not mean that either can be specified in advance of the other.
Of course, that is a somewhat abstract claim. The phenomenological
denial of the 'givenness' of any part of the social environment gives
way, for the purpose of any particular sociological investigation, to a
more limited assertion that some part of that environment is the product
of social construction. In order for such an investigation to take place, the
assumption must be made of a range of 'givens' that are external to the
investigation. If, for instance, we are investigating the contribution of a set
of party polemics to the construction of a group identity, we would not be
directly concerned with the more fundamental question of the source of the
detailed factual recollections that would be a part of such polemics. This
phenomenological issue would be set aside. What the founder of phenom-
enology, Edmund Husserl, called the 'natural attitude', the common-sense
perception of givens by which we orient ourselves in the world, cannot in
other words be suspended tout court -in phenomenological terms it cannot
be 'bracketed' in its entirety, at any rate for the purposes of sociological
investigation. For those purposes, what is in essence a fiction of solid
ground must be established, from which an investigation exposing the
plasticity of some set of meanings may be launched. But that any particular
investigation will in this way rely on a set of 'givens' does not invalidate the
phenomenological insight that all such givens are provisional. Therefore,
while any particular piece of phenomenological investigation may appear
to make assumptions consistent with culture- or interest-determination, the
perspective of phenomenology continues to make a fundamental challenge
to the notion that interests and social structure exist independently of
meanings, or vice versa.

PHENOMENOLOGY AND POLITICAL CULTURE

Despite its apparent abstractness, phenomenological social theory bas some

very concrete implications both for the research discussed in this chapter
114 The Concept of Political Culture

and for political culture research. It makes the positive contribution

of answering the question posed in this and the preceding chapter;
namely, to what sort of explanation does an interpretive use of political
culture contribute? It also reinforces our earlier critique of political culture
research, in ways that will shortly be explained.
We have seen that Clifford Geertz's reliance on phenomenology is
considerable. To be sure, his own account of the methodology of thick
description distracts attention from that influence. It emphasizes the role
of the ethnographer in the elaboration of a cultural 'context', and thus
makes it seem that culture is an abstraction from the observable events.
But Geertz also, in the application of the method, relates it, though as it
happens not with much evidence, to the interpretive practices of the par-
ticipants themselves. His so doing strongly recalls Schutz's argument that
interpretive sociology- in particular Weberian verstehende methodology
- is only the methodological implication of the fact that its subjects have
already engaged in the task of interpretation; their social life is facilitated
by 'constructs' or 'typifications', making the sociologist's task one of
developing 'constructs of the second degree'.
Geertz's account of the cockfight, we are now in a position to see,
inadequately brings to bear the resources of phenomenological explanation.
This is not only for the reason already mentioned, Geertz's lack of attention
to the 'native point of view', but for a reason well expressed by William
Roseberry. Roseberry has argued that in order to justify a claim about
the function of the cockfight, Geertz would have to elucidate not just its
'reference' to status conflicts, but its exact relationship to status conflict,
that is, its involvement in the process of status formation: 'The cockfight
has gone through a process of creation that cannot be separated from
Balinese history . . . . A text is written; it is not writing. To see culture
as an ensemble of texts or an art form is to remove it from the process
of its creation.' 42 Geertz's interpretive analysis of the cockfight as a text,
in other words, treats it objectively, for all Geertz's commitment to thick
description. Thick description in the full, phenomenological sense would
involve showing how the meanings that it exposes are constructed and
negotiated.
Thus one important feature of research that fully brings to bear the
resources of phenomenological explanation is its strongly empirical nature.
This is what enables the phenomenological potential of political culture
research to counter the idealist tendency, whose deficiency consists chiefly
in its inattention to concrete evidence for its rich, integrative and thought-
provoking- and hence seductive- thick descriptions. We can now make
some clarifications of the argument presented in Chapter 5. The idea
 Political Culture and Interpretation 115

of atomization is itself a phenomenological one: it is a hypothetical limiting

case, where irregularity reaches such a level that meaning, and in particular
social cohesion, is destroyed, exposing individuals to absorption and
integration on the grand scale of Stalinist construction. This hypothesis
does what Geertz demands of thick description - it helps us to find
our feet when confronting the social upheaval cataclysm of Stalinism.
But the hypothesis is, nevertheless, refuted by the counter-example of
shopfloor culture - not a hypothesis but a finding, and one that is entirely
consistent with the analysis of culture exposed in our anthropological
survey. Our discussion of Stalinism also argued that 'Stalinist political
culture' - the 'total claim' of incorporation into the heroic construction
of an industrial state, reinforced by the arts and sciences - was a real
culture, not just an ideal, for its own agents, who were most exposed
to it by the recurrent and profound irregularity of their position. The
culture provided, it was argued, a basis for their own continuance and
functioning as a social group. In this argument the overlap between political
culture and ideology may be observed, as indeed it can in the more specific
case of the managerial organization of 'industrial culture' as an expres-
sion of regularity against the highly irregular setting of 'taut planning'.
But what also needs to be stressed is the way in which phenomenology,
despite its implications for empirical research, casts doubt on the kind of
empirical research that has been characteristic of non-interpretive uses of
political culture. The following passage from Schutz, while hardly pellucid,
repays examination:

What we call the world of objective meaning is ... abstracted in the

social sphere from the constituting processes of a meaning-endowing
consciousness, be this one's own or another's. This results in the
anonymous character of the meaning-content predicated of it and also
its invariance with respect to every consciousness which has given it
meaning through its own intentionality. In contrast to this, when we
speak of subjective meaning in the social world, we are referring to the
constituting processes in the consciousness of the person who produced
that which is objectively meaningful . . . . The world of subjective
meaning is therefore never anonymous .... 43

Here, Schutz is drawing attention to one of his central themes, the twin
claims that the social world is perceived as 'objective' - his version of
the 'natural attitude' -and that its objective meaning is, nevertheless, the
product of an ongoing, if normally unrecognized, activity of construction
and reconstruction. We can readily observe that political culture research
116 The Concept of Political Culture

in the behavioural idiom, whether comparative or sociological, also makes

a distinction between 'subjective' and 'objective'. What is important,
however, is that the two distinctions are not parallel. Political culture
in the behavioural idiom has been defined, from Almond onwards, as
'subjective', but the meaning of this has been 'psychological'. This is not
Schutz's meaning. From the phenomenological perspective, these 'subjec-
tive' data- values, recollections of history and the like- have been wrongly
construed in political culture research as if they were objective. The use of
the attitude survey, the ultimate instance of the assumption of anonymity,
is the prime indication of this. For phenomenology, 'subjectivity' implies
awareness of the continuous processes by which objects and actions are
endowed with meaning. Phenomenology insists that, while the subjective
is construed as objective by social actors, facilitating social interaction, this
construal is provisional. Social actors take the objective as 'given' (that is
what the term 'objective' means in phenomenology), but for analysts to do
so exposes them to a range of potential errors.
These errors are just the ones we exposed in Chapters 1 to 4. The idea
of cultural lag, which lies at the root of many of them, is an example of the
analytical objectification of meaning. Again, it needs to be distinguished
from the claim made in the second phase of phenomenological explana-
tion that meaning may become detached from its original sources. The
difference lies in the provisional nature of the latter claim, which in the
notion of cultural lag is completely obscured. Two major problems result.
Lacking an aetiology of meaning, the cultural lag hypothesis lapses into
equivocation in cases such as those discussed in Chapter 2, where political
culture presents itself as both an aspect of modernization and a context
for it. Failing to note that the objectification of meaning is provisional,
the hypothesis is unable to deal with what in Chapter 3 we termed the
'multivalence of history': the occurrence of contention over the value
to be given to historical recollections, as well as their content. That
in communist Eastern Europe 'constructions' of historical experience -
indeed of memory itself- were serving purposes of group identification, in
particular against history-denying Soviet rule, is clear. The idea of 'Central
Europe' is a good example of what is an apparently factually incontestable
field - geography - being invaded by constructs of a transparently political
nature. A phenomenology of geography could no doubt present many more
examples.
The issues raised by the movement in anthropology from culture-
determination to interest-determination, as well as both the idea of Stalinist
political culture as an elite culture and the claims of the critical sociolo-
gists that the 'civic culture' may best be seen as a source of cohesion
 Political Culture and Interpretation 117

for the political elite and a means of preserving its dominance, also
merit a phenomenological response. The essence of this response is the
phenomenological denial of the duality of culture and interests. However,
the implications of this denial need to be brought out in much more detail.
We have already hinted that a phenomenological perspective on political
culture suggests the role of political culture in the formation of group
identity, wbicb is a more 'political' use of phenomenology than can be
found in Schutz's writings. This line of thought needs to be pursued
further. Moreover, mention of 'elite culture' brings into play an important
question that also merits further discussion: bow are the apparently more
discretionary and self-conscious 'inventions' and 'mystifications' in wbicb
political and intellectual elites engage to be fully incorporated into a
phenomenological analysis? Pointing to the porousness of the boundary
between political culture and ideology is far from a complete answer.
These questions suggest that we have as yet only begun to expose the
phenomenological potential of political culture research. The project is
continued in Chapter 7.
This chapter bas argued that the nature of the explanation offered by the
interpretive use of political culture is phenomenological. Phenomenological
social theory is a very abstract set of claims, but its attention is focused
very concretely on matters such as common-sense knowledge and identity.
It demands a posture of doubt as to the fixed or given nature of any of the
social phenomena it may be used to study. In particular, it precludes the
comparative politics conception of political culture as a set of attitudes and
values that may be specified in abstraction of their own social context. At
the concrete level, phenomenological social theory is characterized by an
insistence on detailed investigation of the process of the construction of
meaning - something that furthermore distinguishes it from an idealist
and purely hermeneutic focus on culture as an orienting device for the
investigator. As we have seen, some writings on culture in general have
made use of such methods and assumptions, but it is clear that for the most
part political culture research bas not. In this regard it bas failed to exploit
the most useful potential of the concept of political culture.
7 Political Culture and
National Identity

There are several reasons why it is appropriate at this point to shift attention
to the topic of national identity. The most important of these is that doing
so provides a test of the usefulness of the phenomenological perspective
developed in the preceding chapter - indeed, as will become apparent, a
particularly severe test. The nature of the test will be to see in what way
a phenomenological perspective contributes to the theory of nationalism,
which bas recently been an arena of lively debate. Before that, however,
some other reasons for turning to the investigation of national identity may
be mentioned. The most obvious of these is that, since The Civic Culture,
national identity bas been seen as a central component of political culture.
The unreflective way in which it was invoked by Almond and Verba
bas also been characteristic of later research. For instance, Brian Girvin
proposes that political culture be split into three levels: the 'macro-
level', consisting of a 'core' of national identity and rarely questioned
'absolute presuppositions'; the 'meso-level', consisting of long-term but
nevertheless contested political 'rules of the game' (such as 'Tbatcberism');
and the 'micro-level', at which 'normal political activity', such as elections,
occurs. 1 The theory which he develops from this basis relates the three
levels, but it is noteworthy that national identity is explained only by
reference to the supposed necessity of a 'sense of belonging'. More than
this, we might suspect, needs to be said about the 'core' of political
culture.
A further reason for turning to national identity concerns what was
termed in Chapter 4 the 'indexicality' of some descriptions of political
culture. Examples of indexical descriptions abounded in Chapter 3, which
argued for the contestability and multivalence of historical symbolism.
National identity, it is easy to see, is an indexical component of political
culture par excellence. We will see that it is also a contestable one. Thus
by examining it we can advance a phenomenological understanding of the
issues raised in those earlier chapters, exposing both the significance and
the source of indexical descriptions of political culture. We will begin
by discussing the possibility of a phenomenological approach to national
identity and the problems it would face. Then theoretical debates in the

118
 Political Culture and National Identity 119

field of nationality and nationalism will briefly be surveyed. Finally, we

will turn to two case studies, selected not for their typicality, but because
in the specific nature of their atypicality they serve as pointed illustrations
of the utility of existing approaches and of the one we are developing.

OUTLINE OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO NATIONAL

IDENTITY

The applicability of the approach developed in the preceding chapter to

the study of national identity is not immediately obvious. Indeed, just to
reach the point at which the specific problems presented by this application
become apparent requires further theoretical elaboration. We begin by
considering the relationship between culture and identity, already touched
on in Chapter 6.
We noticed, in that chapter, that the holistic definition of culture was in
part a response by the anthropologist to his or her confrontation with the
comprehensively alien. Putting aside the question of definition, this fact
suggests that in anthropology, the first use of the concept of culture has
been to assert a certain range or degree of difference between societies.
Hence our tendency in ordinary speech to use the word 'culture' to refer
to societies themselves, rather than to one of their attributes. Claude
Levi-Strauss has expressed this as follows:

What is called a 'culture' is a fragment of humanity which, from the

point of view of the research at hand and of the scale on which the
latter is carried out, presents significant discontinuities in relation to the
rest of humanity . . . . This is true as a limit; however, anthropologists
usually reserve the term 'culture' to designate a group of discontinuities
which is significant on several of these levels at the same time.2

But if the concept of 'culture' is a 'response' of the anthropologist; if

its application is relative to 'the research at hand'; if (in Geertz's phrase)
its purpose is to help ethnographers 'find their feet', we are left with only
indirect guidance as to the true nature of culture: its nature, that is, 'on
the ground'. This is a very general way of characterizing the problem of
idealism that is faced by interpretive anthropology, and, we have seen,
by the interpretive use of political culture too. In Chapters 5 and 6 we
tried to sunnount it by advocating the study of concrete social processes.
Our question here is, are discontinuities that are apparent to the observer
significant also for the observed, and if so, in what way?
120 The Concept of Political Culture

The phenomenological perspective begins not with the interpretive effort

of the ethnographer but by supposing that that effort is necessitated by the
interpretive practices of the participants themselves. From this perspective,
the establishment of identity and boundary becomes a salient issue; it is
a matter not of discontinuities perceived from outside, but of boundaries
created from within. The idea of 'typification', which, as we saw, lies at
the heart of phenomenological social theory, is closely related to that
of identity. Social roles are, indeed, identities. Whether identities are
individual or collective is, again, a matter that is determined not by
the observer but by the situation on the ground. 'Bystander', to use one
of Schutz's examples, is a momentary and individual identity or role;
'shopfloor worker', to use our example from Chapter 5, is an enduring and
collective one. More than the breadth of our ethnographic focus determines
these distinctions.
A culture, for instance 'shopfloor culture', consists of values, knowledge
and skills. These attributes, since they provide criteria of distinctness
between one group and another, for instance between workers and man-
agers, may also constitute expressions or markers of identity. At the
point where a significant difference occurs in one of these dimensions,
a boundary between one group and another may be indicated. Whether a
boundary is established at such a point is an empirical question. Identity
therefore involves not only the presence of such distinctions but their use
as markers; hence it involves the explicit self-consciousness of a group as a
group. Identity in this sense is the core, or carrier, or symbol, of the culture.
Because of its explicitness, identity may be seen as the 'cutting edge' of
a culture: the 'edge' in that identity expresses the boundary, and defines
inclusion and exclusion; a 'cutting edge' in that the identity is not a mere
formality, but structures conflict with groups beyond the boundary.
Group identity in its simplest form establishes a 'we/they' boundary. In
some situations, no more specific content is required; for instance, in the
isolated and primitive communities studied by early anthropologists. But
in most cases the 'we' and the 'they' are explicitly named. The idea that
identity involves an act of naming is important for the analysis of national
identity. For it opens up the possibility, not immediately apparent in the
simpler phenomenological example of shopfloor culture, that different acts
of naming may be made in competition. Although, in that example, the
identity follows fairly directly from the criteria of differentness of the
culture, this, we shall argue, is not always the case, and a disjunction
between the two is made possible by the assertion of identity being a
conscious act.
A first attempt at extending the phenomenological perspective to national
 Political Culture and National Identity 121

identity would be to argue, by analogy with 'shopfloor culture', that

national identity emerges from and in turn contributes to a process of
opposition between nations, and that just as the discontinuities encapsulated
in the idea of shopfloor culture are drawn upon as criteria of boundary, so
the differences we refer to with the term 'political culture' provide a basis
for the assertion of national identity. There are several related reasons why
this analogy might seem a little too neat. The first concerns scale. The size
of nations means that the development of group self-consciousness in them
is not the straightforward matter it may be among workers on a shopfloor.
A nation, as Benedict Anderson has put it, is an 'imagined community' .3
Put another way, nationality is not for the most part a social role, constantly
being used and reinforced as one moves through social life; it is for most
of the time a background condition. Even when nations are at war, the
confrontation between them is for much of the population an imaginary
affair, represented in the media. This is true even in a 'total war', such as the
Second World War, when civilian populations are at risk and hence are in
some sense participating; the technology that puts them at risk, in this case
aerial bombing, also makes more anonymous the 'opposition process'.
Secondly, nations are not only large, they are also highly internally
differentiated. The significance of this banal fact is that the 'imagining' of
the national community is not a spontaneous act of the whole population;
it is to some extent initiated and controlled by certain sectors of the
population, specifically the intellectual and political elite. The sense, by
all accounts quite real, that the British population in the Second World
War was ready to fight 'on the beaches and in the towns' was instilled
by Winston Churchill, with the help of the BBC; it did not simply emerge
from the experience of war.
Thirdly, the role of the act of naming which we have argued is necessary
to the formation of group identity is potentially more complex in the case of
nations. As a conscious and voluntary act, it is contestable. In other words,
there may be political struggle over the very name to give a population, or
more generally over its allegiance, the meaning of national symbols, and
the facts of national history.
As the first step towards overcoming these barriers to a phenomenologi-
cal approach to national identity, it is worth pointing out that the differences
between this case and our paradigm case are, though considerable, differ-
ences of degree. Shopfloor workers may be able to see themselves as a
community in a direct manner, but in many cases, even conceivably in
the Stalinist case, and certainly in more familiar Western ones where trade
unions have some independence, an imaginary component is present too.
What is imagined is the existence of similar groups, in similar situations,
122 The Concept of Political Culture

having similar relationships with the authorities. What may follow from
this is 'collective action', such as striking, in which the collectivity is
itself imagined. Secondly, it is likely that even at this local level, some
people will take on the role of leaders in the opposition process, and
some of followers, leading to some degree of internal differentiation. The
leaders, we might expect, would try to represent the history and scope of
the opposition process in such a way as best to meet their goals. Finally,
even in this example it is not bard to visualize competing acts of naming;
'shopfloor workers' versus 'builders of communism', or 'employees', for
instance.
Thus in developing a phenomenological approach to national identity,
we encounter difficulties whose resolution is important for our whole
enterprise, not just at this level. They can, however, be resolved, as the
arguments and examples below will show. We will see that the case of
national identity does indeed require greater attention to elites and greater
scope for invention, but that approaches that press these emphases too far
have deficiencies which only a phenomenological approach can repair. We
will need to examine debates in the theory of nationalism and specific cases
in order to establish this claim.

TilE THEORY OF NATIONALISM

As Eric Hobsbawm, one of its major contributors, bas pointed out, the last
two decades have seen a burgeoning of theoretical debate on the subject of
nationalism and national identity. 4 To do full justice to this debate would
require more space than is available here; nevertheless it is necessary to
form an idea of its outlines for the purpose of framing our discussion.
Broadly speaking, the debate has concerned the question 0f the novelty of
nations. The view that they are of ancient lineage has been challenged by a
number of provocative syntheses claiming in various ways that nations are
constructs of comparatively recent origin. That view, which has become a
new orthodoxy, has, however, itself been challenged. The debate recalls the
'movement of thought' from the holistic view of culture to its being viewed
as a resource, which we recorded in the preceding chapter.
Although several versions of the 'mobilizationist' position, as it bas been
called, have been put forward, we will concentrate on the most forceful,
that of Ernest Gellner. Gellner's argument is that industrialization and
modernization require the creation of national educational and communica-
tions systems as 'breathing chambers' for industrial man.5 Only a state can
preserve such a system. That nations apparently become distinguishable in
 Political Culture and National Identity 123

terms of underlying ethnicity results from the fact that in the conditions
of widespread, homogeneous high culture, the only bases remaining for
legitimacy are 'units of culture' (tantamount to ethnic groups); but since
these were historically much more numerous, diverse and interpenetrating
than nation states, an act of selection and invention had to be undertaken.
Its agents were a nationalist intellectual and political elite. Moreover,
'The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary
historical inventions. Any old shred and patch would have served as
well.' Nations and hence states were the result: thus it is 'nationalism
which engenders nations, not the other way round'. Gellner writes, 'The
basic deception and self-deception of nationalism is this: nationalism is,
essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where
previously low culture had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some
cases the totality, of the population.' 6
Thus, in the mobilizationist view, nations are novel; they are arbitrarily
'invented' by intellectual and political elites; these 'inventions' are imposed
on the mass of society; and the whole process is an effect, indeed a
functional requirement, of modernization and industrialization. There are
a number of points at which these claims have been challenged, but we
should notice first that the claims of arbitrariness and of imposition present,
if they are true, the most serious obstacles to a phenomenological approach
to national identity. The first denies the emergence of meaning, and hence
culture and identity, from ongoing scciallife, while the latter portrays the
mass of the population as passive recipients of the invented meanings. In
combination, these claims deny what is necessary to the phenomenological
analysis, that nationality can ever be a social role. However, we will see
that they are too strongly stated, and that some scope for that necessary
condition remains.
The role of invention has also been stressed in a much-cited study of
symbolic and historiographical representations of the national past in the
cases of Scotland, Wales and England. 7 This study provides many striking
examples of invention, such as the Ossian myth, a forged national epic, in
Scotland and the myth of Madoc (supposed discoverer of America in the
twelfth century) in Wales, as well as t:tie invention of the Scottish kilt by a
Lancastrian mill owner in the eighteenth century. However, invention need
not necessarily be arbitrary, as is suggested by Hobsbawm's concluding
observation that 'the most successful examples of manipulation are those
which exploit practices which clearly meet a felt- not necessarily a clearly
understood- need among particular bodies of people' .s
On the basis of a comprehensive survey of nationality and nationalism,
Anthony Smith argues that 'in most cases, the mythologies elaborated by
124 The Concept of Political Culture

nationalists have not been fabrications, but recombinations of traditional,

perhaps unanalyzed, motifs and myths taken from epics, chronicles, docu-
ments of the period, and material facts'. They are thus 'inventions' only in
a limited sense of the word. Smith makes a distinction between 'full' and
'drained' (or 'empty') national histories, the former providing a bounteous
range of myths and symbols from the history of an ethnic group, the
latter requiring a process of disentanglement and recombination in order
to simulate a national history for an ethnic group which does not have one.
'In the first case, it is more a case of selective memory "rediscovering" the
past; in the second, a more conjectural "reconstruction" of the past from
such motifs and myths as can be unearthed.' It is true, Smith notes, that an
elite sector of society is responsible for these activities. However, he makes
a point that has the same implication for the elite that Hobsbawm's does
for the masses: 'Such novel recombinations are pre-eminently the work of
intellectuals in search of their "roots".' 9
The implication is that inventions or recombinations are not and cannot
be entirely arbitrary, either for the perpetrators or for the recipients. So far
as the elite nationalists are concerned, it is true that they might indeed be
somewhat estranged from the mass of the population, and uniquely able to
engage in relevant intellectual activities such as historical research. But to
suppose, as Gellner, does that their formulations are always arbitrary is to
posit an extreme form of estrangement. A higher level of education offers
the possibility of a degree of detachment from history necessary for the
conscious invention of national myths, but to suppose that this is always or
even usually the case is to commit a rationalist fallacy. It is to suppose that
the elite is estranged also from its own history. We will shortly consider a
case which exposes the fallaciousness of this claim. So far as the 'receiving'
masses are concerned, if some inventions are more successful than others at
meeting 'felt needs', it is necessary to ask what is the source of these needs.
Again, we will argue that it is concrete historical processes.
Without pre-empting the discussion to follow, we can see the basis for
a phenomenological analysis. We saw that such an analysis encounters
difficulties if national identity is regarded as the natural product of 'national
experience', essentially because in concrete terms there is no such thing as
national experience. The historical experience of the nation, like the nation
itself, is imagined. But if instead of arguing analogically as if the nation
were just a large version of a social group, or indeed an individual in
its own right, we continue to pursue the investigation of concrete social
processes, we will observe ample scope for national identity to be seen as
a response. We turn now by way of illustration of this claim to two case
studies.
 Political Culture and National Identity 125

POLAND: THE NATION AS RESPONSE

The Polish case is distinctive in that the nation has an ancient lineage while
at the same time its existence as a state has not been continuous - it was
decisively interrupted for most of the period from 1795 to 1918, the most
active period of nationalism in Europe. This is one source of its interest
for our purposes, since it allows us to investigate the degree to which the
re-emergent Polish state of 1918 was the result of preservation or invention,
and in what manner. The case is interesting too, we will see, because of
the relatively high level of contestation that occurred over what we have
been calling the act of naming; over what we may call 'nominal national
identity'. We begin with a brief survey of Polish history, drawing on the
work of Norman Davies.ro
The first important factor in Poland's development is its location- both
geographically and geopolitically. So far as the first is concerned, its lack
of defensible boundaries (except to the south, where it is bounded by the
Carpathian mountains) has been a contributor to its political vulnerability.
The same problem bas afflicted Russia: however the results in terms of
political organization have been radically different, the necessity of military
mobilization contributing to the latter's extreme centralization, whereas
decentralization and even anarchy were characteristic of independent Pol-
ish politics. The nobility bad a great deal of autonomy: it elected the king
and individual members of the Sejm (parliament), and retained the right
to bring proceedings to a halt, effectively a veto power. This circumstance
contributed to the paralysis of the state in the face of increasing external
threats in the eighteenth century. Geopolitically, Poland's location between
Muscovy, subsequently Russia, whose growth in size was slow but appar-
ently inexorable, and Prussia, subsequently Germany, which grew from an
enclave of the Teutonic Knights to become a continental power, combined
with its internal organization to render it increasingly vulnerable.
In the period 1569-1795, the Polisb-Lithuanian Republic was one of the
Great Powers of Europe, extending at its maximum size (in 1634- 35) to a
line well to the east of Kiev, and northwards almost to the Gulf of Finland,
later to become the location of St Petersburg. However between 1772 and
1795 Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and, to the south,
Austria. Following the defeat of Prussia in the Napoleonic Wars, the
Duchy of Warsaw was created in 1807, but this 'rump Polish state' was 'an
expression more of the balance of power than of the wishes of the people'
(II, pp. 296f.). Its precariousness was quickly confirmed after Napoleon's
retreat from Russia when, in 1813, the Duchy was occupied by Russian
forces. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 created a new Kingdom of Poland,
126 The Concept of Political Culture

also centred on Warsaw. This 'Congress Kingdom' was as stable as the

Vienna settlement- that is, instability was not long in coming. The Russian
Tsar had the title of King of Poland, with considerable executive powers;
however the constitution provided, 'on paper', 'many of the marks of a
genuine constitutional monarchy' (IT, p. 309). A constitutional monarchy
with a Russian Tsar as monarch was not a felicitous combination, and
clashes of interests developed, coming to a head in the abortive November
Rising of 1830. This ill-planned rebellion led, through the intransigence
of Tsar Nicholas I, to a Russo-Polish war in which the Russians were
eventually victorious. The Kingdom persisted in formal terms until 1874,
but its annexation by Russia had largely been achieved de facto in 1832.
The end of the First World War on the Eastern Front saw the emergence
of a new independent Poland, the Second Republic, on frontiers consider-
ably to the east of the present ones, marking the recapture for Poland of
much territory that had been under Russian control since the Partitions. The
Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20 and the resulting Treaty of Riga confirmed
these possessions. A further partition, the seventh in Davies's count (II,
p. 433),11 occurred under the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and
the ensuing invasions and occupation. The post-war settlement, initiated at
Yalta, shifted Poland to the west, at the expense of Germany; and, moreover,
the occupying forces brought about a huge movement of population - of
Poles in the Ukraine and Byelorussia into the new Poland, and of Germans
in Pomerania and Silesia to Germany. Under communist party rule, the
familiar experience of domination by Russia was relived, exacerbated by
the absence of a substantial domestic source of support for communism
in the activities of a wartime communist resistance movement. 12 Postwar
history up to 1989 was marked by cycles in which national self-assertion,
coupled with economic or political crisis, led to 'palace revolutions' which
appeared, misleadingly, to address fundamental national grievances. 13
The 'historical experience' of Poles and hence the content of national
identity might therefore appear to be easily specified: memories of the
status and extent of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic; resentment of its
dismemberment and of the perpetrators of that act; further resentment
of the Russians fuelled by subsequent hostilities; consciousness of the
lengthy struggle of Poles for lost nationhood; and Roman Catholicism.
A closer look reveals various complexities. The Republic involved an
act of self-deception - that administrative paralysis comprised a form
of freedom - which the Russian Tsar (who claimed in the period of
growing Russian hegemony to be the 'protector' of Polish freedoms against
encroachment by central authority) was able to exploit. The partition period
saw widespread 'loyalism' (that is, loyalty to the partitioning authorities):
 Political Culture and National Identity 127

predictably enough, opposition was a minority activity. The Catholic

Church played a particularly ambiguous role. Its symbolic representation
of nationhood could only be enhanced by the fact that the main oppressing
powers were, respectively, Lutheran and Russian Orthodox. However, the
Catholic Church is an organization as well as a symbol, and moreover
a supranational one with its own political interests. The Catholicism of
the Hapsburg rulers of Austria-Hungary impinged on these interests. The
November Rising, one of the most salient symbols of nationhood, was
condemned by Pope Gregory XVI, and a favourable Papal response to
the January Rising of 1863 was somewhat tardy. But at a lower level,
and among Polish Catholic intellectuals, the role of the clergy in the
preservation of national identity was more positive (II, pp. 213-216).
Thus it is clear that a substantial element of myth contributes to Polish
national identity. This element is perhaps unusually large because of the
fact that, for much of its history, "'Poland", as an abstraction, could
be remembered from the past, or aspired to for the future, but only
imagined in the present'; 'Poland was ... an Idea' (II, pp. 8f.). Davies
notes that the idea replaced the real nation 'on the eve of the birth of
Nationalism and Liberalism' (1, p. 525), thus facilitating the preservation
of national identity in the particularly potent form of nationalism, as
well as enabling Poland to serve as a symbol of the new principle of
self-determination throughout Europe. As a result, 'the modem Polish
nation is the end-product of modem Polish Nationalism', that is, of the
overtly political, even if minority, struggle for statehood in the nineteenth
century (II, p. 13).
According to Davies, the definition of Polishness has varied sub-
stantially. In Poland-Lithuania, its application was geographically wide
but socially narrow. Nationality was equivalent to citizenship, and thus
referred to many peoples - such as Ruthenes and Lithuanians - who
were not ethnically Polish; but at the same time 'citizenship' denoted
political participation, and thus was confined to the nobility. During the
nineteenth century, he argues, the idea of Polishness became more widely
disseminated, as a result both of social change (such as the emancipation
of serfs in the Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II) and of the publicity
attending uprisings. At the same time, it became narrower geographically,
as outlying groups, particularly the Ruthenes, who became Ukrainians and
Byelorussians, began to assert their own identity. Despite changes in the
composition of the population, Davies argues that 'the net result is clear':
'The multinational, multilingual, multistratified society of the old Republic,
ruled by its noble Polish ruirod, or nation, has been transformed over five
or six generations into a far more homogeneous society where the lud, the
128 The Concept of Political Culture

common people of workers or peasants, have risen to a position of apparent

supremacy' (II, p. 179).
In view of these changes in social structure and in the scope of nation-
ality, the suggestion that a sense of Polish identity could be explained by
simple inheritance - the socialization process - is implausible. Davies's
account of the preservation of the Polish 'idea' during the partition period
puts decisive emphasis on the role of the cultural intelligentsia and the
small minority of insurrectionists, noting the absence of an 'organic social
process' which is Polish (II, pp. 178f. and n. 1, p. 652), and the wide
differences between the three partitioned areas in terms of laws, institutions
and way of life. To this extent, it would appear that the bearers of Polish
identity continued to be a minority elite stratum of the population. On the
other hand, Davies's account of the emergence of Polish nationalism in
the Prussian, subsequently German, partition, points to a different social
locus of identity. Two policies towards the Polish territories initiated by
Bismarck had counterproductive effects: that of 'colonization', designed
to encourage Germans to settle in the east, and the Kulturkampf, which
involved (as we will soon see in more detail) an attack on the Polish
language, and other attempts at cultural 'Germanization'. Where the
state, in conformity with Prussian tradition, while being authoritarian
nevertheless operated within a framework of legality, scope was offered
for Polish nationalism to reassert itself: but it was the vigour of the
attacks made on it, and particularly their penetration to low levels of
society, that provoked the widespread emergence of national identity (II,
pp. 124-132).
The nineteenth-century extension of Polish nationality to the mass of the
population is, as the mobilizationist school in the theory of nationalism
has made clear, a widespread phenomenon, not confined to Poland. It is
indeed, as Gellner suggests, part of a more general political development
of the political incorporation of the masses, marked in many countries by
the spread of mass education and the broadening of the franchise. Davies's
assertion of the 'supremacy' of the Polish people is a claim about changes
in social structure and the political importance of the masses - essentially
about the beginnings in Poland of mass society - and not one about the
degree to which a Polish identity was actually possessed by the majority
of the population. Evidence for the response of the mass of the population
to the assertion of Polish identity is in short supply. A distinction needs to
be made, this example suggests, between the new political principle that
the masses possessed citizenship and hence politically significant national
attributes, and the claim that they experienced Polish identity. The former
is a normative claim, and involves the transition from naming a territory to
 Political Culture and National Identity 129

naming a population Polish; the latter is an empirical claim for which we

lack evidence. The age of nationalism to which Davies refers is so precisely
because of the establishment of the former principle, extending nominal
national identity to the masses. But that principle, whose assertion was in
general terms a once-and-for-all event, comprising part of the development
of mass politics, merely opened up a new field for political contestation,
in which people, not land, were the target, and rival assertions of nominal
national identity were the substance of the contest. The empirical claim was
swept up into the normative struggle, and not just as a question of which
assertion of nominal national identity was empirically correct, but also, as
the Kulturkampf graphically illustrates, as a question of which assertion
was going to be made correct.
The Kulturkampf was an attempt by Germany to invalidate the 'Polish
question' by eliminating the phenomenon of Polishness, and thereby
simultaneously to justify, on the basis of the new principle of popular
national identity, the boundaries of the German Empire. To be sure, these
policies had wider ramifications in the rest of the German Empire also,
involving an attack on the Catholic Church. But, as a monograph by
Lecb Trzeciakowski makes clear, in Poland Catholicism and Polisbness
merged into a single target, as for instance the much greater percentage
loss of Catholic clergy there reveals.1 4 A series of legislative acts in
the 1870s progressively weakened the authority of the Catholic Church
by eliminating its educational role. In the Polish partition, senior Polish
bishops were replaced by Germans and local clergy removed. German
was propagated as a compulsory language of instruction from 1872,
Polish being made a supplementary language. Local government and
the courts were Germanized in 1873-76, leading to considerable incon-
veniences for all concerned, and place names were changed. Bismarck,
Trzeciakowski reports, wanted to spread knowledge of German as a means
of access to pro-German propaganda But the effect was the reverse:
these policies made contact with German a source of difficulties for the
population, reciprocally reinforcing Polish national identity: 'For many it
was to constitute a moment of passage from an objective to a subjective
national consciousness, consisting of a participation in the fight against
germanization.' 15
Trzeciakowski's account of this response concentrates on the sector for
which more evidence is available- the political elite- but does not ignore
the mass response. Evidence for the latter includes the signing of petitions
and attendance at rallies. He attributes the largest role in the diffusion of
nationalistic ideology to the Polish-language press; many journalists were
themselves active politically. Other contributions were made by economic,
130 The Concept of Political Culture

educational and cultural societies, by political theatre, and by election cam-

paigns, whose purpose was indeed primarily mobilizational, since Polish
deputies, even when their election was unhampered by the authorities, had
little influence in the Prussian and imperiallegislatures. 16 Trzeciakowski's
conclusion is that the Kulturkampf, while its influence varied across the
regions of Poland, was an experience for the whole population. It originated
as an elite-level contest over the assertion of nominal national identity, but
the comprehensive penetration of that assertion provoked a 'continuous
everyday struggle to retain national distinctness, a struggle that took in the
widest mass of Polish society' .n
What Davies's hints about the Kulturkampf and Trzeciakowski's fuller
examination suggests is that the implication of active subject and passive
object carried by terms such as 'incorporation' and 'imposition' is erro-
neous. It is certainly true that we have more evidence concerning the
elite activists, mainly because much of their activity consisted in writing;
and it is also true that intellectual and political elites are better equipped,
through their education and indeed through their possession of leisure time,
to engage in the activity of reconstructing or inventing national identity.
But the claim that the mass of the population is a passive object is
nevertheless false. In the Kulturkampf, an assertion of nominal national
identity by the political authorities provoked a counter-identity on the part
of the population, seeking a means by which to analyze and react to the
concrete and day-to-day disruption that the Kulturkampf brought about.
Once made objects of the claim of nominal national identity, and thereby
admitted into political significance, the masses at once become subjects,
experiencing their own phenomenological national identity.
The admission that intellectual elites are better equipped for reconstruc-
tion and invention of national identity, and that the identity they elaborate
provides the content sought in the popular response to German oppression,
does not, furthermore, justify the Gellnerite claim of the 'arbitrariness' of
their activities. We argued in the abstract that this claim isolates the national
activists from their own history. In the concrete Polish case we can see what
this means. That case illustrates quite clearly that increased education might
simply bring increased exposure to discrimination and a more dramatic and
painful confrontation with an asserted nominal national identity. No less
than the masses, and perhaps a good deal more, the Polish elite has ample
stimulus in its own experience to construct a national identity - to 'search
for its roots'.
Distinctions between elites and masses, therefore, although they exist,
should not be drawn too strongly. It is true that, among the Polish
elite, nationalism was an active principle well before the Kulturkampf,
 Political Culture and National Identity 131

whereas for the mass of the population it seems that the latter provided
the decisive moment. It is also true that, in its contributions to written
debate about national identity and the threat of Germanization, particularly
in newspapers but in other forums as well, the elite is in a position to make
a more elaborate construction of national identity than ordinary people can
in their response to an event such as the loss of their local priest or an
incomprehensible encounter with a state official. It is the elite who are in
a position to make connections between the Kulturkampf and the earlier
indignities and injustices of Polish history, and thus to give reaction to it
a national character. But, we are suggesting, in both cases the formation
of national identity needs to be seen as a response to social conditions.
The conditions are such as to make nationality a social role, creating the
possibility for the community first 'imagined' by the elite to be joined by
the whole population. Polish response to the Kulturkampfis a good example
of the typification and reciprocal typification of phenomenological social
theory; and phenomenology in particular enables the Gellnerite supposition
of free-floating intellectuals arbitrarily inventing national identity to be
avoided.

GERMANY: THE NATION AS INVENTION

The case of Germany merits consi(leration if only as a counterpoint to

our discussion of the Kulturkampf. Of more relevance to our argument,
however, is that it provides an extreme example of the creativity involved
in elaborating nominal national identity. Despite this it also illustrates the
utility of a phenomenological explanation of the etiology of this identity.
The German nation was first, but only minimally, embodied in the Holy
Roman Empire, a 'transnational, rather metaphysical' structure 'without
its own statehood, organization or power' .18 The Empire was a structure,
therefore, not only isolated from the mass of the population, but also and
more unusually lacking any basis in its historical existence upon which
a national idea, or nominal national identity, could be built. Its final
abolition in 1806 by Napoleon was a mere formality. The wars against
Napoleon which led to the amalgamation of the 314 large and small
states and principalities comprising the Holy Roman Empire into the 39
components of the German Confederation at the Congress of Vienna were
regarded as 'wars of liberation', but the Germany that resulted remained a
'multinational complex': the area was organized 'not as a German nation-
state but as a region where European interests were balanced out' .19 The
specification of boundary, crucial to nominal national identity, remained
132 The Concept of Political Culture

vague: the Confederation included various foreign monarchs (such as the

king of England, a Hanoverian), and excluded large parts of Prussian and
Austrian territory.
The proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 marked the culmination
of the growth of Prussian domination over Germany and the exclusion
of Austria (militarily defeated by Prussia in 1866). Germany was thus a
good example of a nation with an 'empty history': it lacked any history
as a nation state; it was a multinational empire, making the construction
of national identity from mythic sources especially problematic; and no
particular specification of boundary was suggested by its history. Indeed,
debate over a 'greater' or 'lesser' Germany (including or excluding Austria)
was an overt and salient feature of the growth of German nationalism in the
period up to 1871.
German nationalism could not fail, in this setting, to be an invention. In
the eighteenth century, Hagen Schulze reports, it was the development of
a language of German high culture that provided the only basis of national
sentiment; hence 'The German nation ... was to be found solely in the
heads of its educated members.' Defeat at Napoleon's hands in 1806 led
to the assertion of the new principle: 'the people and their language were
discovered as the only and final legitimising basis for the nation'. This
assertion of nominal national identity was, Schulze explicitly states, the
product of a confrontation with 'aggressive French nationalism' .20
In the case of a nation with a 'drained' history, Smith writes, the
construction of national identity must be creative, and hence romantic.21
German nationalism has indeed been seen as a 'romantic nationalism'; as
perhaps the first. 22 Its symbolism has included Goethe, the city of Weimar,
Gothic architecture, the Germanic legend of tribal leader Armenius and his
ancient struggle against the Roman Empire. These are romantic notions in
the everyday sense of the word, as well as being instances of the nineteenth-
century European mood known as Romanticism. An important component
was provided by the speculative linguistic theories ofFichte, which posited
the superiority of the German 'mother tongue' over the 'derived' French
language, and inferred boundaries from the linguistically-based idea of the
Kulturnation.
Although the linguistic definition of boundary helps to explain policies
such as the Kulturkampf in the Polish partition, the existence throughout
Central and Eastern Europe of a large German-speaking diaspora made
the expansionist implications of that definition geopolitically impractical
for most of German history. Together with the feebleness of the Holy
Roman Empire and the Confederation as symbols of the national past,
the infeasibility of the romantic conception of nominal national identity
 Political Culture and National Identity 133

bas been seen by Harold James as provoking an alternative 'doctrine of

nationality', a doctrine 'that justified the existence of the nation primarily
by reference to the inexorable laws of economic development' ,23 a doctrine
that was in time challenged from the romantic perspective in diverse ways,
for instance by Wagner and Nietszcbe.
The Weimar Republic, which so conspicuously failed to meet the eco-
nomic criterion of national progress (being the victim first of hyperinflation
and then in the late 1920s of the Great Depression), also failed to create
a new 'national iconography' .24 Its successor, National Socialism, was a
synthesis of many of the components of nominal national identity already
mentioned. It rejected the modernistic aesthetic culture of Weimar, reviving
not only some of the symbols of German romantic nationalism but also,
and fatefully, its definition of boundary.25 At the same time it was
constructive, in the specifically German sense of using economic advance
to create community. Architectural gigantism, as in the Soviet Union, was
a symbol of this economic effort. 'There is no better way to educate a
people to self-consciousness than grandiose communal tasks which show
each individual that such a people is at least equal to all other nations',
Hitler said in an address in 1939, revealing both his concern with defining
national identity and, most interestingly, under-confidence in the German
people's possession of it.26
Although, as Schulze, in a bibliographical essay, makes clear, research
into the social basis of the rise of German nationalism, in other words
into the transformation of nominal national identity into genuine popular
national identity, is at only a preliminary stage, German historiography
bas in recent years investigated in much greater detail the elite debates of
which the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 was the culmination.27
These investigations have served to counter earlier assumptions of the
inevitability of that outcome, stressing the diversity of the conceptions of
German nationality that the debates featured. Significant moments, such as
the debate in the Frankfurt Paulskirche Assembly following the revolution
of 1848 over whether the Confederation should be succeeded by a greater
or lesser Germany (in which the initial presumption in favour of the
former was transformed into an unrealized decision for the latter) expose
for analysis processes which in the case of most nations are less public
and for which minutes are not usually taken: processes of the construction
of national identity. It is indeed worth suggesting that the records of
such occasions be examined with the rigour of conversational analysis
(although minutes of political meetings are, of course, less susceptible to
such detailed analysis than tape-recorded conversations) in order to expose
how fundamental was the process of construction. In any case, awareness
134 The Concept of Political Culture

of the fluidity of the definition of Gennany certainly aids in understanding

the vigour of the attack which the Kulturkampf subsequently made on the
Polish minority.

IMPLICATIONS FOR POLITICAL CULTURE

It has been an important contribution of the recent debates in the theory

of nationalism to deny that nations can be explained simply on the
basis of inheritance, or that national identity can be explained simply
in terms of socialization. These factors undoubtedly play a role, but it
has been salutary to have historical attention directed to those mainly
nineteenth-century periods in which nationalism and nations were in many
cases created. Profound social changes occurred in the nineteenth century,
and to suppose that nations served simply as the unmodified receptacles for
these changes is implausible, and is contradicted by evidence unearthed
by recent research. In neither the Polish nor the German cases were the
receptacles 'given'; they were created and struggled over.
This new view itself begins to shed more darkness than light, however,
when an excessive emphasis is placed on invention, particularly on its
arbitrariness and on the ease of its imposition. Our examples have served
to show that construction of national identity is not an act, but a process.
The process is no doubt made up of a series of individual acts, such as
the forgery of a fragment of 'ancient' national literature, the making of
a speech in the Paulskirche Assembly, or the passing in the German
Reichstag of an item of Kulturkampf legislation. Nevertheless, to see
construction as a process is more fully to recognize social reality; to
see its participants as trying to project a path through a changing and
conflict-ridden political landscape, and to see the constructs themselves
as new entries into that landscape that have to be comprehended and
negotiated by participants lower down the social hierarchy. It is, therefore,
to adopt a phenomenological perspective on national identity.
This conclusion has more general implications for our understanding
of political culture. The study of national identity presents obstacles to
a phenomenological approach, but they may be overcome, indicating the
usefulness of that approach in the otherwise problematic study of the
indexical aspects of political culture. We have seen that, while a mass/ elite
distinction needs to be taken into account in the study of national identity,
it should not be overstated, and both levels should be approached with the
phenomenological orientation towards political and social process, and the
abandonment of assumptions about what is given or 'primordial'. The same
 Political Culture and National Identity 135

is true in the study of political culture more generally. The behavioural

definition of political culture as mass attitudes towards politics and political
symbols might, for instance, be regarded as a means of investigation of the
success of claims of nominal national identity. Alternatively, those who,
applying to political culture research the 'movement of thought' we traced
in Chapter 6, construe culture as a resource, make the opposite emphasis, on
the discretionary activities of the political elite. David Laitin, for instance,
writes: 'a good theory of culture must also point to the fact that people are
instrumental about which aspect of their cultural repertoire is of primary
significance and that shared symbols constitute a political resource that
can be effectively exploited by political entrepreneurs' .28 The last phrase,
particularly, recalls Gellner's idea of elites arbitrarily gathering 'shreds and
patches' to create national identity. What we learn from studying the case
of national identity more carefully is that neither of these approaches is
adequate, and that not only does attention to mass and elite levels have to
be combined, it also bas to take the phenomenological form that we have
outlined.
Although deriving from a quite abstract discussion of issues in anthropol-
ogy and social theory, the phenomenological analysis throws considerable
light on the more down-to-earth questions that political culture research bas
raised. We have seen examples of political contestation over the meaning
of historical symbols, of the formulation of elite cultures as ways of
life depending on elaborate rationalizations, and of cultures emerging
in response to these. This complex range of phenomena, all of which
comprise the context that an interpretive use of political culture refers to,
cannot adequately be taken into account if either of the two restrictions on
the scope of political culture just mentioned (restricting it to a mass or elite
focus) are in effect. To take account of them requires placing emphasis on
the invention of meaning, on the dependency of this process on political
circumstances, and on its contribution to the evolution of new political
circumstances. The study of national identity provides the most effective
demonstration of the necessity of doing so.
8 New Trends in Political
Culture Research

This final chapter, like the preceding one, aims to develop and refine further
the phenomenological analysis of political culture. Here, however, we are
concerned not to extend the analysis beyond the scope of existing political
culture research, but to show how it can be used in the evaluation of recent
and novel examples of that research. In part, the argument to follow will
illustrate the use of the phenomenological analysis as a critical tool, as we
investigate developments in the political-scientific use of political culture,
particularly the impact of anthropological structuralism and its derivative,
the 'grid/ group' typology of Mary Douglas. In the latter half of the chapter,
however, a more positive argument is made. We will examine the use of
political culture in American historiography, a setting in which the concept
has in recent years undergone a rapid rise in popularity. The best of these
uses, we will argue, illustrate not only the utility but also the detailed form
of a phenomenological analysis of political culture.

STRUCTURALISM

The methodological and interpretive principles of structuralism that were

borrowed by political scientists from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss
were first borrowed by him from linguistics, particularly the structural
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Some of the key features later to
be found in political cultural structuralism can be seen in this original
version. Of crucial significance is Saussure's claim that the relationship
between sign and signified is arbitrary. This somewhat oracular utterance
encapsulates much of the structuralist programme, because it entails that
meaning is to be sought not in the 'reference' of sign to reality, but
in relations between signs, that is, in linguistic structure. In Saussure's
linguistics, units of sound or 'phonemes', rather than words or other
supposedly meaningful units, provide the basic data, and the general rules
by which they are combined provide the analytic framework. 1 Among
these rules, the most important is 'binary opposition', the dictum that
'Concepts are purely differential, and are defined not by their positive
content but negatively by their relations with other terms of the system. '2

136
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 137

Levi-Strauss's borrowing from structural linguistics was essentially ana-

logical, as is exemplified by his structuralist theory of myths. He coined the
tenn 'mytheme' to refer to the 'constituent units' of myths, and his goal,
analogously, was to expose the universal relations by which mythemes are
connected. The analysis attempts to show that myths consist of repetitions
of the same sequences -just as a musical score, if it were read line by line
as a book, would contain repetitions (with variations for each instrument) of
the same themes. As with the musical score, the myth ought not to be read
sequentially, and its full meaning is brought out only when the 'harmony'
between the repeated themes is exposed by structural analysis.3 This was
not, however, the only application: the structural linguistic paradigm came
to be applied by Levi-Strauss to more general phenomena too, such as
kinship systems, the layout of cities, and other manifestations of social
organization.
Levi-Strauss's structuralism has in turn been adopted by political sci-
entists. If Levi-Strauss's theory of myth is an extension of Saussure' s
linguistic structuralism, the concept of 'narrative' used by political culture
researchers is a further extension, although as just noticed, grounds for
it are already suggested by Levi-Strauss's own wide applications of
structuralist analysis. Like myths, narratives are said to 'act out' the
culture and in particular to enact, through binary oppositions, relations
and transformations, the contradictions inherent in it. Like myths, they
need to be read in a structuralist manner in order for their meaning to be
exposed; their meaning lies in their structure, in the relations between their
universal elements, not in what might appear in a non-structuralist reading
to be their particular content. The concept of 'narrative' is of very broad
application. Myths become merely a subset of narratives; anything can be
tenned a narrative and interpreted structurally that can be represented as
a story. Oral narratives, that is, stories told to one another by members of
a community, have, for instance, been the subject of structuralist analysis
by Eloise Buker.4 A wider range of material has been examined in this
manner by Richard Merelman, including accounts of historical events
in high-school textbooks, the content of corporate house journals and
magazine advertisements, and the plots of TV sitcoms.s The concept of
narrative has even been extended to the record of a series of legislative
enactments in the Brezhnevite Soviet Union.6
Part of the legacy of structuralism in political culture research, then,
has been a readiness to consider a much wider range of phenomena as
data. But neither this attribute nor the location of structuralist political
culture research within the broad category of interpretivism exhaust that
legacy. Its crucial component is the claim that meaning is expressed
138 The Concept of Political Culture

through structure, or what is sometimes called 'deep structure', a term

which further emphasizes the structuralist notion that meaning is never
immediately apparent, but can only be exposed through analysis. This
view has considerable ramifications. It means that structuralist analyses
explicitly and self-consciously abstract the meaning of 'narratives' from
what may be understood by the participants. It therefore does as a matter
of programme what thick description is sometimes in danger of doing
accidentally.
This characteristic of structuralism has been criticized, by Sebastiana
Timpanaro, as 'objective idealism' .1 This contradictory-sounding label
is not altogether inapt. Not only is emphasis in structural interpretation
squarely placed on the interpretive achievement of the researcher in
exposing the structure of narratives clearly an example of what we have
termed idealism. But in contrast to Geertz's agnosticism about what form
that achievement should take, structuralism is insistent that it should expose
the universal pattern of relations, transformations and, fundamentally,
binary oppositions. This is not yet perhaps an 'objective' idealism, but it
is certainly a universalistic or formalistic one, and it threatens to become
objective when structuralists argue that there is something in the structure
of the human mind that gives rise to the alleged structure of its products.8
When the same critic writes,

the anthropologist ... invites [the linguist] not to furnish historical

or empirical merchandise but rather a priori models, inventories by
means of which all cultures can appear as the result of various random
correlations of a few invariant elements9

he goes too far, since structuralism certainly does not posit random combi-
nations of elements, but instead combinations that 'express' contradictions.
His identification of the a priori nature of structuralism, hence its idealism,
is, however, accurate. With reference to the actual form of the structure
held to be present, Ernest Gellner has alleged that 'some of these "binary
oppositions" do not genuinely explain or generate anything', and that
structuralist analyses are 'open to the suspicion that they are just the pursuit
of pretty and fanciful patterns, in a language which is suggestive but which,
like the various Hegelian and Freudian languages, is over-adaptable and
hopelessly loose' .1o
However, lest our own critique of structuralism seem excessively a
priori, it is time to examine in detail one of its exemplars. Because it
not only illustrates in its findings the structuralist use of political culture
but is also concerned to draw a contrast in theoretical terms between
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 139

structuralism and earlier modes of political culture research, we will

turn to Merelman's contribution. So far as the theoretical discussion is
concerned, it is unsurprising that Merelman somewhat caricatures what
he calls the 'political culture approach', but rather than correct this error,
we may notice that the caricature is itself instructive. Merelman first notes
that descriptions of American political culture are far from being mutually
coherent This fact alone does not vitiate cultural description, he says:
it may be that American political culture consists of 'a perhaps fuzzy,
yet nevertheless real pattern of attitudinal correlations'. Such a claim,
however, would already go beyond what attitude survey data reveal, since
a 'pattern' can only be identified by the analyst. The structural approach,
as we have seen, is characterized by the assumption of a pattern, and
not just any pattern. 'Cultural form', Merelman says, is provided by
opposition, an assumption that is at variance with the 'expectation of
consensus' in existing analyses of American political culture. The 'cultural
process', moreover, consists in the repetition of narratives which depict
opposition and hence 'act out', 'display' and 'exercise' the culture. A
crucial difference between structural and pre-structural analyses occurs
in their treatment of individuals. Political culture research has aggregated
individual attitudes, whereas in fact people 'have at best partial, distorted
views of society's inner workings'. Culture has what is explicitly called
an a priori quality; it imposes itself on individuals whether they like it or
not, in the form of 'collective repre~entations'. Not only are individuals
represented as recipients of cultural processes; the question of what effect
on individuals they have is put to one side: 'the structural approach does not
depend for its account of culture and politics on audience reaction. Its first
question is the nature of collective representations themselves; only later
does it concern itself with the effects of such representations.' Eclectic use
of data is justified by the structuralist argument that the deep structure of
collective representations has its existence as deep structure only through
'metaphor', by which structuralists mean its repetition in diverse settings.
Here, again, the analyst's priority is emphasized, since the links between
these settings are not necessarily apparent to the participants, just as in
Levi-Strauss's analogy each musician is ignorant of the entire score.
There is a peculiar difficulty in objecting to the idealism of the struc-
turalist approach, in that the approach is explicit in admitting it. Never-
theless, we can notice that structuralism contrasts rather starkly with a
phenomenological approach to political culture. To be sure, the latter, as
we have outlined it, pays considerable attention to processes of opposition
and to the reciprocal typification that they facilitate. But it directly counters
the idealist claim that meaning is not to be sought in the understanding
140 The Concept of Political Culture

of the participants but in the structure-making and metaphor-recognition

of the analyst. It makes precisely the opposite claim, that meaning is
constituted through concrete social processes - and this does not entail, as
Merelman's caricature of non-structuralist political culture research would
imply, that it may be fully described by administering attitude surveys. But
given structuralism's disarming frankness about its lack of interest in the
'native's point of view', how are we to criticize it? Merelman's findings
provide the means.
The essential problem of idealism is of the validation of its claims. If all
data other than the interpretation offered by the analyst are declared irrel-
evant, how can that interpretation be compared to a rival one? Merelman
interprets the deep st.'Ucture of American political culture in terms of
'mythologized individualism': its narratives 'all depict a deep structure
which poses group repression in an unjust society against individual
freedom in a just, naturally sound society' . 11 This structure is derived
from a cursory reading of American history, with its tales of 'American
heroes who have successfully negotiated the deep structural passage
from group-based constraint to individual freedom', people like Andrew
Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Merelman then claims
to find this representation recurring in his sample of sitcoms, magazines,
textbooks and company newsletters, providing a 'statistical' test of his
'hypothesis'. These scientific-sounding words are, however, rather out
of place, given the nature of the 'demonstration' - a scanty collection
of generalities about advertising, house journals and sitcoms that do not
even forcefully state the hypothesis, let alone demonstrate it. 12
The problem, obviously, is not that the idea of individualism cannot
be found in media representations, but that many other values or even
'oppositions' no doubt can be too. The most cursory thought about
the sitcoms currently most popular in the United States ('Roseanne'
and 'Cheers') suggests that the values of family and community are
at least as important as that of individualism. This is not to deny the
significance of individualism, only to deny that Merelman's methods
effectively demonstrate its presence or say anything new about it. If
all that structuralism bas to offer is another statement of the idea of the
'American dream' we may indeed wonder what all the fuss was about.
Yet Merelman cannot in principle offer more because all evidence about
what this representation means to people bas been deemed irrelevant.
Structuralism offers collective representations but eschews investigation
of whether anything is represented to anybody. Describing them in terms
of 'binary oppositions', especially when, with Gellner, we notice bow easy
such redescription is, is in itself not at all compelling, except to a convert.
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 141

Merelman begins by accepting that a choice needs to be made between

what he terms 'idealist' and 'materialist' assumptions, the latter asserting
the 'economic and ecological' basis of culture, the former its irreduc-
ibility. This dichotomy is denied by phenomenology (which Merelman
erroneously places in the 'idealist' camp). Meanings are socially construc-
ted, it argues, and the appearance of their 'objectivity' or 'givenness' is
merely a common-sense agreement that provisionally enables social life to
proceed. They are constructed, moreover, in social processes, particularly
in the process of opposition. Opposition, in this view, is a concrete social
process from which meanings emerge, not an abstraction in which they are
elaborated by the analyst. We have seen in this section how such abstraction
deprives structuralist political cultural description of evidential support. In
the last section of this chapter we will look at some examples of the kind
of description sanctioned by the phenomenological approach.

THE GRID AND THE GROUP

Of all recent entries into political culture research, the most ambitious has
been the so-called 'culture theory' derived by Aaron Wildavsky and others
from the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas. 13 In a number of ways this
theory resembles the structuralist approach to political culture; indeed it
may be seen as a derivative of it.l 4 Of greatest importance among these
similarities is the formalistic or universalistic quality of the theory, which,
in like manner, is in danger of seeming at best irrelevant and at worst
misleading when it is applied to concrete cases.
The theory, which has been developed by Wildavsky in several articles
and more fully set out in a recent book co-authored by him, Michael
Thompson and Richard Ellis, 15 draws its initial impetus from an argument
that sits comfortably with the phenomenological approach to political
culture that we have advanced in preceding chapters. This is Wildavsky's
argument that, while 'the politics of interests is the mainstay of political
science', the construal of interests as unanalyzable 'givens' by economics
and its derivative, rational choice theory, is unwarranted. Interests should
instead, he argues, be defined as 'preferences' that emerge out of social
relations and people's participation in politics: '[people's] continuing
reinforcement, modification, and rejection of existing power relations
teaches them what to prefer'. Wildavsky defines 'cultures' as groups
possessing a distinct set of preferences, requiring others against which to
define themselves, again suggesting the phenomenological analysis, though
without using that word. 16 In Cultural Theory, this view is considerably
142 The Concept of Political Culture

expanded. Not only are interests denied the status of 'givens', but so are
'myths of nature' (that is, views of the bountifulness or otherwise of
nature), views of human nature, and perceptions of needs and resources
(cbs. 1, 2). Thus a culture is a coherent set of biases and patterns of
behaviour which is typified and perpetuated by what amounts to a distinct
rationality.
Somewhat provocatively, the authors describe their analysis as 'func-
tional'. This has the unfortunate result of forcing them to defend their
account against the well-known objections to functional explanation that
it incorporates 'illegitimate teleology' and makes an implicit assumption
of homeostasis (cbs. 10, 11). The defence consists in the claim that
such objections are valid only against functionalism as applied to whole
societies, when it unwarrantably obscures the existence of conflict and
change. In the new theory, culture is explicitly separated from societies or
countries, each country being seen as having only a particular combination
of culturesP When applied to 'ways of life' or cultures within societies,
attention is, on the contrary, directed to conflict and change, in the form
of the process of rivalry between the cultures. 'Functionalism', then, is
supposed to refer only to the logical interconnections between preferences,
interests, views of nature, views of human nature and conceptions of
needs and resources, and to the contribution each of these makes to the
perpetuation of a distinct way of life. We will see, however, that in the
particular form taken by the claim that cultures require each other for
self-definition, a hint of societal functionalism is present, to damaging
effect.
That claim of reciprocal dependence in its own right is, of course, con-
sistent with a phenomenological analysis, and indeed 'phenomenological'
would be a more accurate label than 'functional' for the analysis as
presented thus far. This is, however, only the first phase of the argument
made by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky. Its second and more distinctive
phase is the claim that there is only a limited number of 'viable' ways of
life: five, to be exact.
The basis for this claim lies in Douglas's theory of the 'grid' and the
'group'. Douglas posits two 'dimensions of social control': the degree of
prescriptivity or grid dimension, which specifies whether prescriptions and
constraints are numerous, and the degree of collectivity or group dimen-
sion, which specifies whether group boundaries are weak or strong. From
these two dimensions is derived a four-place matrix of cultures or ways of
life, each defining itself in contrast with its opposite along each dimension.
The four cultures are termed (in the most recent version) 'egalitarian',
'hierarchical', 'individualistic' and 'fatalistic'. The fifth viable culture is
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 143

the antithesis of all these, in a sense a 'special case': the way of life of the
'hermit'.
The implications of the proposed limitation in number of viable cultures
are considerable. As Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky put it:

Anyone who sets out to draw parallels between one culture and another
(or, loftier still, to formulate a universal generalization about human
behavior) is liable to have those whose stock-in-trade is the deep-seated
peculiarities of a society or organization immediately step in with the
anthropologist's veto: 'Not in my tribe.' Om aim is to override this
veto by showing that although nations and neighborhoods, tribes and
races, have their distinctive sets of values, beliefs, and habits, their basic
convictions about life are reducible to only a few cultural biases. By
limiting the number of viable ways of life, we contend, one can rescue
the study of culture from the practitioners of 'spiteful ethnography',
who conceive of culture solely as a means to invalidate social science
theories. (pp. 4f.)

A number of arguments are marshalled in support of the proposed

typology. Its fecundity is illustrated, the authors assert, by a 'wide and
impressive body of applications' (p. 14). This support is rendered doubtful,
however, when some of these 'applications' are examined. The work of
Arthur Asa Berger is a case in point. His collections Political Culture
and Public Opinion and Agitpop: Political Culture and Communication
Theory gather accounts (in the first case by other writers, in the second
by himself) of popular culture as diverse as the description of the creation
of the Washington Vietnam Veterans Memorial and semiotic analysis of
its function, an analysis of graffiti by homeless youth, and dissections of
a music video and the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Terminator. 18
Whatever the merits of the individual analyses (and some of them are
certainly thought-provoking), only the most cursory editorial justification
is offered for placing them under headings derived from Wildavsky's
categories. The categories offer little to the analyses. In this respect, the
typology, like the structuralist idea of binary opposition, appears to be
not merely available, but promiscuously so, to an extent that threatens to
discredit it.
The same point can be made about the more general justification
offered by the authors for their four-place typology (ignoring, as the
&uthors frequently do, the special case of the hermit's way of life), that
it comprehends and better accounts for numerous existing typologies.
A theory that claims to comprehend not merely several of the many
144 The Concept of Political Culture

typologies presented by existing political culture research (cbs. 12-14),

but also such broad typologies as Marx's distinction of feudal and capitalist
society (p. 155) and Weber's distinction of 'traditional', 'legal-rational'
and 'charismatic' types of authority (pp. 162-164), must either be one of
the most striking achievements in the history of thought or be subject to
the suspicion of banality. Perhaps the expansion of the explanatory scope
of a theory may reach a point of diminishing returns.
However, these arguments do not address the central justification pro-
posed for the typology, which is of a distinctively formal nature. That is,
the very form of the typology is held to be its main strength. The authors
make much of the 'asymmetric' nature of other typologies, and the fact that
some of them are not derived from the interaction of dimensions. In a field
where, as was observed in the Introduction, typologies have proliferated,
sometimes to no discernible benefit, some consideration of the criteria of
a good typology is certainly in order. But the insistence on 'symmetry'
and 'dimensionality' is unjustified. Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky make
a distinction between explanation and labelling, arguing that only when
the types derive from the interaction of dimensions is the former, that is,
a causal account, achieved: 'A single dimension is insufficient to compel
anything. It is the organizational imperatives created by the interaction
of the grid and group dimensions that compel people to behave in ways
that maintain their way of life' (p. 262). But if the dimensions themselves
are mere labels, bow does their interaction transcend description? If the
distinction between high and low levels of prescriptivity on the 'grid'
dimension is not in itself explanatory, why does it become so when
combined with the perpendicular 'group' dimension? Why, for that matter,
may not a third dimension, or more, be added? The addition of the category
of 'hermit' may indeed be seen as introducing a third dimension. But this
upsets the 'symmetry' of the Wildavsky typology, by which the authors
assert its superiority over others. In general, it appears that an aesthetic
judgement of the typology's formal elegance is substituted for a scientific
judgement of its usefulness.
The claim that cultures require opposites against which to define them-
selves, which as its stands is phenomenologically valid, becomes dubious
when the number of cultures is restricted, and moreover leads to an
important contradiction in the theory. The authors note the dynamic
nature of their theory; they allow for 'migration' from one culture to
another, prompted by 'surprises', that is the discovery that 'the world
as it is' does not in crucial respects 'fit' the cultural model (p. 69).
They give the analogy of a flock of starlings, each bird having to move
constantly in order to keep the flock intact ( p. 84), 19 but the implication
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 145

of this claim is that all four cultures need to be present if any of them are
to be. Thus a claim to societal functionalism is implicit. Not only does this
undermine the authors' defence of their variant of functionalism, it makes
the application of the typology to concrete cases highly problematic. The
capacity of the grid/ group typology to absorb all existing characterizations
and typologies of political culture is touted as one of its strengths, but in
order for it to do so, the claim of mutual dependence of the four cultures
has to be abandoned. This is true not only for small-scale accounts, such as
Edward Banfield's study of an Italian peasant community (pp. 223-227),
redescribed by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky in terms of 'fatalism'. It
is also true for countries as a whole, in keeping with Wildavsky's claim
that countries are typified by a certain distribution of cultures. Lucian
Pye's account of two political cultures in China (pp. 228f.), and Almond
and Verba's of the three components of the civic culture in the United
States (pp. 247-258)2° provide examples of studies that, viewed through
the lens of the grid/ group typology, reveal incomplete sets of cultures.
These findings, if they are to be so reinterpreted, indicate that the claim
that each culture needs its opposites in order to exist must be false. But
that claim derives from the fundamental structuralist basis of the theory
- it cannot easily be discarded. A tension thus appears between the
phenomenologically plausible claim of reciprocal cultural definition and
the formalistic and basically structuralist insistence that only four cultures
are viable.
That the four cultures really are fundamental to the theory may be
demonstrated by looking at how Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky treat
a typology of American political culture that superficially bears a strong
resemblance to theirs, namely Daniel Elazar's. As we saw in Chapter
4, Elazar argues that American political culture is a synthesis of three
subcultures: 'individualistic', 'moralistic' and 'traditionalistic', whose cen-
tral concepts, respectively, are the marketplace, the commonwealth, and
hierarchy. He describes the geographical distribution of these subcultures,
the result, he says, of migrations of their original bearers.zt Thompson,
Ellis and Wildavsky criticize this analysis on two counts (the number of
applications it has generated not appearing to provide immunity). One is
that the categories are wrongly specified, some being translatable into
Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky's, others requiring disaggregation (the
'moralistic' culture of Massachusetts, for instance, is found to contain
both 'hierarchical' and 'egalitarian' elements - p. 240). The other is the
formalistic argument that Elazar's types are differentiated not in terms
of underlying dimensions, but in terms of their concrete manifestations:
that is, their geographical distribution (pp. 240f.). They are thus instances
146 The Concept of Political Culture

of mere 'labelling'. The redescription of Elazar's categories in terms of

the four cultures is supposed not merely to provide a more differentiated
and accurate description, but also an explanation, which follows from the
'compulsion' inherent in the interaction of the two dimensions. Elazar's
historical and hence contingent explanation of the presence of the three
subcultures is superseded by an ahistorical and formal claim that four
cultures must necessarily exist.
Thus the theory has some self-destructive contradictions. It is dynamic
without being historical. It is phenomenological without being concrete.
It posits a universal condition that is patently not met in specific cases.
This does not mean, however, that it is without application. A revealing
assertion by Wildavsky is that the limit of four cultures is generous by
the standard of the usual political dichotomy of left and right.22 This
suggests that the greatest utility of the grid/ group typology might lie in
the analysis of policy preferences and groupings in electoral politics. It
is not only more discriminating than the left/right dichotomy, but in its
phenomenological or 'functional' aspect makes more explicit than that
dichotomy the linkages between different policy preferences and between
preferences and lifestyles. But as a tool of policy analysis, the grid/ group
typology becomes itself mired in cultural specificity. Its grand ambitions
then have to be exchanged for the less impressive though still significant
purpose of analyzing electoral politics, in particular of demonstrating the
interconnection of social, economic and environmental political issues.23
Even here, however, the formalism and resulting abstractness of the
theory may prove its undoing. Wildavsky has derided the insistence
that cultures be attached to whole societies as 'nominalism' ,24 with the
implication that just because a society has a name does not mean that it
has a culture. While not endorsing the view that cultures do necessarily
attach to societies and not to subgroups, the phenomenological argument
counters that dismissal. If the attribution of a national, tribal or more
generally 'cultural' label were merely an act of the observer, 'nominalism'
- reserving the denotation 'culture' for such named groups - would be
arbitrary. When, however, the act of naming is seen primarily as an act
of the group itself or of its elite, one with potential significance for
the political demands that are pressed on the basis of identity, and one
which might reflect the group's or its elite's own (phenomenological)
response to its history in relation to other groups, 'nominalism' assumes
great descriptive utility. What is more generally implied is that the
concrete processes of group formation and reciprocal definition may
tell us much more than the abstract framework of grid and group. The
phenomenological perspective invites such concrete investigation: that
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 147

is why it is in fundamental conflict with formalism, structuralism and

idealism.

THE HISTORIANS

Political culture research intersects with historiography in a number of

ways. Within comparative political science, even when political culture is
characterized mainly through survey data, historical findings are frequently
alluded to by way of consolidation of the descriptions gleaned from surveys,
or indeed by way of accounting for the results they demonstrate. In the
comparative use within communist studies, we saw, the relative scarcity
of survey data led to a much more central use of historical data in
accounts such as Stephen White's of Russian political culture. Even
in this case, however, no claim was made to novel historical insight;
White explicitly says of his use of historical findings that it 'reflects the
scholarly consensus'. These cases represent the use of historical findings
for the purposes of comparative political culture research, and as is typical
of cross-disciplinary borrowings, the borrowers pay little attention to the
conflicts within or purposes of the donor discipline.
Although, like White, Robert Tucker (and for that matter Alfred Meyer,
whose usage is similar to Tucker's) makes the claim that Soviet political
culture is in large measure a conti!luation of Tsarist Russian political
culture, his purpose in making this claim is somewhat different. The
difference is an instance of a banal but nevertheless valid distinction
that may be made between historiography and political science: Tucker is
concerned less to explain the present than to describe the past To be sure,
his account of 'Stalinist political culture' involves explanatory claims,
contrary to his theoretical supposition that political culture may be useful
'without explaining anything', and in part these are indeed claims, similar
to White's, of cultural continuity. But Tucker's account involves more than
this, as we saw in Chapter 5; it also concerns itself with the novel aspects
of Stalinist politics, such as its impact on the arts and sciences, and is amply
aware of the novelty of the scope of the Stalinist imposition on society.
Somewhat modifying and expanding Tucker's analysis to present it in its
most distinctive light, we saw that it is an attempt at the thick description of
Stalinist politics; we saw that 'political culture' is held to be an apt term not
only because of the presence of cultural lag, but also because the Stalinist
attempt at culture-building in all its comprehensiveness and radicalism can
be supposed to have a meaning for its agents and victims - to be a culture
in its own right It is true that such thick description is vulnerable to
148 The Concept of Political Culture

idealist excess; the description that is meaningful for the analyst might
not reflect what is meaningful for the participants. The thick deset?ption we
elaborated in Chapter 5, moreover, was guilty of this excess. Nevertheless,
the attempt is what distinguishes Tucker's approach from White's, making
it not simply a use of historical findings in political culture research, but a
use of political culture in the production of historical findings.
The potential offered by the concept of political culture for historians
has been most fully taken up in American historiography. Within the
study of American political history by American historians we can trace
in microcosm many of the issues that we have been pursuing at a more
general level throughout this book. This is one reason why it is convenient
to end with a survey of American historiography's use of political culture.
The more important reason, however, is that in the most sophisticated uses
one can see grounds for reborrowing by political scientists of the concept
originally borrowed from them. And the grounds for saying that certain
uses are the most sophisticated, we will see, recall the phenomenological
analysis of political culture that we have been advancing.
It would be naive to say that historians, or indeed any researchers,
approach their subject matter free of hypotheses or theoretical frameworks,
not to mention political preferences, that in some manner delimit or
constrain their investigations. Nevertheless it is obviously true that a
researcher investigating the past with the tool of political culture is much
less constrained than one investigating it with a view to justifying this
or that theory of comparative politics. One very important result of this
difference is in the degree of openness each displays to the possibility that
political culture might change. This possibility, we have seen, although
it is acknowledged in the comparative politics use of political culture,
is somewhat played down, as it needs to be if the main instrument of
comparative explanation - cultural lag - is to be effective. Historians
investigating the political cultures of the past labour under no such
constraint. Something similar can be said about the possibility of variations
in political culture across space. Again, political scientists frequently make
prefatory remarks about 'subcultures', but equally frequently fail to follow
these up, revealing the nature of these remarks as hedging clauses. This is
not so say that historians are uninterested either in cultural continuity or
in similarities across cultures. But it does make clear why historians who
contradict such claims feel no apparent embarrassment in doing so under
the rubric of political culture, and hence why historiographical uses, even
if we restrict ourselves to the American context, show such wide variety.
In what, then, does this variety consist? We will approach this question
by describing a series of characteristics of American historiography's use of
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 149

political culture. These are not shared characteristics; we will progressively

narrow the field by converging on the characteristics of the most sophisti-
cated uses, by which is meant not only the most theoretically self-conscious
uses, but also those that derive the greatest explanatory advantage from the
concept. In the first place, we may observe that the comparative politics
notion that political cultures are relative to nations is far from absent in
the historiographical use. Perhaps, indeed, the majority of historiographical
uses make reference to or imply an 'American political culture'. This is not.
however, done for comparative purposes, in the sense of using this object
to explain the divergence of the American outcome from other outcomes to
a common stimulus or situation. Such descriptions are what we may term
'inclusive', then, without necessarily being comparative.
Inclusive descriptions of political culture often have a purely prefatory
character: they are used to refer to the area of study without making a
substantial contribution to the research method or indeed the elucidation
of findings. This is also true, of course, of many uses within political
science, uses that were characterized in the Introduction as casual. The
area of study to which reference is thereby made is American values,
ideology and political thought. without any specific commitment being
made to the investigation of these on the mass or any other level or by
any specific method. Many examples could be given, but an interesting
example of the inclusive use is Richard Hofstadter's, because in addition
to this casual use he also makes a more substantive one. In his Idea of
a Party System, a study of the growth of a tolerance for political parties
within an originally highly unfavourable context (illustrating, we may note
in passing, the ready acceptance by the historian of change in political
culture), Hofstadter says in his preface that his subject is a 'development
in American political culture'. This inclusive phrasing is shortly followed,
however, by the statement of his thesis, which is that the 'political culture
of the Albany regency' is the source of this development.25 This thesis is
amplified in the text in a description of the Albany regency's political
history and practices, and the 'New York philosophy' that emerged
along with them. 26 Thus a casual inclusive reference to political culture
is eombined with an investigation of the local and particular, change issuing
from the latter being seen as the source of a 'development' of the former.
Localism, then, is a characteristic found in some historiographical uses
of political culture, sometimes, indeed, in combination with inclusiveness.
Many examples of such localism could be cited. In some cases, its purpose
is to throw light on the more general environment. as, for instance, in the
work of Ronald Formisano, perhaps the leading exponent of this 'case
study' method. Formisano' s description of Massachusetts' political culture
150 The Concept of Political Culture

is explicitly aimed at describing at this detailed level changes that he takes

to be general- changes in the same area broached by Hofstadter, that of the
development of party politics.27 A more extreme example is John Brooke's
examination of political culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts. No
claim is made of the representativeness of this county for the purposes of
Brooke's account; indeed, he states that it is the site of a 'dramatic and
unique concentration of political insurgencies' for much of the period of his
study. 28 Nevertheless, his theme- oscillations between the dominance of
alternative liberal and republican visions of American politics- is of great
generality. His book, for all its narrowness of scope, is thus a contribution
to the debate between liberal and republican interpretations of American
political history, a debate that in our terms is certainly inclusive. Another
example of extreme narrowness of investigative scope is Robert Kelley's
study of the history of flood control efforts in the Sacramento Valley,
California. Here we have not only a small region but also a debate highly
constrained as to its subject. Kelley nevertheless insists that the politics of
flood control illustrates larger themes in American political culture.29
Attention is sometimes focused on a locality for the latter's intrinsic
interest, although in such cases more general implications are usually
implicit. Philip VanderMeer's study of Indiana's political culture, and
Robert Weir's of South Carolina, are examples of this approach.3o Weir's
account, in particular, cannot help but have general implications, precisely
because of the distinctiveness of the political culture of South Carolina.
This state preserved a political environment that was hostile to parties far
longer than any other state, but the peculiarity of its politics led not to
its marginalization but instead to its leading role in the secession of the
South.
If the inclusive characterization of political culture merely orients the
reader as to the area of investigation - values, political thought, ideology
and so forth- what is the purpose of political cultural localism? In some
cases, it is just the same. For Formisano, for example, political culture
consists of 'all those parts of a culture which are political', especially
the taken-for-granted components.3 1 It is, he has written elsewhere, 'an
inclusive term referring to the "givens" and implicit values of a polity
seen as a whole' .32 With such a view, political culture may be studied as
easily in microcosm as macrocosm, so long as the microcosm is sufficiently
representative. But this case study method is not the only possible ground
for examining political culture at the local level. In fact, two other grounds
present themselves, though they are not always explicitly stated in the
examples we are considering. One of these is that at the local level it is
more likely that a distinct way of life of which the political culture is a
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 151

part will be observable. The other is that the very self-consciousness of the
inhabitants of the locality as a separate group may be politically significant.
Both of these grounds recall the arguments we have been making in other
chapters.
Several examples of the use by American historians of political culture
as a means of describing a local way of life have recently appeared. The
prediction made in 1964 that the most fruitful direction for historical
research would be towards 'retrospective cultural anthropology' appears,
as Kelley has observed, to have been fulfilled. 33 It is true, in the light of our
examination of anthropology in Chapter 6, that this suggestion looks like
another instance of the simplifying effect of cross-disciplinary borrowing;
however, if historians, being already attuned to the possibility of change,
have avoided the disorienting effects that change in the form of urbaniz-
ation has had on the holistic definition of culture within anthropology, that
is so much the better for them. The claims made by historians when they
point to a 'way of life' are in any case less grand than those made by the
early anthropologists. This is mainly because, like Thompson, Ellis and
Wildavsky, whose theory also needed to be defended against criticisms
that had been made of anthropological holism, they make no assumption
that a way oflife need be coextensive with a society. In the very narrowness
of their focus the historians avoid the charge levelled at anthropological
holism that the notion of a way of life precludes the possibility of conflict
or change.
Hofstadter's description of the political life of the Albany regency might
be seen as a tentative move in this direction, but its scope remains quite
narrow in that only the political aspects of the lives of certain political
activists are considered. A fuller illustration of the historian's idea of a way
of life is provided by Kenneth Greenberg's study of the impact of slavery
on the political culture of the antebellum South. 34 Greenberg argues that
the master-slave relationship was 'paralleled' by political relations among
Southern whites and between the South and the North. Greenberg's account
is a thick description of Southern politics, but he averts idealist excess by
providing ample evidence that matters were perceived in these terms by the
participants. He argues, for instance, that the oratorical and honour-seeking
style of the Southern statesman reflected the relationship he aspired to
have with his slaves - that of unbridgeable social distance combined with
trust and respect. Similarly, the longer survival, in South Carolina espe-
cially, of the principle of virtual as opposed to actual representation both
justified and was sustained by the claim of harmony of interest between
master and slaves. 35 Underlying all of this was what another historian has
called 'The Fear' - fear of the ultimate uprising of the slaves. The fear
152 The Concept of Political Culture

of enslavement was, Greenberg suggests, an overt and powerful motor

of the Southern politician's striving for political independence from party
and from the North. Apart from drawing these metaphorical connections
Greenberg pays much attention to more direct effects of social structure,
such as the impact of the lower level of urbanization on the plausibility
of the claim of Southern unity. Thus, 'slavery in the antebellum South
was intimately connected to a distinct set of political values and practices.
Ultimately, these values and practices - this political culture of slavery -
helped shape the form and content of conflict with the North.' 36
In a similar vein is the description of Southern political culture provided
by Anne Norton.37 Norton differs in paying less attention to slavery and
more to the agrarian lifestyle in general. Its effects, she holds, were to
perpetuate the notion of republican virtue through the fact of greater mutual
independence and, in the annual rhythm of agriculture, to facilitate periods
of leisure, much misunderstood by the North, in which politics could be
practised. Norton, like several of the authors we have mentioned, is
concerned to relate her account to the debate between liberal and republican
interpretations of American political thought, and specifically argues that
the deficiency of each has been its claim to inclusiveness. Louis Hartz's
liberal tradition thesis dismissed the political thought of the South as a
mere 'deviation', while in tum the republican revision has substituted a
new cultural monolith. 38 Along with Greenberg, Norton argues that the
South's way of life enabled classical republican values and political style
to persist there far longer than they did in the North.39 Here we may see
how the use of political culture to describe a way of life can contradict
more inclusive uses of the term.
The American South is, of course, a rather large locality; large enough
for objections to be made to its being said to have a single political culture
or way of life. Both Greenberg and Weir pay particular attention to South
Carolina, because that state represented the most extreme manifestation of
Southern culture, but it follows that the picture is less clear elsewhere.
How may inclusiveness at this level be justified? Part of the answer lies
in the fact that, for all its internal diversity, the South did come to define
itself in opposition to the North- in short, the Civil War took place. Here
we begin to converge on a final characteristic of the historiographical
use of political culture, that of reciprocality. What is emphasized by
uses with this characteristic is the idea that cultures are defined through
the process of opposition. Norton, for instance, writes of 'a network of
meaning [created] through the articulation of difference' .40 Thus the fact
that the plantation economy was far from universal in the antebellum South,
that rivalry between 'upcountry' yeoman farmers and 'lowland' planters
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 153

was widespread, that in some states urbanization and its concomitant

socioeconomic differentiation proceeded much further than it did in South
Carolina, that in general there was at least one 'other South', does not
necessarily tell against the idea of Southern political culture. For all its
diversity, the South was sufficiently different from the North to come to
define itself in terms of these differences. Thus, for these historians, it is not
simply that the South is, in Josiah Joyce's terminology, a 'province', 'part
of a national domain, which is, geographically and socially, sufficiently
unified to have a true consciousness of its own unity, to feel a pride in its
own ideas and customs, and to possess a sense of its distinction from other
parts of the country' .41 They do not simply regard southern distinctness as
a natural fact, but in part as a function of opposition. To be sure, opposition
cannot get started without some original criteria of distinctness, but these
were clearly present in the South, notwithstanding its internal diversity.
There is, in other words, a dynamic relationship between the process of
opposition and the criteria of distinctness adopted and promoted by the
opposing groups. What John Shelton Reed bas called the South's 'sense
of grievance' and 'siege mentality' needs to be taken into account in the
description of its political culture.42
Within American historiography several studies which emphasize recip-
rocality have appeared in recent years. It is an emphasis which need not
be restricted to the rivalry between North and South. Weir, for instance,
in an essay on South Carolinian political culture in the revolutionary era,
suggests that the revolution itself may be partly expl~ned in terms of
the development of a 'contraculture' in the colonies as a reaction to the
'metropolitan culture' of Britain, the latter having been manifested not just
in the assertion of political hegemony but in the style and tone adopted by
British governors and emissaries. He draws an analogy from social psy-
chology: 'Abrupt juxtaposition of the metropolitan culture and provincial
subcultures dramatized the differences between them, and the experience
appears to have been as painful for many local leaders as adolescence is for
some twentieth-century youths.' 43 In nineteenth-century American politics,
a second major rivalry, cutting across that between North and South, was
that between the two major parties in a succession of 'party systems': the
Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans, the Whigs and the Jacksonian
Democrats, and the Republicans and the Democrats. The study of the
'second party system' of Whigs and Democrats bas been the beneficiary
of two of the most fully developed historiographical applications of the
concept of political culture, by Dfuliel Walker Howe and Jean Baker.44
Howe's and Baker's accounts are distinguished both by a concern to
trace the whole complex of extrapolitical values and way of life found
154 The Concept of Political Culture

among leaders and adherents to these respective parties and by a sensitivity

to the formative effects of the opposition process. As it happens, they also
demonstrate the fullest familiarity with theoretical debates on political
culture, though this has not prevented them from extending the use of the
concept in fruitful ways. Howe's method is to investigate Whig political
culture by concentrating on the activities of its leaders, but his is far
from a conventional account of elite-level politics. He emphasizes the
connections between the Whigs' policies of strong government, tariff and
internal improvement and their broader culture of 'aggressive didacticism',
'Victorian values', anti-masonry and pro-temperance. 45 Their preoccupation
with social control was intimately linked, Howe asserts, with their concern
for self-control. Baker discusses the inculcation of the 'partisan culture'
of the Northern democrats in family, school and party itself. She also
concentrates on specific individuals: 'the life history', she says, 'becomes
the historian's completed questionnaire' .46 The Democrats opposed central
authority and stood for the sovereignty of the states and the people.
Their disposition was to support the humble against the arrogant and the
entrenched. Despite being the source of the newer understanding of party
that derived from Van Buren's circle, the Democrats continued to think
of themselves as a 'movement', expressed by their use of the term 'the
Democracy'. Their rallies had a militaristic quality, and the now familiar
militaristic language of politics as a 'battle' requiring 'enlistment' and
'mobilization' originated in Democratic electioneering.47
It is noteworthy that Howe's and Baker's studies reveal a good deal of
similarity between the two sides. For instance, both adopted pessimistic
republican rhetoric while somewhat contradictorily expressing an opti-
mistic view of time as progress. Both began with a sceptical view of
political parties as expressions of faction that undermined the common
good. Yet bitter and prolonged conflict between them occurred. Howe and
Baker enable us to see that this was not simply a product of confusion,
as Hartz's placing of both sides within the 'liberal tradition' implies. 48
Fundamental differences in lifestyle were involved, and on that basis the
conflict itself served to reinforce party identity. The similarity of their
rhetoric - the Whigs in republican fashion criticized Jackson as 'King
Andrew' for his Bank veto while the Democrats in tum made a republican
critique of corruption in Whig relations with financial interests - belies
profound differences in the uses to which it was being put, which included
reinforcement of party identities. The development of a more positive
attitude towards party politics and the use of republican rhetoric were both
aspects of 'American political culture', but they also took place within a
context defined by the opposition of two distinct political cultures.
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 155

The reconciliation of, on the one hand, the inclusive description of

American political culture and, on the other, the emphasis on local
ways of life and on the reciprocal relations between cultures may be
best approached through the work of historian Robert Kelley. 49 Kelley
takes his approach, which he terms 'cultural political history', to combine
the best features of the 'new political history' or etbnohistory and the
more traditional form of intellectual history practiced pre-eminently by
Hofstadter. The latter concentrated on political elites, but the former, with
its emphasis on quantification and on local political contexts, is guilty of
the opposite bias, eschewing links to national politics.5° The analysis that
Kelley's cultural history provides contains all of the features that we have
been discussing hereto. His conception of American political culture is that
it features a continuing rivalry between what he calls the 'host culture' and
the 'outgroups'. A link is thereby effected between the familiar structure
of party conflict in the successive party systems and the newly discovered
environment of ethnic politics at the local level. The core of the host
culture consists of descendants of the English, based in New England
and politically active through the Federalist party and its successors the
Whigs and the Republicans. The outgroups consist of successive waves of
immigrants, bringing with them ethnic hostility to the English and finding a
welcoming home among the Jeffersonian Republicans and their successors.
Thus American political culture is made up of an ongoing bipolar conflict
that in turn can be analyzed as the aggregate manifestation of a series of
ethnic rivalries.
Kelley's claim to have blended traditional and newer historical under-
standings may be somewhat overconfident. Baker, indeed, distances her
approach from that of the new political history, arguing that the latter
obscures the existence of what she calls 'partisan', as opposed to ethnic,
cultures; and Howe similarly points out that ethnohistory is an incomplete
guide to the culture of the Whigs. Historical ethnic rivalries may stimulate
the construction of a political rivalry, but they do not necessarily exhaust
it. Kelley, to a large extent, seems to adopt a view of ethnicity as primordial,
whereas we have seen that it, like other criteria of identity, needs to be
seen as a product of social construction, in the same way that Baker
and Howe view the political cultures of Democrats and Whigs. On the
other hand, his extension of the label of ethnic group to poor white
Southerners indicates a more fluid use of the term, tantamount in this
case simply to 'culture'. With this understanding, no distinction would
be possible, for instance, between the 'ethnic' sources of Whig politics
and those outlined by Howe. The false assumption that rigidly distinct
aetiologies can be provided for ethnicity and culture appears to underlie
156 The Concept of Political Culture

Formisano's criticism of Kelley's 'fusion' of the two, a criticism that

ignores Kelley's own nods in the direction of this assumption. Formisano
is more on target when he alleges that '[Kelley's] understanding of
how community context creates variations in social group or subcul-
tural alignments is minimal if not absent' .51 This judgement, however,
suggests only the incompleteness of Kelley's ambitious synopsis, not
its erroneousness. It provides a framework into which later and more
detailed accounts of partisan ways of life and the construction of partisan
identities such as Howe's and Baker's may, without too much strain, be
inserted.
This synthesis is usefully brought to bear in Kelley's account of the
politics of flood control in the Sacramento Valley. The problem faced
by residents, landowners and politicians in the valley was the propensity
of the Sacramento River to flood over a wide area at quite frequent
intervals. The problem was exacerbated by the growth of the hydraulic
gold-mining industry, which produced vast quantities of mine tailings that
clogged the river system, making flooding more likely and more damaging.
This 'objective' problem might appear to call for an 'objective' solution,
but it is the thrust of Kelley's argument that quite different world-views
were brought to it by the Democrats and the Whig-Republicans, making
different 'solutions' look natural and obvious. The Whig-Republicans had
a deep trust in experts, and favoured large-scale government interven-
tion, even though the solutions proposed by experts were consistently
inadequate. The Democrats, on the other hand, distrusted experts and
intervention, regarding the problem as one best solved on the local
level, a view that resulted in a destructive and futile competition to
build ever-higher levees. Through what in retrospect can be seen as
a fifty-year process of trial and error, the correct solution was finally
reached, but the open-minded empiricism suggested by that phrase was
absent from most of the debates of the period. In highly concrete terms,
Kelley demonstrates not only the persistence over generations of 'distinc-
tive policy potentials', but shows how they relate to the broader values and
ways of life of the opposing sides. Not only that, but in describing the direct
effects which the activities of each side had on the other, in the tangible
form of ruptured dams and levees and flooded farms, Kelley provides
us with an example of literal, down-to-earth construction of opposing
identities.
Kelley's explanation of his use of the concept of political culture
provides a helpful guide to the relationship between the conceptions of
political culture that we have been discussing. Political culture, he says,
is not simply the story of everyday politics. He continues:
 New Trends in Political Culture Research 157

A useful analogy could be the difference between reporting the flow of

play in a particular sporting event and describing the larger framework
that sets up its overall nature: the rules of the game; the contrasting ideas
about it, even its purpose in the larger scheme of things, believed in by
the opposing coaches; the kinds of people the two teams tend to recruit.
their values, and their consequent style of play; who their traditional
'enemy' is, toward whom they orient themselves; and their sense of
identity, of cobesion.s2

Inclusive descriptions of American political culture are concerned with

the rules of the game. For Louis Hartz, these rules were extremely rigid:
anyone who did not stay within the bounds of the 'liberal tradition' was
doomed to marginality. Following the republican revision, we have been
able to see that the repertoire of criticism was somewhat larger, but
the availability of a certain critical language is still one of the rules.
The teams playing within these rules in turn have their own distinctive
values and practices, partially constituted by their leaders, which are
reinforced by the competition between them. Where this analogy is a
little misleading, however, is in implying that the rules always exist prior
to the competition. In sport, that is true. Even in politics, it may seem
obvious that a competition such as the one over flood control in California
follows guidelines established nationally. But these broader guidelines
are themselves established in a series of identity-defining competitions,
of which the most important for the case we are considering is the
mid-nineteenth century 'Bank war'. In phenomenological terms, Kelley
'brackets' this fact for the purposes of his local investigation, that is, be
takes the opposing cultures as given at the national level. But in showing
bow the two cultures of Whig-Republicans and Democrats are not only
enacted but also reinforced by their conflict over flood control, his account
also indicates why this bracketing is necessarily provisional.
There is no reason in principle why political scientists may
not also emphasize reciprocality, providing findings that exploit the
phenomenological potential of political culture research. But it happens that
they have not done so. Elazar' s account of American political subcultures,
we have seen, is historical but nevertheless lacks a true grasp of historical
process. Its history is only that of migration, offering some explanation
of the distribution of subcultures, but scarcely addressing the question of
their origin. Analyses of American subcultures influenced by Almond and
Verba's approach fail in a similar way, since the only aetiology of political
culture admitted by this approach is cultural lag. 53 One might suggest
that the empirical bounty offered by the attitude survey bas encouraged
158 The Concept of Political Culture

behavioural political scientists to imagine they have the fullest conception

of political culture, and has distracted them from the more fertile modes
of inquiry to which historians have perforce been led.
On the other hand, juxtaposing the historians' use of political culture,
especially the most developed examples, with recent interpretive political
scientific uses influenced by structuralism makes clear the deficiencies
of the latter. The deficiencies of both structuralism and its derivative,
Wildavsky's 'culture theory', result from their extreme idealism, which
may be termed formalistic idealism. This involves what amounts to
disdain for historical contingency, an error, of course, to which historians
are for the most part professionally immune. Historical research takes
many forms, and some of its forms would certainly be vulnerable to the
opposite criticism, that the detail of the historical narrative obscures or
even prohibits general conclusions. Such is not the case in the examples
we have considered, however. Their use of political culture is such
as to admit a large range of data in its description, but not to the
exclusion of what in the best cases is a strong theoretical framework.
That framework, we have seen, incorporates many of the implications
of the phenomenological analysis of political culture. Like that analysis,
it denies the necessity of choosing between interests and culture as
explanations, instead using political culture to transcend that dichotomy.
Even in its points of deficiency, such as Kelley's partial assumption of the
primordial and unanalyzable nature of ethnic ties, it illustrates the utility
of the phenomenological analysis. And in keeping with the argument of
Chapter 7, it places emphasis on the construction of identity and meaning
through the process of opposition. Perhaps, in that last regard, it does
tell us something about the structure of the human mind, but it does
so much more richly and convincingly than the loose generalities of
structuralism. It provides what Schutz envisaged for phenomenological
social theory, a means of connecting the analyst's thick description with
the self-understandings of the participants, a connection that can only be
enhanced by more and more detailed empirical investigation of concrete
social and political processes.
Conclusion

As already observed, reports of the death of the concept of political culture

have been not only exaggerated, but diametrically wrong: it is more widely
used than ever, and has perhaps reached the stage of conceptual maturity,
where debates over definition are no longer prominent, and it is routinely
invoked as if there were no question as to its meaning or usefulness
- and not only by academic analysts. One might perhaps argue that
its routinization in the vocabulary of political scientists, commentators,
journalists and even politicians marks the ultimate indignity, demonstrating
only the concept's extreme vagueness and malleability - its having been
'stretched' to the point of fatigue. That argument would posit an inverse
relationship between a concept's degree of acceptance and its scholarly
interest. While this is not a particularly plausible general claim, it is worth
considering in the present case. This Conclusion aims to account for the
continued appeal of the concept of political culture and to summarize the
arguments of preceding chapters in order to show to what extent and in
what ways it is justified.
It was suggested in the Introduction that the issue of definition with
which theorists of political culture have been much concerned is something
of a red herring. The main organizing categories for the preceding argument
have been categories of use of the concept of political culture, though
we have also referred more vaguely to 'tendency' and 'potential'. These
categories, it is apparent, fail to provide a neat typology of political
culture research, if 'neat' is taken to mean mutually exclusive and single-
dimensional. But they have fulfilled what the Introduction described as the
main purpose of categorization, that is, providing a theoretical orientation
to a complex body of material. Assigning labels and differentiating types
is, however, only the first stage in analysis, despite the fact that in political
culture theory it has sometimes been seen as sufficient. Of much greater
interest and significance are the relationships between the categories and
the theoretical and philosophical foundations and assumptions of each. It
is these matters that the above argument has aimed to expose.
As anticipated in the Introduction, the multiplicity and incommens-
urability of the scholarly activities that have been undertaken under the
rubric of 'political culture' have meant that traversing the field of political
culture research bas involved many digressions and detours. Our theoretical
concerns have indeed necessitated looking at writings in which the term

159
160 Conclusion

'political culture' does not figure at all, although the concept is often
implied. Nevertheless, our journey across this jungle has been one journey,
following one route. An overly precise stipulation as to how political
culture research should be conducted, or what definition of political culture
should be used, cannot be the outcome of such a journey. Many, indeed,
are the attempts at this that have been made, only to be roundly ignored,
simply because the field of study is too large to admit of such constraint.
Despite this, the above argument does have certain implications, negative
and positive, for the future conduct of political culture research.
It has a number of negative implications concerning the prospects
for further development of comparative political culture research. The
comparative use of political culture is the most widespread use, ostensibly
providing a scientific means of investigating the common-sense perception
that, across nations, people differ in ways relevant to political outcomes.
We saw in Chapters 1 to 4 that this use encounters many problems. One is
its interference with the sociological use of the term. The damaging effects
of interference were illustrated by the case of Almond and Verba's The
Civic Culture; however, the issues raised by that case are quite general,
and are not to be resolved solely by assuming carelessness or excessive
ambition on the part of Almond and Verba. The sociological use, in
which political culture is investigated intranationally, exposes numerous
possibilities that make the comparative use difficult to sustain. Construing
political culture as a label for a field of study and not necessarily as a
variable, political sociologists have drawn attention to cleavages within
it and to their relationship to socioeconomic cleavages. The role of
political culture in contributing to the internal cohesion of the elite, the
possibility that it includes 'mystifications', and hence the function of 'the'
national culture (and academic analyses of it) in reinforcing domination are
thereby suggested. Modernization theory in its numerous variants presents
another instance of the sociological use of political culture, in which it is
related to stages of modernity. Here, too, conflict with the comparative
use appears, in the form of an unresolved division between 'world' and
national cultures, which arises in even the most sophisticated versions of
this sociological use.
When such conflict arises, we have seen, the comparative use is
invariably the weaker party, and political culture is thus gradually made
a residual category. The residue is never completely eliminated, however.
The continued presence of national differences prompts ad hoc references
to events in national history and hence to 'cultural factors' that, however
unscientific and hence embarrassing, seem to be unavoidable. The embar-
rassment here is really over the limitations of the comparative use, indeed
 Conclusion 161

of the comparative method in general. It cannot by definition deal with what

we have termed indexicality; indexical components of political culture are
not comparable. The problem does not end there: indexical components are
also susceptible to contestation over their meaning, as we saw from our East
European examples, casting fundamental doubt on the comparativist notion
of cultural lag.
None of this means that the 'sensitivity to context' of which political
culture research bas been both a token and a result should be aban-
doned. Indeed it is rendered all the more necessary by the discovery
that generalizations about the effect of context are dubious. The entry
of each new common stimulus, whether it be a multinational corporation
or Soviet-inspired communism, an investment programme by the World
Bank or the arrival of an academic team of advisors on electoral systems,
should be seen as a new experiment in political culture research. The
recommendation that follows is that if political culture is to be used as
an explanatory variable, comparisons must be much more specific than
they have typically been. Perhaps, over time, a body of comparisons of
the scale of Hofstede's will contribute to a more general characterization
of national or regional political cultures, but this equally well might not
occur, and should not be the goal of comparison. In some particular setting,
some values might be malleable, and some nol Perhaps the values which
communist regimes tried to change are resistant to change, or perhaps
they are resistant only to those methods - maybe even because of those
methods. It is not enough to disaggregate the components of political
culture, though doing this already makes the prospect of a cumulative
description of national political cultures recede. The further possibility
that values, attitudes, identities and in general culture may be a response
to a political setting, like the dissidents' now-receding elaboration of the
idea of 'Central Europe', in other words the dynamic nature of political
culture must also be acknowledged.
Our argument also provides a platform for criticism of interpretive
political culture research, although here the issues are confused by the
fact that interpretivism itself draws, not always consciously or without
contradiction, from the phenomenological tradition that provides the criti-
cal platform. The target of criticism is what we have termed the idealist
tendency of interpretivism. We have taken idealism to refer not to the
general claim of the paramountcy of ideas, but to the claim, explicit or
implicit, of the paramountcy of the analyst's ideas. Thick description, we
have seen, places decisive emphasis on the interpretive achievement of
the analyst. We need only recall Alfred Meyer's assertion, recorded in
the Introduction, that culture is distinguished not by its contents but by
162 Conclusion

a 'manner of ordering and viewing' them to see the influence of such

an emphasis on the interpretive use of political culture. The error of
idealism consists in mistaking the interpretive richness of a description for
its truth. To be sure, investigating the ideas of the participants, such as those
manifested in the arts and sciences in the Stalinist Soviet Union, is likely
to contribute to greater insight on the part of the investigator, but there is
always a danger of that insight being over-extended. This is what happens
in the case of the hypothesis of atomization; it is an a priori hypothesis of
great interpretive richness which we nevertheless find in at least one case
to be untrue. Phenomenology provides a means of avoiding this danger
by its strong emphasis on the concrete process of meaning-construction,
though in a sense it also admits its own culpability by arguing that thick
description is a second-order effect of this first-order process. Restoring
the phenomenological basis of interpretivism enables us to return the cart,
with Geertz as passenger, to its proper place behind the horse.
Exposing and elaborating upon the phenomenological potential of
interpretivism does two things: it accounts for many of the prob-
lems that have arisen in the various uses of political culture and
more generally for the vacuity of the debate between cultural and
interest- or structure-based explanation; and it also refocuses political
culture research on a new range of phenomena at a new empirical
level.
The fundamental posture of phenomenological social theory, indeed
of phenomenology in general, is the claim that the social environment
through which people move is constituted and made meaningful by them.
It denies the 'givenness' of any part of that environment. Although
phenomenological justifications are implicit, and sometimes explicit, in
some anthropological uses of the concept of culture, and hence, through
Geertz's influence, in some political scientific and historiographical writ-
ings too, phenomenological social theory is not, in fact, a theory of
culture. Indeed, the concept of culture is not much used by the classic
phenomenological social theorists we have considered. The reason for this
is that phenomenological perspective denies the 'givenness' and asserts
the 'constructedness' of all social objects. Thus it denies the duality of
culture and its various supposed ontological opposites, 'structure', 'power',
'interests' or 'objective circumstances'. Culture is not itself any more a
'phenomenological' notion than these others. In this way phenomenology
transcends the question of the superiority of explanations with any of these
'objects' as their basis. It suggests that this debate is as meaningful as one
in physics would be over whether electrons are best regarded as particles
or waves.
 Conclusion 163

What, then, does it mean to introduce the concept of culture to phe-

nomenology, or to approach culture in a phenomenological manner? In a
sense, it involves a restriction of the scope of phenomenology, or at least a
specification of the level at which we are applying it. Only a subset of the
typifications of which Schutz speaks could be awarded the denomination
'culture'. Phenomenological social theory, we saw from Schutz's examples
of social roles - 'passenger, consumer, taxpayer, reader, bystander' - does
not distinguish between evanescent and more stable roles, and between
ones with and without political significance. Our analysis, in contrast,
has made such a distinction, and has marked it with the denomination
'culture'.
The concept of 'interest group' represents interests as objectively given
and not related to self-understanding or other aspects of meaningful
context, and hence provides only a 'thin' description. The concept of
culture offers the advantage of relating interests to identity. Just as a
role is not necessarily a culture, neither, necessarily, is an interest group.
In the language of political science, an interest group may be a fleeting
and minimally coherent association of individuals, such as the opponents
of a road-building proposal. The members might not know each other.
But suppose that such an association broadens its interests, becomes more
cohesive, its members establishing a common life together in a process
of opposition, becoming perhaps an environmental or local autonomist
movement. In that event it is clear that the label 'interest group' would
be somewhat lacking in descriptive richness - in fact to apply it, as the
group's opponents might, would have become an act of derogation. The
group would instead be a culture.
Thus, while 'interest groups' are differentiated only by their interests,
cultures are differentiated by a variety of phenomena, the distinctiveness
of which gives rise to an identity, enabling a role to be constituted as an
interest group. Thus the advantage of the denotation 'culture' is that, on
the one hand, a social role that is described as a culture is one that, on the
basis of its identity, can be seen as proceeding to assert itself in the political
arena; and, on the other hand, an interest group that is described as a culture
is thereby provided with a plausible and enriched aetiology, drawn not from
some claim of objective interests individually perceived, but from the kinds
of phenomenological perspective we have been discussing.
The restriction we have made in the scope of phenomenology therefore
consists precisely in its application to political settings. Tucker, we saw,
argued that Almond was wrong to separate political culture from culture in
general; however, he himself erred in assuming that it was unproblematic
to speak of an 'anthropological' meaning of culture. Looking at debates
164 Conclusion

within anthropology, we observed that culture had already been somewhat

politicized before being borrowed by political scientists, and was in danger
indeed of being made merely an epiphenomenon of interests and structure.
We deployed the phenomenological argument to show why the extreme
position of reducing culture to interests needs to be avoided. But to deploy
phenomenology in this manner is to apply it to political settings, and
hence to provide what is already a phenomenological approach to political
culture. Culture is not a set of givens of which political culture is a subset;
it is a process, and 'political culture' refers to that process in its political
aspects.
The phenomenological approach to political culture has a wide range
of applications. It is not, as we have seen, irrelevant to the investigation
of national identity; indeed it serves to resolve some problems in the
recent debates in that field. In this connection we were led to investigate
the phenomenological basis of 'invented' meaning, an investigation that
provides us with a template for the analysis of the indexical components of
political culture and of the functions of political culture exposed by critical
sociologists, such as its contribution to the internal cohesion of elites and to
the perpetuation of their dominance through cultural 'mystifications'. But
although the phenomenological approach is applicable to a wide range of
levels of investigation, its scale is necessarily intimate. It seeks, at its most
thorough, the detailed empirical manifestation of the creation of meaning
and identity. In this respect it is no less empirically demanding than the
comparative use. Indeed, it is more so, since such is the fundamentality
of its assertion that human circumstances are human constructs that in
many cases the degree of detail that the analysis would ideally require is
not available. Parliamentary debates and journalism may both contribute
to the creation of national identity, as they did in Germany and Poland
respectively; but in these records we lack the kind of detail that conver-
sational analysis is able to provide: hesitations, ambiguities, ellipses and
so forth. These are cleansed from most historical records, leaving only the
finished edifice, not the half-used supplies, the plastered-over mistakes, and
the spillages, that went into building it. Nevertheless, the phenomenological
analysis at its most thoroughgoing at least provides a posture that sensitizes
us to these matters, and alerts us to the source of the dynamism that we may
locate in political culture. And in some cases, comprehensive application of
this detailed methodology may yet be possible.
Thus the phenomenological approach to political culture explains many
of the deficiencies of the uses we have considered, and sets political culture
research on a new course. It also, finally, illustrates the particular utility
of the concept. What is distinctive about the concept of political culture,
 Conclusion 165

as we noticed at the outset, is the enduring nature of its appeal in the

face of a large body of criticism. This may partially be explained by the
common-sense connotation of national difference it has been given in its
comparative use. But perhaps the concept has some more fundamental
appeal. Perhaps the juxtaposition of the two words 'political' and 'culture'
has struck a deeper chord than even Almond envisaged when he introduced
it to political science. If so, we may suggest that its resonance derives from
a dissatisfaction both with an account of politics that ignores the issues of
meanings and culture, and with an account of culture that ignores issues
of politics and power. Each of these accounts, we perhaps implicitly
recognize, fails to do justice to our experience of the social world. Hence
the appeal of the juxtaposition, and hence the above argument, which has
attempted to reveal the origins and ramifications of the seductive quality
of political culture.
Notes
Introduction

1. David J. Elkins and Richard E. B. Simeon, 'A Cause in Search of its

Effect, or What Does Political Culture Explain?', Comparative Politics
11, 1979, 127-145, p. 127.
2. For instance, advertisement for Basil Blackwell/Polity Press, New York
Review of Books 31, 20 December 1984, p. 29.
3. Typologies of political culture research are to be found in John
R. Gibbins, 'Introduction', in John R. Gibbins (ed.), Contemporary
Political Culture: Politics in a Postmodem Age (London: Sage,
1989), Dennis Kavanagh, Political Science and Political Behaviour
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), and Glenda M. Patrick,
'Political Culture', in Giovanni Sartori (ed.), Social Science Concepts:
A Systemic Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA and London: Sage, 1984).
4. Arthur Kallenburg, quoted in Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis and
Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO and Oxford:
Westview, 1990), p. 14.
5. Robert Brown, quoted in Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky, Cultural
Theory, p. 261.
6. David Truman, quoted in Robert A. Dahl, 'The Behavioral Approach in
Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Revolution',
American Political Science Review 55, 1961, 763-772, p. 767.
7. Gabriel A. Almond, 'Introduction', in Gabriel A. Almond and James
S. Coleman (eds), The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 4.
8. Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and
Conditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 234.
9. Gabriel A. Almond, 'Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political
Science', in Gabriel A. Almond, A Discipline Divided: Schools and
Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage,
1990), pp. 27-29.
10. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory
of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 333.
11. See Kavanagh, Political Science and Political Behaviour, pp. 3f.
12. F. M. Barnard, 'Culture and Political Development: Herder's
Suggestive Insights', American Political Science Review 63, 1969,
379-397, p. 392; Archie Brown, 'Introduction', in Archie Brown
(ed.), Political Culture and Communist Studies (London: Macmillan,
1984), p. 1.
13. Gabriel A. Almond, 'Comparative Political Systems', Journal of Poli-
tics 18, 1956, 391-409, p. 396.

166
 Notes 167

14. Almond, 'Comparative Political Systems', p. 396.

15. Barnard, 'Culture and Political Development', p. 382. See also
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1977), p. 17.
16. Barnard, 'Culture and Political Development', p. 390.
17. Almond, 'Separate Tables', p. 28.
18. See Clifford Geertz, 'Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory
of Culture', in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London:
Hutchinson, 1975), and the discussion in Chapter 6 below.
19. Charles Taylor, 'Interpretation and the Sciences of Man', Review of
Metaphysics 25, 1971, 3-51.
20. Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London:
Macmillan, 1979), p. 1.
21. Alfred G. Meyer, 'Communist Revolutions and Cultural Change',
Studies in Comparative Communism 5, 1972, 345-372, p. 349.
22. Stephen White, 'Political Culture in Communist States: Some Problems
of Theory and Method' (Research Note), Comparative Politics 16,
1984,351-365, p. 352.
23. Lucian W. Pye with Mary W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cul-
tural Dimension of Authority (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), p. ix.
24. Richard H. Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 521.
Solomon's and Pye's writings fall within the 'psychocultural' category
of approaches to political culture that Yung Wei has noticed the
Chinese case has attracted. Yung Wei, 'A Methodological Critique
of Current Studies on Chinese Political Culture', Journal of Politics
38, 1976, 114-140, p. 122. As White makes clear in a useful survey
of Sovietological examples, psychoculturalism is a modern version of
the earlier and much criticized 'national character' literature. White,
Political Culture and Soviet Politics, pp. 6-14.
25. Robert D. Putnam, 'Studying Elite Political Culture: The Case of
Ideology', American Political Science Review 65, 1981, 651-681.
26. See David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York:
John Wiley and Sons, 1965). For a behavioural analysis of political
culture that makes a non-casual use of Easton's concept, see Donald
J. Devine, The Political Culture of the United States: The Influence
of Member Values on Regime Maintenance (Boston: Little, Brown,
1972).
27. See Williams, Marxism and Literature, ch. 1, and the discussion in
Chapter 5, below.
28. See Archie Brown, 'Soviet Political Culture Through Soviet Eyes', in
Brown, Political Culture and Communist Studies.
29. For this debate, see Robert Tucker, 'Culture, Political Culture and Com-
munist Studies', in Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership
in Soviet Russia: From Lenin To Gorbachev (Brighton: Wheatsheaf,
168 Notes

1987) and Archie Brown, 'Conclusions', in Brown, Political Culture

and Communist Studies, pp. 149-155.

1: Political Culture and Democracy

1. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political

Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1963; abridged edn Boston: Little, Brown, 1965,
repr. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage, 1989). In the present
chapter, page references to this book will be made in parentheses in
the text. References will be to the abridged edition, since it is the most
widely available; it differs from the Princeton edition principally in
omitting a description of the methodological apparatus of the study.
2. Brian M. Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 51.
3. Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, pp. 49f.
4. Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, p. 94.
5. W. G. Runciman, 'Some Recent Contributions to the Theory of Democ-
racy', European Journal of Sociology 6, 1965, 174-185, p. 183.
6. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (eds), The Civic Culture Revisited
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980, repr. Newbury Park, CA and London:
Sage, 1989)
7. Sidney Verba, 'Germany: The Remaking of Political Culture', in
Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds), Political Culture and Pol-
itical Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965),
p. 133.
8. Verba, 'Germany', pp. 147, 170.
9. David P. Conradt, 'Changing German Political Culture', in Almond and
Verba, The Civic Culture Revisited, quotation from p. 263.
10. Geoffrey K. Roberts, '"Normal" or "Critical"?: Progress Reports on the
Condition of West Germany's Political Culture', European Journal of
Political Research 12, 1984, 423-431. For an interesting comparison
with the former East Germany which also emphasizes the growth of
'alternative' political culture, see Christiane Lemke, 'New Issues in the
Politics of the German Democratic Republic: A Question of Political
Culture?', Journal of Communist Studies 2, 1986, 351-358. See also
Henry Krisch, 'Changing Political Culture and Political Stability in the
German Democratic Republic', Studies in Comparative Communism
19, 1986, 41-53.
11. Roberts, '"Normal" or "Critical"?', p. 428.
12. Walter A. Rosenbaum, Political Culture (London: Thomas Nelson &
Sons, 1975).
13. Rosenbaum, Political Culture, pp. 37-55.
14. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 1, also published
 Notes 169

as Ronald Inglehart, 'The Renaissance of Political Culture', American

Political Science Review 82, 1988, 1203-1230.
15. lnglehart, Culture Shift, p. 43.
16. lnglehart, Culture Shift, p. 46.
17. Carole Pateman, for instance, suggests that 'throughout The Civic
Culture it is assumed that there are no problems in talking about
the political culture or the civic culture of Britain and the United
States'. Carole Pateman, 'The Civic Culture: A Philosophic Critique',
in Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture Revisited, p. 76. Michael
Mann also characterizes The Civic Culture as a 'consensus theory' of
society, in Michael Mann, 'The Social Cohesion of American Liberal
Democracy', American Sociological Review 35, 1970, 423-439. Bob
Jessop writes of 'the temptation to talk of the political culture and its
effects in any given society' and the necessity of instead specifying
'exactly what orientations ... are related to which actions among
which members of society'. R. D. Jessop, 'Civility and Traditionalism
in English Political Culture', British Journal of Political Science 1,
1971, 1-24, p. 21. Jessop further asserts that it is an assumption of
Almond and Verba's that consensus supports stability, and argues
that the study fails to recognize 'the implications of inequalities in
the distribution of power for the relevance of consensus in producing
stability'. Bob Jessop, Traditionalism, Conservatism and British Pol-
itical Culture (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), p. 53. This
position is spelt out further in Bob Jessop, Social Order, Reform and
Revolution: A Power, Exchange and Institutionalization Perspective
(London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 78: 'The greater the structural differ-
entiation and power hierarchization, the less the need for consensus and
the more the need for institutional integration.'
18. Mann, 'Social Cohesion', p. 435.
19. For a survey of this debate, see Paul G. Lewis, 'Legitimation and Pol-
itical Crises: East European Developments in the Post-Stalin Period', in
Paul G. Lewis (ed.), Eastern Europe: Political Crisis and Legitimation
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).
20. Nicholas Abercrombie and Bryan S. Turner, 'The Dominant Ideology
Thesis', British Journal of Sociology 29, 1978, 149-170, p. 159.
21. Jessop, Traditionalism, pp. 255f.
22. Jessop, Traditionalism, pp. 53, 60.
23. Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, pp. 51, 94.
24. Carole Pateman, 'The Civic Culture', p. 78.
25. Quentin Skinner, 'The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their
Critics: A Plague on Both Their Houses', Political Theory 1, 1973,
287-306, pp. 298-304.
26. Carole Pateman, 'Criticizing Empirical Theorists of Democracy: A
Comment on Skinner', Political Theory 2, 1974, 215-218, pp. 216f.
Other writers who have seen The Civic Culture as a covert justification
of the political status quo in Britain and the United States, apart from
170 Notes

Barry, include James A. Bill and Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr, Comparative

Politics: The Quest for Theory (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1981), pp. 90f. Pateman's critique is found also in Carole
Pateman, 'Political Culture, Political Structure and Political Change',
British Journal of Political Science 1, 1971, 291-305.

2: Political Culture and Modernity

1. Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman (eds), The Politics of the

Developing Areas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960);
Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds), Political Culture and Political
Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
2. Contrary to Barry's assessment. Brian M. Barry, Sociologists, Econo-
mists and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
p. 93. See Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture:
Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1963; abridged edn Boston: Little, Brown,
1965, repr. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage, 1989), pp. 267f.
3. Cyril E. Black, Understanding Soviet Politics: The Perspective of
Russian History (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986), p. 90.
4. Lucian Pye, 'Introduction: Political Culture and Political Develop-
ment', in Pye and Verba, Political Culture and Political Development,
p. 13.
5. Raymond Grew, 'More on Modernization', Journal of Social History
14, 1980, 179-187, p. 179.
6. Archie Brown, 'Introduction', in Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture
and Communist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 1.
7. Gabriel A. Almond, 'The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture
Concept', in Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (eds), The Civic
Culture Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980, repr. Newbury Park,
CA and London: Sage, 1989), pp. 6-10.
8. Cyril E. Black, 'Eastern Europe in the Context of Comparative Mod-
ernization', in Charles Gati (ed.), The Politics of Modernization in
Eastern Europe: Testing the Soviet Model (New York: Praeger, 1974),
p. 25.
9. Lucian W. Pye, 'Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism',
American Political Science Review 84, 1990, 3-19.
10. Pye, 'Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism', pp. llf.
11. Gabriel A. Almond, 'Introduction', in Almond and Coleman, Politics
of the Developing Areas, pp. 22-25.
12. For a critique of such 'dichotomous schemes' see James A. Bill and
Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr, Comparative Politics: The Quest for Theory
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1981), pp. 50-57.
13. Stephen Chilton, Defining Political Development (Boulder, CO and
London: Lynne Reiner, 1988), pp. 68, 76.
 Notes 171

14. Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life
in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press;
London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 383, 391.
15. Margaret S. Archer, 'Theory, Culture and Post-Industrial Society', in
Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalism and
Modernity (A Theory, Culture and Society special issue) (London and
Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), pp. 98-107.
16. Archer, 'Theory, Culture and Post-Industrial Society', pp. 98f.
17. Archer, 'Theory, Culture and Post-Industrial Society', p. 117.
18. John R. Gibbins, 'Contemporary Political Culture: An Introduction', in
John R. Gibbins (ed.), Contemporary Political Culture: Politics in a
Postmodern Age (London: Sage, 1989), p. 14.
19. Gibbins, 'Contemporary Political Culture', pp. 17f.
20. Bryan S. Turner, 'From Postindustrial Society to Postrnodern Politics:
The Political Sociology of Daniel Bell', in Gibbins, Contemporary
Political Culture, p. 213.
21. Gibbins, 'Contemporary Political Culture', p. 15.
22. See particularly Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing
Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1977) and Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift
in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990). The latter study, a continuation of the former, but drawing
on a wider range of data, will provide the basis of our discussion.
Page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text of the present
section.

3: Political Culture and Communism

I. In recent years this constraint has evaporated. For an example of con-

ventional survey-based political culture research in the Russian case see
Jeffrey W. Hahn, 'Continuity and Change in Russian Political Culture',
British Journal of Political Science 21, 1991, 393-421. Hahn's main
conclusion is that Russian political culture is 'not strikingly different
from what is found in Western industrial countries', and thus that
it 'would appear to be sufficiently hospitable to sustain democratic
institutions' (pp. 420f.).
2. Harry Eckstein, 'A Culturalist Theory of Political Change', American
Political Science Review 82, 1988, 789-804.
3. Samuel P. Huntington and Jorge Domfuguez, 'Political Development',
in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (eds), Handbook of
Political Science Volume 3: Macropolitical Theory (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1975), p. 17.
4. Barbara Jancar, 'Political Culture and Political Change', Studies in
Comparative Communism 17, 1984, 69-82, pp. 79-81.
5. Archie Brown, 'Introduction', in Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds),
172 Notes

Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London:

Macmillan, 1977), p. 5.
6. Brown, 'Introduction', p. 1 (for the definition); Archie Brown, 'Intro-
duction', in Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture and Communist
Studies (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 153f. (for the argument).
7. Brown, 'Introduction', in Brown, Political Culture and Communist
Studies, p. 3.
8. Richard R. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 6.
9. Fagen, Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, pp. 152f. See also
the discussion in Stephen Welch, 'Issues in the Study of Political
Culture: The Example of Communist Party States', British Journal
of Political Science 17, 1987, 479-500, p. 482.
10. Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London:
Macmillan, 1979).
11. White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, cbs. 4, 5. See also Stephen
White, 'Political Socialization in the USSR: A Study in Failure?',
Studies in Comparative Communism 10, 1977, 328-342 and Stephen
White, 'Propagating Communist Values in the USSR', Problems of
Communism 34, 1985, 1-17.
12. Gabriel A. Almond, 'Communism and Political Culture Theory',
Comparative Politics 15, 1983, 127-138, pp. 127f.
13. Huntington and Domfnguez, 'Political Development', pp. 15f. (for the
definition), 31.
14. Almond, 'Communism and Political Culture Theory', p. 127.
15. Archie Brown and Gordon Wightman, 'Czechoslovakia: Revival and
Retreat', in Brown and Gray, Political Culture and Political Change,
p. 178.
16. There are two main representatives. The Harvard Project on the Soviet
Social System involved the application of questionnaires to a group of
about three thousand of the up to half a million former Soviet citizens
who for various reasons were not repatriated after the Second World
War, and the conducting of long interviews with 764 of them. The
research was carried out in 1950-51, and the results were published
in several studies during the 1950s, notably in Alex Inkeles and
Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian
Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford
University Press, 1959). The General Survey of the University of
Illinois Soviet Interview Project was applied to emigrants, primarily
Jewish, from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1970s, the
results being published in book form as James R. Millar (ed.), Politics,
Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Surveys applied to
much smaller samples of Jewish migrants to Israel provided material
for studies by White and Zvi Gitelman: Stephen White, 'Continuity and
Change in Soviet Political Culture: An Emigre Study', Comparative
 Notes 173

Political Studies 11, 1978, 391- 395; White, Political Culture and
Soviet Politics, ch. 5; White, 'Political Socialization in the USSR';
Zvi Gitelman, 'Soviet Political Culture: Insights from Jewish Emigres',
Soviet Studies 29, 1977, 543-564.
17. Stephen White, 'Soviet Political Culture Reconsidered', in Brown,
Political Culture and Communist Studies, p. 66.
18. White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, pp. 24-39.
19. White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, ch. 3, quotation from
p. 58.
20. White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, p. 65.
21. Jancar, 'Political Culture and Political Change', p. 73.
22. Mary McAuley, 'Political Culture and Communist Politics: One Step
Forward, Two Steps Back', in Brown, Political Culture and Communist
Studies, p. 18.
23. White, 'Soviet Political Culture Reconsidered', p. 90.
24. Archie Brown, 'Conclusions', in Brown, Political Culture and Com-
munist Studies, pp. 188f.
25. Stephen R. Burant, 'The Influence of Russian Tradition on the Political
Style of the Soviet Elite', Political Science Quarterly 102, 1987,
273-293, p. 284. See also Frederick Barghoom, 'Stalinism and the
Russian Cultural Heritage', Review of Politics 14, 1952, 178-203.
26. Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal
Decline (London: I. B. Tauris, 1986), p. 6; see also Frederick C.
Barghoom and Thomas F. Remington, Politics in the USSR (3rd edn)
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1986). Robert Tucker's argument, in 'Stalinism
as Revolution from Above', in Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and
Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin To Gorbachev (Brighton:
Wheatsheaf, 1987), will be discussed at length in Chapter 5.
27. Archie Brown, 'Ideology and Political Culture', in Seweryn Bialer
(ed.), Politics, Society, and Nationality Inside Gorbachev's Russia
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989), p. 19.
28. White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, pp. 189f.
29. Brown, 'Ideology and Political Culture', pp. 21 (for the quotation from
Burlatsky), 26. What has happened to the 'cultural supports for the
status quo'?
30. 'In the view of senior members of the Institute of Public Opinion
expressed later in 1969' - Brown and Wightman, 'Czechoslovakia',
n. 14, p. 192.
31. Brown and Wightman, 'Czechoslovakia', p. 173.
32. There is a certain irony in the symbolic role that Masaryk has come to
play for the Czechs. He had earlier been involved (though how crucially
is a matter of controversy) in the 'Battle of the Manuscripts', in which
the forgery in the nineteenth century of a manuscript previously taken
to be an ancient symbol of Czech nationhood was exposed. The liberal
rationalist's fate was to become himself the subject of myth. See
Stanley B. Winters (ed.), T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937). Volume 1:
174 Notes

Thinker and Politician (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 5 and

Robert B. Pynsent (ed.), T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937). Volume 2:
Thinker and Critic, p. 155. On the creation of romantic national myths
see Chapter 7 below.
33. H. Gordon Skilling, 'Czechoslovak Political Culture: Pluralism in an
International Context', in Brown, Political Culture and Communist
Studies, p. 121.
34. David W. Paul, 'Czechoslovakia's Political Culture Reconsidered', in
Brown, Political Culture and Communist Studies, pp. 137-139.
35. Brown and Wightman, 'Czechoslovakia', pp. 170-172.
36. David W. Paul, The Cultural Limits ofRevolutionary Politics (Boulder,
CO: East European Quarterly, 1979; distributed by Columbia Univer-
sity Press, New York), p. 175.
37. Brown and Wightman, 'Czechoslovakia', p. 166.
38. Janina Frentzel-Zagorska, 'The Dominant Political Culture in Poland',
Politics 20, 1985, 82-98; Stefan Nowak, 'Values and Attitudes of the
Polish People', Scientific American 245, 1981, 23-31.
39. Frentzel-Zagorska, 'The Dominant Political Culture in Poland', pp. 82f.
40. Nowak, 'Values and Attitudes', p. 27.
41. Frentzel-Zagorska, 'The Dominant Political Culture in Poland', p. 95.
42. Brown, 'Conclusions', in Brown, Political Culture and Communist
Studies, p. 188.
43. Kristian Gerner, The Soviet Union and Central Europe in the Post-War
Era: A Study in Precarious Security (Aldershot: Gower, 1985), p. 31.
44. White, 'Soviet Political Culture Reconsidered', p. 83.
45. Vaclav Havel's phrase, quoted by H. Gordon Skilling, 'Sixty-eight
in Historical Perspective', International Journal 33, 1978, 678-701,
p. 700. The idea is implicit in many responses to the more recent
events, and thus may serve as a token in the following discussion.
46. See Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet-East European Rela-
tions in Transition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990),
pp. 164-167.
47. Vaclav Havel, 'The Power of the Powerless', in Vaclav Havel et al.,
The Power of the Powerless (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 42f.;
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1983), pp. 219-221.
48. Havel, 'Power of the Powerless', pp. 35-38.
49. Cyril E. Black, 'Eastern Europe in the Context of Comparative Modern-
ization', in Charles Gati (ed.), The Politics of Modernization in Eastern
Europe: Testing the Soviet Model (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 35.
50. Dennison Rusinow, 'Introduction', in Dennison Rusinow (ed.), Yugo-
slavia: A Fractured Federalism (Washington DC: Wilson Center Press,
1988), p. 4.
51. This explanation has been proposed by Mary McAuley in the guise
of devil's advocate against Stephen White. Mary McAuley, 'Political
Culture and Communist Politics: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back',
 Notes 175

in Brown, Political Culture and Communist Studies, pp. 24f. It is in

fact an exaggeration to say that Eastern Europe lacks experience of
the operation of the market. But its experience is hardly such as
to generate enthusiasm. Rivalries between the new states of Eastern
Europe after the First World War led to the erection of tariff barriers,
to a general weakening of the already underdeveloped economy of the
region, and to its susceptibility to economic imperialism on the part
of Nazi Germany. See Ivan T. Berend and Gyorgy Ranki, Economic
Development in East-Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), esp. chs 8, 9.
52. Karen Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great
Challenge (2nd edn) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
pp. 40f.
53. Quoted in Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform, p. 43.
54. Black, 'Eastern Europe in the Context of Comparative Modernization',
p. 35.
55. Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East
Central Europe Since World War II (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), p. 225. Both the 'return' and the 'diversity'
of Rothschild's title are rendered questionable by the latter statement.
56. Havel, 'Power of the Powerless', pp. 49-57.
57. George Konn:id, Antipolitics: An Essay (trans. Richard E. Allen) (New
York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 95.
58. Timothy Garton Ash, 'Does Central Europe Exist?', New York Review
of Books 33, 9 October 1986, 45-52.
59. Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform, pp. 43f.
60. Gerner, The Soviet Union and Central Europe, p. 59.
61. Quoted in Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform, p. 69.
62. Paul, 'Czechoslovak Political Culture Reconsidered', p. 140.

4: Political Culture and Comparative Explanation

1. Almond, 'The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept',

in Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (eds), The Civic Culture
Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980, repr. Newbury Park, CA and
London: Sage, 1989),p. 29.
2. Brian M. Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 49.
3. Mary McAuley, 'Political Culture and Communist Politics: One Step
Forward, Two Steps Back', in Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture
and Communist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 26.
4. Archie Brown, 'Conclusions', in Brown, Political Culture and Com-
munist Studies, p. 187.
5. Arend Lijphart, 'Comparative Politics and Comparative Method',
American Political Science Review 65, 1971, 682-693. See also the
176 Notes

synopsis in David Collier, 'The Comparative Method: Two Decades

of Change', in Dankwart A. Rustow and Kenneth Paul Erickson (eds),
Comparative Political Dynamics: Global Research Perspectives (New
York: HarperCollins, 1991 ), pp. 8-11.
6. One of Lijphart's justifications of the comparative method was the lim-
ited quantity of research resources; the profession of political science
has expanded considerably since he wrote, helping to overcome this
problem.
7. Collier, 'The Comparative Method', pp. 15-19.
8. Collier, 'The Comparative Method', p. 13.
9. David J. Elkins and Richard E. B. Simeon, 'A Cause in Search of its
Effect, or What Does Political Culture Explain?', Comparative Politics
11, 1979, 127-145.
10. Elkins and Simeon, 'A Cause in Search of its Effect', pp. 127f., 132,
137-139.
11. Elkins and Simeon, 'A Cause in Search ofits Effect', pp. 129f.
12. Fransisco Jose Moreno, Legitimacy and Stability in Latin America: A
Study of Chilean Political Culture (New York: New York University
Press; London: University of London Press, 1969), p. 182.
13. Geert Hofstede, Culture's Consequences: International Differences in
Work-Related Values (Beverly Hills, CA and London: Sage, 1980).
14. Hofstede, Culture's Consequences, p. 25.
15. 'Masculinity' is found to be 'negatively correlated with the percentage
of women in professional and technical jobs'. Hofstede, Culture's
Consequences, p. 262.
16. Hofstede, Culture's Consequences, p. 336.
17. In Easton's theory the universality of political systems derives from
a functionalist perspective - its aim was to 'extricate from the total
political reality those aspects that can be considered the fundamental
processes or activities without which no political life in society could
continue'. David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), p. 13. Clearly, these functionalist
assumptions are much more open to question than Hofstede's organi-
zational categories - and this is before we begin to consider the role of
attitudes or 'culture'.
18. Miller, 'Political Culture: Some Perennial Questions Reopened', in
Brown, Political Culture and Communist Studies, p. 56.
19. Lucian W. Pye, 'Culture and Political Science: Problems in the Evalu-
ation of the Concept of Political Culture', in Louis Schneider and
Charles M. Bonjean (eds), The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University'Press, 1973); see also McAuley's
commentary in 'Political Culture and Communist Politics', pp. 20f.
20. Pye, 'Culture and Political Science', p. 73; also Pye, 'Introduction',
in Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds), Political Culture and
Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1965), p. 8.
 Notes 177

21. Bradley M. Richardson, The Political Culture of Japan (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1974), p. 7.
22. Glenda M. Patrick, 'Political Culture', in Giovanni Sartori (ed.),
Social Science Concepts: A Systemic Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA
and London: Sage, 1984), p. 279.
23. Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New
York: Thomas W. Crowell, 1966), pp. 85-97.
24. Ira Sharkansky, 'The Utility of Elazar's Political Culture: A Research
Note', in Daniel Elazar and Joseph Zikmund ill (eds), The Ecology
of American Political Culture: Readings (New York: Thomas W.
Crowell, 1975), table 2, p. 254; pp. 255-259.
25. Compare Barry's similar criticism of The Civic Culture: Barry, Soci-
ologists, Economists and Democracy, p. 89.
26. Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), pp. 106, 125.
27. Miller, 'Political Culture', p. 42.
28. Gabriel A. Almond, 'Comparative Political Systems', Journal of Poli-
tics 18, 1956, 391-409, p. 396.
29. Moshe M. Czudnowski, 'A Salience Dimension of Politics for the
Study of Political Culture', American Political Science Review 62,
1968, 878- 888, pp. 881 f.
30. Ann L. Craig and Wayne A. Cornelius, 'Political Culture in Mexico:
Continuities and Revisionist Interpretations', in Almond and Verba,
Civic Culture Revisited, pp. 331-333.
31. A later edition is Frederick C. Barghoom and Thomas F. Remington,
Politics in the USSR (3rd edn) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), p. 45.
32. Wayne DiFranceisco and Zvi Gitelman, 'Soviet Political Culture and
"Covert Participation" in Policy Implementation', American Political
Science Review 78, 1984, 603- 621.
33. Richardson, Political Culture of Japan, p. 78.
34. Czudnowski, 'A Salience Dimension of Politics', p. 882. A somewhat
similar suggestion has been made by Edward Lehman, who proposes
that, instead of political culture being related causally to other variables,
it be construed as a 'specifying variable'. Such a 'variable' "'specifies"
the conditions under which more strategic correlations will exist in
greater or lesser intensity'. Edward W. Lehman, 'On the Concept of
Political Culture: A Theoretical Reassessment', Social Forces 50, 1972,
361-370, p. 368.
35. In addition to 'filter variable' and 'specifying variable', political culture
has been described as an 'intervening variable' and a 'supervenient
variable' -Dennis Kavanagh, Political Science and Political Behaviour
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 72 and David W. Paul,
The Cultural Limits of Revolutionary Politics (Boulder, CO: East
European Quarterly; distributed by Columbia University Press, New
York, 1979), p. 5, respectively. However, a variable can only be
dependent or independent, or both; that is what the term 'variable'
178 Notes

means in this context. The last two usages reduce to dependence or

independence; the first two are meaningless.
36. Archie Brown and Gordon Wightman, 'Czechoslovakia: Revival and
Retreat', in Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds), Political Culture and
Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1977),
pp. 170-172.
37. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political
Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1963; abridged edn. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965,
repr. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage, 1989), e.g. at pp. 66,
184f; Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 33.
38. Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London:
Macmillan, 1979), p. 20.
39. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1977), pp. 77-80.

5: Political Culture and Stalinism

1. Robert C. Tucker, 'Communist Revolutions, National Cultures, and

the Divided Nations', Studies in Comparative Communism 7, 1974,
235-245, p. 236: 'comparativism is built into the very structure of
theorizing'.
2. Robert C. Tucker, 'Communism and Political Culture', Newsletter on
Comparative Studies of Communism 4, 1971, 3-12, pp. 11f. Tucker
has not pursued his suggestion.
3. Robert Tucker, 'Culture, Political Culture and Communist Studies', in
Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia:
From Lenin To Gorbachev (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987), p. 5. (First
published in a slightly different form as Robert C. Tucker, 'Culture,
Political Culture, and Communist Society', Political Science Quarterly
88, 1973, 173-190.)
4. Tucker, 'Culture, Political Culture and Communist Studies', p. 4.
5. Robert Tucker, 'Lenin's Bolshevism as a Culture in the Making', in
Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership, pp. 34-36.
6. Quoted in Tucker, 'Lenin's Bolshevism', p. 45. Original emphasis.
7. Tucker, 'Lenin's Bolshevism', p. 46.
8. Tucker, 'Communist Revolutions', p. 245.
9. A similar view was developed more or less simultaneously by Alfred
Meyer, who argued that 'Communism can be described as a deliberate
and systematic attempt at culture-building', and also recommended the
study of 'communist culture'. Alfred G. Meyer, 'Communist Revolu-
tions and Cultural Change', Studies in Comparative Communism 5,
1972, 345-372, p. 365.
10. Robert Tucker, 'Leadership and Culture in Social Movements', in
 Notes 179

Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership, p. 20. See also the essay
'On Revolutionary Mass-Movement Regimes' in Robert C. Tucker,
The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change
(London and Dunmow: Pall Mall Press, 1963).
11. Tucker, 'Leadership and Culture', p 22.
12. Tucker, 'Lenin's Bolshevism', p. 45.
13. Tucker, 'Lenin's Bolshevism', p. 37.
14. Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin
Controversy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988),
pp. 68, 74.
15. Quoted in Sochor, Revolution and Culture, p. 148. Original emphasis.
16. Maurice Meisner writes of the priority of the economy in Lenin's
conception of cultural revolution; of 'the Leninist emphasis on the
need to learn the modem material and technical "culture" of the
capitalist West in order to overcome the feudal habits and inertia of
the Russian cultural-historical heritage'. Maurice Meisner, 'Iconoclasm
and Cultural Revolution in China and Russia', in Abbott Gleason,
Peter Kenez and Richard Stites (eds), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment
and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1985), p. 287. Leszek Kolakowski writes similarly
of Proletkult's utopianism that it 'seemed to Lenin an idle fantasy
unconnected with the party's true objectives. In a country with a huge
percentage of illiterates the need was to teach them reading, writing
and arithmetic ... and give them an elementary idea of technology
and organization, not to pull civilization up by the roots and start
again from zero'. Leszek KolcJcowski, Main Currents of Marxism:
Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. Volume II: The Golden Age (trans.
P. S. Falla) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 444. See also
Sochor, Revolution and Culture, p. 119.
17. Alfred G. Meyer, 'The Use of the Term Culture in the Soviet Union',
Appendix B of A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A
Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage
Books, n. d.) (originally published as Papers of the Peabody Museum of
American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 47, 1952),
p. 415.
18. Quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'Cultural Revolution as Class War',
in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-31
(Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 9.
Pravda's emphasis.
19. Robert Tucker, 'Stalinism as Revolution from Above', in Tucker,
Political Culture and Leadership, p. 85.
20. Jonathan R. Adelman, 'The Impact of Civil Wars on Communist Politi-
cal Culture: The Chinese and Russian Cases', Studies in Comparative
Communism 16, 1983, 25-48, pp. 29f.
21. Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'The Civil War as Formative Experience', in Gleason
et al., Bolshevik Culture, pp. 60f., 74.
180 Notes

22. Tucker, 'Stalinism', p. 85.

23. Robert Tucker, 'Gorbachev and the Fight for Soviet Reform', in
Tucker, Political Culture and leadership, pp. 176-179.
24. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political
Biography 1888-1938 (London: Wildwood House, 1974), p. 126.
25. Robert Tucker, 'Between Lenin and Stalin: The Breakdown of a
Revolutionary Culture', in Tucker, Political Culture and leadership,
p. 59.
26. Fitzpatrick, 'Cultural Revolution as Class War', p. 32.
27. Gail Warshovsky Lapidus, 'Educational Strategies and Cultural Revo-
lution: The Politics of Soviet Development', in Fitzpatrick, Cultural
Revolution, pp. 91-94.
28. Robert Sharlet, 'Pashukanis and the Withering Away of the Law in the
USSR', in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution.
29. Fitzpatrick, 'Cultural Revolution as Class War', p. 11.
30. Moshe Lewin, 'Society, State and Ideology During the First Five-Year
Plan', in Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays
in the Social History of Interwar Russia (London: Methuen, 1985),
pp. 220f.
31. Donald W. Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia (7th edn) (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1990), p. 245.
32. Moshe Lewin, 'The Immediate Background of Soviet Collectivization',
in Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System, passim.
33. Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'New Perspectives on Stalinism', Russian Review
45, 1986,357-373,p. 364.
34. Robert C. Tucker, 'Stalin and the Uses of Psychology', in Tucker, The
Soviet Political Mind, p. 98.
35. Tucker, 'Stalin and the Uses of Psychology', pp. 92-94.
36. David Joravsky, 'The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche', in
Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution, pp. 110, 117, 126f.
37. Robert C. Williams, 'The Nationalization of Early Soviet Culture',
Russian History 9, 1982, 157-172, p. 172.
38. Max Hayward, 'The Decline of Socialist Realism', in Max Hayward,
Writers in Russia: 1917-1978 (London: Harvill, 1983), p. 156.
39. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), passim.
40. Clark, The Soviet Novel, pp. 37-41.
41. Graeme Gill, 'Personality Cult, Political Culture and Party Structure',
Studies in Comparative Communism 17, 1984, 111-121.
42. Tucker, 'Stalinism', pp. 88-93.
43. Tucker, 'Stalinism', p. 95.
44. Archie Brown, review in The Times Literary Supplement, 7 March
1980, p. 273.
45. Edward L. Keenan, 'Muscovite Political Folkways', Russian Review
45, 1986, 115-181.
46. Other examples are Frederick Barghoorn, 'Stalinism and the Russian
Cultural Heritage', Review of Politics 14, 1952, 178-203; Zbigniew
 Notes 181

K. Brzezinski, 'Soviet Politics: From the Future to the Past?', in

Paul Cocks, Robert V. Daniels and Nancy Whittier Heer (eds), The
Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 1976 ); Stephen R. Burant, 'The Influence of Russian
Tradition on the Political Style of the Soviet Elite', Political Science
Quarterly 102, 1987, 273-293; and Richard Pipes, Russia Under the
Old Regime (New York: Scribners Sons, 1974).
47. Tucker, 'Stalinism', p. 96.
48. Tucker, 'Stalinism', p. 95. Frederick Barghoorn has made a similar
connection between Russian cultural influences and Stalin's personal-
ity: 'only those aspects of Russian culture and history with which in
some way Stalin identifies himself are permitted to figure significantly
in Soviet intellectual activity'. Barghoorn, 'Stalinism and the Russian
Cultural Heritage', p. 180.
49. See Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879-1929: A Study in
History and Personality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); Robert C.
Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928-1941 (New
York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990).
50. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: Merid-
ian, 1958), pp. 398, 405. Arendt is speaking of the Nazi regime and
Hitler's personality cult, but the point is equally relevant here.
51. T. H. Rigby, 'Stalinism and the Mono-Organizational Society', in
Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 55-59. Gill's analysis of the
personality cult also has some affinities with this perspective. Arendt's
emphasis on organizational con~usion distinguishes her approach from
that of later theorists of totalitarianism, among whom Carl Friedrich and
Zbigniew Brzezinski are pre-eminent, who conceived of totalitarianism
in terms of its institutional features. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K.
Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (2nd edn) (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 21-27. Revisionist
findings such as Lewin's of the ad hoc nature of central planning and
J. Arch Getty's of the inadequacy of bureaucratic control procedures
within the Party (J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet
Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), e.g. ch. 3) tell more against the latter concep-
tion of totalitarianism than Arendt's.
52. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 323.
53. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 317.
54. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 391. Jerry Hough writes, osten-
sibly contra Arendt, 'The regime's "mobilization" program was really
an unprecedented attempt to integrate, not atomize, a vast number of
inexperienced workers and former peasants into a rapidly expanding
urban sector'. Jerry F. Hough, 'The Cultural Revolution and Western
Understanding of the Soviet System', in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolu-
tion, p. 246. This criticism misunderstands Arendt's position, which
182 Notes

precisely argues that atomization is a precondition of integration.

55. Lewin, 'Society, State and Ideology', p. 221; Daniel R. Brower,
'Stalinism and the "View From Below"', Russian Review 46, 1987,
379-381, pp. 380f.
56. Geoff Eley, 'History With the Politics Left Out- Again?', Russian
Review 45, 1986, 385-394, p. 390. Original emphasis.
57. Michael Waller, 'What Is to Count as Ideology in Soviet Politics?',
in Stephen White and Alex Pravda (eds), Ideology and Soviet Politics
(Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 29, 31. Emphasis
added.
58. Daniel Bell, 'Ten Theories in Search of Soviet Reality', in Alex Inkeles
and Kent Geiger (eds), Soviet Society: A Book of Readings (London:
Constable, 1961), p. 49.
59. Vladimir Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia: Industrialization and
Social Change in a Planned Economy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-
Wheatsheaf; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
60. Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia, pp. 116-125.
61. Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia, p. 168.
62. Andrle accepts that an element of inheritance contributes to the
techniques used by workers in navigating through the environment
he describes; for instance of the use of blat ('pull' or 'connections')
he writes, 'blat networks provided a practical context for the familiar
communal virtues of personal reciprocity and loyalty, social settings
in which the rules of conduct were understandable and the rewards
tangible' (Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia, p. 55). Nevertheless,
such techniques were readily taken up by Western immigrants also,
and in a context in which, by 1939, half of the urban population
consisted of post-1926 arrivals (p. 32), it is clear, as Andrle argues,
that inheritance alone is not a sufficient explanation of such behaviour.
His findings here recall those of DiFranceisco and Gitelman, discussed
in Chapter 4.
63. Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia, p. 91.
64. Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia, p. 99.
65. Andrle reports that F. W. Taylor had the same status as Marx in articles
in management journals. Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia, p. 93.
66. Tucker, 'Stalinism', p. 95.
67. Archie Brown, 'Conclusions', in Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture
and Communist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 180f.
68. For further discussion of the relative merits of the notions of 'com-
munist political culture' and 'official political culture' in the Stalin
and Brezhnev periods, see Stephen Welch, 'Political Culture and
Communism: Definition and Use', Journal of Communist Studies 5,
1989, 91-98. See also (on the relativity of political culture to the
tasks undertaken by the leadership) Kenneth Jowitt, 'An Organiza-
tional Approach to the Study of Political Culture in Marxist-Leninist
Systems', American Political Science Review 68, 1974, 1171-1191.
 Notes 183

69. Michael E. Urban, 'Conceptualizing Political Power in the USSR:

Patterns of Binding and Bonding', Studies in Comparative Communism
18, 1985, 207-226, pp. 216-220. The nomenklatura system enabled
Party control of appointments within governmental and other non-Party
organizations.
70. Rachel Walker, 'Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the
Empty Signifier and the Double Bind', British Journal of Political
Science 19, 1989, 161-189, pp. 179f.
71. Michael E. Urban, The Ideology of Administration: American and
Soviet Cases (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982),
p. 129.
72. T. H. Rigby, 'Introduction: Political Legitimacy, Weber and Commun-
ist Mono-Organizational Systems', in T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher
(eds), Political Legitimation in Communist States (London: Macmillan,
1982).
73. Rigby, 'Introduction', p. 15.
74. Christel Lane, 'Legitimacy and Power in the Soviet Union Through
Socialist Ritual', British Journal of Political Science 14, 1984,
207-217, p. 210.
75. It is worth noticing, however, that Lane's own emphasis on popular
legitimation through new Soviet rituals in Christel Lane, The Rites of
Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society - The Soviet Case (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981) cannot ultimately deliver on the
promise, made through the contrast Lane draws between her approach
and Rigby's, to provide empirical evidence of acceptance by the
population: 'Are the official norms and values embodied in the ritual
completely absorbed, or do they form no more than an acceptable
backcloth against which events of interpersonal relevance are given
heightened significance? We just do not have answers and probably
never will acquire them.' Lane, 'Legitimacy and Power', pp. 216f.
76. Gordon Smith, 'A Model of the Bureaucratic Culture', Political Studies
22, 1974, 31-43, p. 32.
77. Ronald J. Hill, 'Soviet Political Development and the Culture of the
Apparatchiki', Studies in Comparative Communism 19, 1986, 25-39,
p. 33. See also Ronald J. Hill, 'The Cultural Dimension of Communist
Political Evolution', Journal of Communist Studies I, 1985, 34-53.
78. The continuity of this concept with the evaluative conception of
'culture' Meyer identified in Marxism and Leninism is clear. See
Archie Brown, 'Soviet Political Culture Through Soviet Eyes', in
Brown, Political Culture and Communist Studies, pp. 103f. for the con-
nection between Soviet usage of 'political culture' and this evaluative
conception.
79. George Yaney, 'Bureaucracy as Culture: A Comment', Slavic Review
41, 1982, 104-111, p. 106.
80. Yaney, 'Bureaucracy as Culture', pp. 106f.
81. See Hill, 'Soviet Political Development', pp. 34f.
184 Notes

6: Political Culture and Interpretation

1. Their common membership of the category of 'political culture

research' is, on the other hand, suggested by this observation of
Lucian Pye's: 'Through the works of ... Hannah Arendt, among
others, we know something about the distinctive human or cultural
basis of totalitarianism; and.through the works of Almond and Verba,
among others, we know something about the civic culture basic to
stable democracy.' Lucian W. Pye, 'Political Science and the Crisis of
Authoritarianism', American Political Science Review 84, 1990, 3-19,
p. 13.
2. Archie Brown, 'Conclusion', in Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture
and Communist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 149-155.
3. Quoted in A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical
Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage Books, n. d.)
(originally published as Papers of the Peabody Museum of American
Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 47, 1952), p. 81.
4. Mead had celebrated sexual freedom in Samoa; Freeman on the other
hand wrote of repression, a cult of virginity, and furthermore of claims
by the inhabitants that Mead was misled. Subsequent defences of
Mead have shown, however, that the issues of fact are by no means
straightforward, and this is what makes the argument seem like one
over mood. See Ivan Brady (ed.), 'Speaking in the Name of the Real:
Freeman and Mead on Samoa', American Anthropologist 85, 1983,
908-947.
5. James A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology
ill the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 16.
6. Ernest Gellner, The Concept of Killship and Other Essays on Anthro-
pological Method and Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
(originally published as Cause and Meanillg ill the Social Sciences,
1973), p. ix; Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes, p. 8.
7. Roger M. Keesing, 'Theories of Culture', Annual Review of Anthropol-
ogy 3, 1974, 73-97, p. 73.
8. Richard Basham and David DeGroot, 'Current Approaches to the
Anthropology of Urban and Complex Societies', American Anthro-
pologist 79, 1977, 414-440, pp. 430f.
9. See Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology (London: Fontana, 1982),
ch. 1 for an account of the differences between social and cultural
anthropology.
10. See the discussion in A. L. Epstein, Ethos and Identity: Three Studies
in Ethnicity (London: Tavistock; Chicago: Aldine, 1978), pp. lOf.
11. Epstein, Ethos and Identity, ch. 2.
12. M. Gluckman, 'Anthropological Problems Arising From the African
Industrial Revolution', in Aidan Southall (ed.), Social Change ill
Modem Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 67, 69.
 Notes 185

13. Abner Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology

of Power and Symbolism in Complex Society (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 92-96.
14. Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man, p. 124.
15. Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community
(Chichester: Ellis Horwood; London and New York: Tavistock,
1985), p. 44.
16. Cohen, Symbolic Construction of Community, p. 47.
17. Cohen, Symbolic Construction of Community, pp. 79-81.
18. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, 'Why Ethnicity?', Commen-
tary 58, 1974, 33-39, p. 33. For a survey of recent writing on the
political use of ethnicity, see James McKay, 'An Exploratory Synthesis
of Primordial and Mobilizationist Approaches to Ethnic Phenomena',
Ethnic and Racial Studies 5, 1982, 395-420. An interesting example
of the earlier confidence about assimilation is provided by Stephen
Meyer's account of the Ford Motor Company's attempted Americani-
zation of its substantially immigrant workforce. Ford's 'Sociological
Department' aimed to improve workers' domestic environment, attend-
ing to matters such as cleanliness, table manners and etiquette. Stephen
Meyer, 'Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the
Ford Factory, 1914-1921 ',Journal of Social History 14, 1980, 67-82,
pp. 71-75. A graduation pageant from the Department's English
school featured a model 'melting pot', fifteen feet in diameter. The
effort, Meyer reports, was undermined by the erosion of the monetary
incentive on which it was predicated, a down-to-earth illustration of
the influence of material circumstances on the survival or otherwise of
ethnic attachments.
19. Glazer and Moynihan, 'Why Ethnicity?', pp. 35, 37.
20. Epstein, Ethos and Identity, p. 122.
21. Clifford Geertz, 'Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of
Culture', in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London:
Hutchinson, 1975), pp. 6f.
22. Geertz, 'Thick Description', p. 13.
23. Geertz, 'Thick Description', p. 14. It is from this position, presumably,
that Tucker draws his overstated conclusion that political culture may
not explain anything; the kind of understanding that Geertz aims at,
however, clearly involves explanation, if in a looser sense- as indeed
does Weberian sociology.
24. Clifford Geertz, 'Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight', in
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 448f.
25. Jonathan Lieberson, 'Interpreting the Interpreter', in New York Review
of Books 31, 15 March 1985, 39-46, p. 46.
26. See Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 26-29.
27. Clifford Geertz, 'Ideology As a Cultural System', in Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures, p. 205.
186 Notes

28. Geertz, 'Ideology As a Cultural System', p. 220.

29. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party
Ideology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1978),
p. 15.
30. For a critique of the influence of Geertz on the development of
the republican 'paradigm', see Joyce Appleby, 'Republicanism in
Old and New Contexts', William and Mary Quarterly 43, 1986,
20-34.
31. See, for instance, Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and
Political Theory (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 141-146.
32. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of
Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1967), pp. 67-75.
33. Alfred Schutz, 'Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human
Action', in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social
Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 7, 19.
34. Schutz, 'Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation', pp. 1lf.
35. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, p. 85.
36. Clifford Geertz, 'The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept
of Man', in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 45.
37. Alfred Schutz, 'Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences',
in Schutz, Collected Papers I, pp. 56-59. See also Maurice Natanson,
'Introduction', in Schutz, Collected Papers I, pp. xxvf., and Bernstein,
Restructuring, pp. 138-140.
38. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, p. 87.
39. Wes Sharrock and Bob Anderson, The Ethnomethodologists (Chich-
ester: Ellis Horwood; London and New York: Tavistock, 1986),
pp. 29-32. For the relationship between ethnomethodology and phe-
nomenology see pp. 1-12.
40. The research was by Emmanuel Schegloff. Sharrock and Anderson,
The Ethnomethodologists, p. 70.
41. David Middleton and Derek Edwards, 'Conversational Remembering:
a Social Psychological Approach', in David Middleton and Derek
Edwards (eds), Collective Remembering (London and Newbury Park,
CA: Sage, 1990), quotation from p. 43.
42. William Roseberry, 'Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthro-
pology', Social Research 49, 1982, 1013-1028, p. 1022.
43. Quoted in Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy
of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986),
pp. 21f.

7: Political Culture and National Identity

1. Brian Girvin, 'Change and Continuity in Liberal Democratic Political

Culture', in John R. Gibbins (ed.), Contemporary Political Culture:
 Notes 187

Politics in a Postmodem Age (London: Sage, 1989), pp. 34f.

2. Claude Levi-Strauss, 'Social Structure', in Structural Anthropology
(volume 1) (New York and London: Basic Books, 1963), p. 295.
3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
4. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1870: Programme,
Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
pp. 3-5.
5. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1983), p. 51.
6. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 54-57.
7. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
8. Eric Hobsbawm, 'Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914', in
Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, p. 307.
9. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986), p. 178.
10. Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland (2 vols)
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). In this section, page references in
parentheses are to volumes I and II of this work.
11. The 'fourth' was the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw (II, p. 297),
the 'fifth' occurred at the Congress of Vienna, 1815 (II, p. 307), and
the 'sixth' was the outcome of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 1918, soon
rendered void by the defeat of Germany (II, p. 385).
12. Paul G. Lewis, 'Obstacles to the Establishment of Political Legitimacy
in Communist Poland', British :oumal of Political Science 12, 1982,
125-147, pp. 130f.
13. Jadwiga Staniszkis, 'On Some Contradictions of Socialist Society: The
Case of Poland', Soviet Studies 31, 1979, 167-187, pp. 175-178. See
also Neal Ascherson, The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 38-42.
14. Lech Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampfin Prussian Poland (New York:
East European Monographs; distributed by Columbia University Press,
1990), pp. 82f.
15. Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland, p. 140.
16. Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampfin Prussian Poland, ch. 4.
17. Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampfin Prussian Poland, p. 188.
18. Hagen Schulze, 'Europe and the German Question in Historical Per-
spective', in Hagen Schulze (ed.), Nation-Building in Central Europe
(Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), p. 186.
19. Hagen Schulze, 'The Revolution of the European Order and the Rise
of German Nationalism', in Schulze, Nation-Building, p. 12.
20. Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick
the Great to Bismarck, 1763-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), pp. 47-50.
21. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, pp. 178-183.
188 Notes

22. Harold James, A German Identity 1770-1990 (London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson, 1989), p. 51.
23. James, German Identity, p. 3.
24. James, German Identity, p. 122.
25. In this respect one of the most significant outcomes of Germany's
defeat was the largely forced migration of 12 million Germans from
their former East European homes to the new East and West Germany.
Despite the persistence of small pockets of German nationality in
the East, the centuries-old expansionist implications of the romantic
Kultumation were eliminated at a stroke. The cost may, however, be
yet to pay, in resentment over this 'lost' Germany (Amity Shlaes's
term) and over the hardship that the mass emigration involved (over 2
million deaths, Shlaes reports). Amity Shlaes, Germany: The Empire
Within (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), p. 6.
26. James, German Identity, p. 147-150.
27. Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism, pp. 150-164.
28. David D. Laitin and Aaron Wildavsky, 'Political Culture and Political
Preferences', American Political Science Review 82, 1988, 589-596,
p. 592. Another attempt to incorporate the idea of culture as a resource
into political culture theory has been made by Lowell Dittmer. Defining
political culture as a system of symbols, Dittmer argues that 'symbols
exist independently of human beings and may therefore transmit
meanings from person to person despite vast distances of space and
time'. Lowell Dittmer, 'Political Culture and Political Symbolism:
Toward a Theoretical Synthesis', World Politics, 29, 1977, 552-583,
p. 557. Indeed, Dittmer also recommends a 'process' view of political
culture that has some affinity with the phenomenological perspective
we have been developing. However, he fails to reconcile the notion
of culture as a resource with the process view; a reconciliation, we are
arguing, that only phenomenological social theory can achieve. See also
Lowell Dittmer, 'Comparative Communist Political Culture', Studies in
Comparative Communism, 16, 1983, 9-24.

8: New Trends in Political Culture Research

1. See Claude Levi-Strauss, 'Structural Analysis in Linguistics and

Anthropology', in Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology
(volume 1) (trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf)
(New York and London: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 31-34.
2. Saussure, quoted in Arthur Asa Berger, Agitpop: Political Culture and
Communication Theory (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction,
1990), p. 140.
3. Levi-Strauss, 'The Structural Study of Myth', in Levi-Strauss, Struc-
tural Anthropology, pp. 212f.
4. Eloise A. Buker, Politics Through a Looking Glass: Understanding
 Notes 189

Political Culture Through a Structuralist Interpretation of Na"atives

(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1987).
5. Richard M. Merelman, 'On Culture and Politics in America: A Perspec-
tive from Structural Anthropology', British Journal of Political Science
19, 1989, 465-493.
6. Michael E. Urban and John McClure, 'The Folklore of State Socialism:
Semiotics and the Study of the Soviet State', Soviet Studies 35, 1983,
471-486.
7. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: NLB, 1975), p. 187.
8. Merelman asserts, for instance, that 'social identity theorists ... pro-
vide ample experimental support for the postulate of structural oppo-
sition in social cognition'. Merelman, 'On Culture and Politics in
America', p. 473 and n. 43.
9. Timpanaro, On Materialism, pp. 18.5f.
10. Ernest Gellner, The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays on Anthro-
pological Method and Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
(originally published as Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences,
1973), p. 1.53.
11. Merelman, 'On Culture and Politics in America', p. 488. The label
'individualism' is easy enough to understand, but the justification
for calling it 'mythologized' is a little puzzling. This refers to the
recurrence of individualism in media narratives (p. 485); but its
recurrence as metaphor is a necessary condition for its identification
as 'deep structure'.
12. 'Corporate house organs frequently portray the corporation ... ';
'Many television sitcoms tell stories about ... '; 'American mass
media regularly disparage ... ': these are the 'statistical' demon-
strations (emphasis added). Merelman, 'On Culture and Politics in
America', pp. 489f.
13. The label 'culture theory' itself hints at the breadth of the claims
made of this approach. In our discussion it will be avoided, since it
begs too many questions about the relationship of this theory to its
many predecessors in political culture research and elsewhere that
might have gone under that name if their authors had been less
reticent.
14. Merelman sees no difficulty in drawing on both: his 'individualism'
is initially specified in terms of Douglas's typology, which he says
'incorporates the structuralist's principle of contrast'. Merelman, 'On
Culture and Politics in America', pp. 485f.
15. Aaron Wildavsky, 'Change in Political Culture', Politics 20, 1985,
95-1 02; Aaron Wildavsky, 'Choosing Preferences by Constructing
Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation', American
Political Science Review 81, 1987, 3-21; David D. Laitin and Aaron
Wildavsky, 'Political Culture and Political Preferences', American
Political Science Review 82, 1988, 589-596; Michael Thompson,
Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO
190 Notes

and Oxford: Westview, 1990). References to the last work in this

section will be in parentheses in the text.
16. Wildavsky, 'Choosing Preferences'.
17. Wildavsky, 'Choosing Preferences', p. 18.
18. Berger, Agitpop; Arthur Asa Berger (ed.), Political Culture and Public
Opinion (New Brunswick, NJ and Oxford: Transaction, 1989).
19. Spurious support for the theory is provided by the arbitrary suggestion
that the birds have to move from one 'quadrant' to another. The number
four is given almost mystical significance by a footnote reference to
the tetrahedron as 'the simplest geometric form capable of structural
integrity in three dimensions' (n. 1, p. 99). Is it pedantic to observe
that the tetrahedron has no geometric connection with either a flock of
starlings or the idea of a 'quadrant'?
20. The last involves the analysis of Almond and Verba's 'case histories'.
These were based on a smaller group of in-depth ar1d uncoded inter-
views used to illustrate the main argument, which, as we saw, was
based on quantitative survey data.
21. Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New
York: Thomas W. Crowell, 1966), pp. 85-97.
22. Wildavsky, 'Choosing Preferences', p. 15.
23. Grounds may therefore be provided for David Laitin's observation that
Wildavsky's matrix of preference combinations 'illustrates something
important about his own culture'. Laitin and Wildavsky, 'Political
Culture and Political Preferences', p. 590. Laitin's own idea of the use
of political cultural resources by 'political entrepreneurs', which we
mentioned in Chapter 7, is of course vulnerable to the same criticism.
24. Laitin and Wildavsky, 'Political Culture and Political Preferences',
p. 593.
25. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate
Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1970), pp. viif.
26. Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, p. 238 and generally ch. 6.
27. Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture:
Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-/840s (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983).
28. John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political
Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts 1713-1861 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xvi. Emphasis added.
29. Robert Kelley, Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture,
Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley 1850-1986 (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1989).
30. Philip R. VanderMeer, The Hoosier Politician: Officeholding and
Political Culture in Indiana 1896-1920 (Urbana and Chicago: lllinois
University Press, 1985); Robert M. Wflir, 'The Last of American Free-
men': Studies in the Political Culture oj the Colonial ana Revolutionary
South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986).
 Notes 191

31. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture, p. 4.

32. Ronald P. Formisano, 'Comment' on Kelley, 'Ideology and Political
Culture', American Historical Review 82, 1977, 568-577, p. 568.
33. Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First
Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 10, citing H. Stuart
Hughes.
34. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture
ofAmerican Slavery (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985).
35. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, chs 2, 4.
36. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, p. vii.
37. Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading ofAntebellum Political
Culture (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1986).
38. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of
American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1955), ch. 7; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), ch. 15; Norton,
Alternative Americas, pp. 4 (on Hartz), 117f. (on Pocock).
39. Norton, Alternative Americas, p. 140. Norton's account also illustrates
the perils of thick description, particularly in her use of the metaphors
of masculinity and femininity to describe respectively the cultures of
the North and the South. These metaphors are suggestive, but perhaps
too loosely so. The prevalence of certain forms of violence, such as
duelling, in the South might imply the opposite characterization. In the
not unrepresentative spectacle of Southerner Preston Brooks attacking
Northerner Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate one certainly fails
to see a clear display of 'feminine' qualities. See Greenberg, Masters
and Statesmen, ch. 2.
40. Norton, Alternative Americas, p. 3.
41. Quoted in John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Per-
sistence in Mass Society (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books-D. C.
Heath, 1972), p. 12.
42. Reed, The Enduring South, pp. 88f.
43. Weir, 'The Last of American Freemen', p. 71.
44. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Jean H.
Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Nonhern Democrats
in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell
University Press, 1983). Baker's study extends also into the period
of the 'third party system'.
45. Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, esp. ch. 3 and
Conclusion.
46. Baker, Affairs of Party, p. 12.
47. Baker, Affairs of Party, p. 289.
48. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, ch. 5.
192 Notes

49. See in particular Robert Kelley, 'Ideology and Political Culture from
Jefferson to Nixon', American Historical Review 82, 1977, 531-562
and the book for which that article was an appetizer, Kelley, The
Cultural Pattern in American Politics. See also Kelley, Battling the
Inland Sea.
50. Kelley, 'Ideology and Political Culture', pp. 532f.
51. Formisano, 'Comment', p. 568.
52. Kelley, Battling the Inland Sea, p. xv.
53. For an example see Samuel J. Patterson, 'The Political Cultures of the
American States', Journal of Politics 30, 1968, 187-209.
Bibliography

Abercrombie, Nicholas and BryanS. Turner, 'The Dominant Ideology The-

sis', British Journal of Sociology 29, 1978, 149-170.
Adelman, Jonathan R., 'The Impact of Civil Wars on Communist Political
Culture: The Chinese and Russian Cases', Studies in Comparative Com-
munism 16, 1983, 25-48.
Almond, Gabriel A., 'Comparative Political Systems', Journal of Politics 18,
1956, 391-409.
Almond, Gabriel A., 'Communism and Political Culture Theory', Compara-
tive Politics 15, 1983, 127-138.
Almond, Gabriel A., A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political
Science (Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage, 1990).
Almond, Gabriel A. and James S. Coleman (eds), The Politics of the Devel-
oping Areas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).
Almond, Gabriel A. and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes
and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1963; abridged edn Boston: Little, Brown, 1965, repr. Newbury
Park, CA and London: Sage, 1989).
Almond, Gabriel A. and Sidney Verba (eds), The Civic Culture Revisited
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980, repr. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage,
1989).
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Andrle, Vladimir, Workers in Stalin's Russia: Industrialization and Social
Change in a Planned Economy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf;
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
Appleby, Joyce, 'Republicanism in Old and New Contexts', William and
Mary Quarterly 43, 1986, 20-34.
Archer, Margaret S., 'Theory, Culture and Post-Industrial Society', in Mike
Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalism and Modernity
(A Theory, Culture and Society special issue) (London and Newbury Park,
CA: Sage, 1990).
Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: Meridian,
1958).
Ascherson, Neal, The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1981).
Baker, Jean H., Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats
in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1983).
Banning, Lance, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology
(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1978).

193
194 Bibliography

Barghoom, Frederick, 'Stalinism and the Russian Cultural Heritage', Review

of Politics 14, 1952, 178-203.
Barghoom, Frederick C. and Thomas F. Remington, Politics in the USSR (3rd
edn) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986 ).
Barnard, F. M., 'Culture and Political Development: Herder's Suggestive
Insights', American Political Science Review 63, 1969, 379-397.
Barry, Brian M., Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (Chic~o: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1978).
Basham. Richard and David DeGroot, 'Current Approaches to the Anthropol-
ogy of Urban and Complex Societies', American Anthropologist 19, 1977,
414-440.
Bell, Daniel, 'Ten Theories in Search of Soviet Reality', in Alex lnkeles
and Kent Geiger (eds), Soviet Society: A Book of Readings (London:
Constable, 1961).
Berend, Ivan T. and Gyorgy Ranki, Economic Development in East-Central
Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1974).
Berger, Arthur Asa, Agitpop: Political Culture and Communication Theory
(New Bruswick, NJ and London: Transaction, 1990).
Berger, Arthur Asa (ed.), Political Culture and Public Opinion (New Bruns-
wick, NJ and Oxford: Transaction, 1989).
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction ofReality: A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
Bernstein, Richard J., The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory
(London: Methuen, 1979).
Bialer, Seweryn, The Soviet Paradox: External Expan~ion, Internal Decline
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1986).
Bill, James A. and Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr, Comparative Politics: The Quest
for Theory (Lanham. MD: University Press of America, 1981).
Black, Cyril E., Understanding Soviet Politics: The Perspective of Russian
History (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986).
Boon, James A., Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the
Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Brady, Ivan (ed.), 'Speaking in the Name of the Real: Freeman and Mead on
Samoa', American Anthropologist 85, 1983, 908-947.
Brooke, John L., The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political
Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts 1713-1861 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Brower, Daniel R., 'Stalinism and the "View From Below"', Russian Review
46, 1987, 379-381.
Brown, Archie, review of White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics in The
Times Literary Supplement, 7 March 1980.
Brown, Archie, 'Ideology and Political Culture', in Seweryn Bialer (ed.),
Politics, Society, and Nationality Inside Gorbachev's Russia (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1989).
 Bibliography 195

Brown, Archie (ed.), Political Culture and Communist Studies (London:

Macmillan, 1984).
Brown, Archie and Jack Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change
in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1977).
Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., 'Soviet Politics: From the Future to the Past?',
in Paul Cocks, Robert V. Daniels and Nancy Whittier Heer (eds), The
Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 1976 ).
Buker, Eloise A., Politics Through a Looking Glass: Understanding Political
Culture Through a Structuralist Interpretation ofNa"atives (Westport, CT
and London: Greenwood Press, 1987).
Burant, Stephen R., 'The Influence of Russian Tradition on the Political Style
of the Soviet Elite', Political Science Quarterly 102, 1987, 273-293.
Chilton, Stephen, Defining Political Development (Boulder, CO and London:
Lynne Reiner, 1988).
Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Cohen, Abner, Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of
Power and Symbolism in Complex Society (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1974).
Cohen, Anthony P., The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester:
Ellis Horwood; London and New York: Tavistock, 1985).
Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political
Biography 1888-1938 (London: Wildwood House, 1974).
Collier, David, 'The Comparative Method: Two Decades of Change', in
Dankwart A. Rustow and Kenneth Paul Erickson (eds), Comparative Pol-
itical Dynamics: Global Research Perspectives (New York: HarperCollins,
1991).
Crick, Bernard, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).
Czudnowski, Moshe M., 'A Salience Dimension of Politics for the Study of
Political Culture', American Political Science Review 62, 1968, 878-888.
Dahl, Robert A., 'The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a
Monument to a Successful Revolution', American Political Science Review
55, 1961, 763-772.
Davies, Nonnan, God's Playground: A History of Poland (2 vols) (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1981).
Dawisha. Karen, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Chal-
lenge (2nd edn) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Devine, Donald J., The Political Culture of the United States: The Influence of
Member Values on Regime Maintenance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).
DiFranceisco, Wayne and Zvi Gitelman, 'Soviet Political Culture and "Cov-
ert Participation" in Policy Implementation', American Political Science
Review 78, 1984, 603-621.
Dittmer, Lowell, 'Political Culture and Political Symbolism: Toward a Theo-
retical Synthesis', World Politics 29, 1977, 552-583.
196 Bibliography

Dittmer, Lowell, 'Comparative Communist Political Culture', Studies in

Comparative Communism 16, 1983, 9-24.
Easton, David, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley
and Sons, 1965).
Eckstein, Harry, 'A Culturalist Theory of Political Change', American Politi-
cal Science Review 82, 1988, 789-804.
Elazar, Daniel J., American Federalism: A View from the States (New York:
Thomas W. Crowell, 1966).
Elazar, Daniel and Joseph Zikmund ill (eds), The Ecology of American
Political Culture: Readings (New York: Thomas W. Crowell, 1975).
Eley, Geoff, 'History With the Politics Left Out- Again?', Russian Review
45, 1986, 385-394.
Elkins, David J. and Richard E. B. Simeon, 'A Cause in Search of its Effect,
or What Does Political Culture Explain?', Comparative Politics 11, 1979,
127-145.
Epstein, A. L., Ethos and Identity: Three Studies in Ethnicity (London:
Tavistock; Chicago: Aldine, 1978).
Fagen, Richard R., The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1969).
Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-31 (Blooming-
ton, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1978).
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 'New Perspectives on Stalinism', Russian Review 45,
1986, 357-373.
Formisano, Ronald P., 'Comment' on Kelley, 'Ideology and Political Culture',
American Historical Review 82, 1977, 568-577.
Formisano, Ronald P., The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts
Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983).
Frentzel-Zagorska, Janina, 'The Dominant Political Culture in Poland', Poli-
tics 20, 1985, 82-98.
Friedrich, Carl J. and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and
Autocracy (2nd edn) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
Garton Ash, Timothy, 'Does Central Europe Exist?', New York Review of
Books 33, 9 October 1986, 45-52.
Gati, Charles, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in
Transition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990).
Gati, Charles (ed.), The Politics of Modernization in Eastern Europe: Testing
the Soviet Model (New York: Praeger, 1974).
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975).
Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
Gellner, Ernest, The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays on Anthropological
Method and Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) (originally pub-
lished as Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences, 1973).
Gerner, Kristian, The Soviet Union and Central Europe in the Post- War Era:
A Study in Precarious Security (Aldershot: Gower, 1985).
Getty, J. Arch, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party
 Bibliography 197

Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1985).
Gibbins, John R. (ed.), Contemporary Political Culture: Politics in a
Postmodern Age (London: Sage, 1989).
Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of
Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).
Gill, Graeme, 'Personality Cult, Political Culture and Party Structure', Studies
in Comparative Communism 17, 1984, 111-121.
Gitelman, Zvi, 'Soviet Political Culture: Insights from Jewish Emigres', Soviet
Studies 29, 1977, 543-564.
Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan, 'Why Ethnicity?', Commentary 58,
1974, 33-39.
Gleason, Abbott, Peter Kenez and Richard Stites (eds), Bolshevik Culture:
Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1985).
Gluckman, M., 'Anthropological Problems Arising From the African Indus-
trial Revolution', in Aidan Southall (eel.), Social Change in Modem Africa
(London: Oxford University Press, 1961).
Greenberg, Kenneth S., Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of
American Slavery (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985).
Grew, Raymond, 'More on Modernization', Journal of Social History 14,
1980, 179-187.
Hahn, Jeffrey W., 'Continuity and Change in Russian Political Culture',
British Journal of Political Science 21, 1991, 393-421.
Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in JJnerica: An Interpretation ofAmerican
Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1955).
Havel, Vaclav, 'The Power of the Powerless', in Vaclav Havel et al., The
Powerofthe Powerless (London: Hutchinson, 1985).
Hayward, Max, Writers in Russia: 1917-1978 (London: Harvill, 1983).
Hill, Ronald J., 'The Cultural Dimension of Communist Political Evolution',
Journal of Communist Studies l, 1985, 34-53.
Hill, Ronald J., 'Soviet Political Development and the Culture of the
Apparatchiki', Studies in Comparative Communism 19, 1986, 25-39.
Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism Since 1870: Programme, Myth,
Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Hofstadter, Richard, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate
Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1970).
Hofstede, Geert, Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-
Related Values (Beverly Hills, CA and London: Sage, 1980).
Howe, Daniel Walker, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
198 Bibliography

Huntington, Samuel P. and Jorge Domfnguez, 'Political Development', in

Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (eds), Handbook of Political Sci·
ence Volume 3: Macropolitical Theory (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1975).
lnglehart, Ronald, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political
Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1977).
Inglehart, Ronald, 'The Renaissance of Political Culture', American Political
Science Review 82, 1988, 1203-1230.
Inglehart, Ronald, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Inkeles, Alex and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a
Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London:
Oxford University Press, 1959).
James, Harold, A German Identity 1770-1990 (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1989).
Jancar, Barbara, 'Political Culture and Political Change', Studies in Compara-
tive Communism 17, 1984, 69-82.
Jessop, Bob, Social Order, Reform and Revolution: A Power, Exchange and
Institutionalization Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1972).
Jessop, Bob, Traditionalism, Conservatism and British Political Culture
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974).
Jessop, R. D., 'Civility and Traditionalism in English Political Culture',
British Journal of Political Science 1, 1971, 1-24.
Jowitt, Kenneth, 'An Organizational Approach to the Study of Political
Culture in Marxist-Leninist Systems', American Political Science Review
68, 1974, 1171-1191.
Kavanagh, Dennis, Political Science and Political Behaviour (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1983).
Keenan, Edward L., 'Muscovite Political Folkways', Russian Review 45,
1986, 115-181.
Keesing, Roger M., 'Theories of Culture', Annual Review of Anthropology 3,
1974, 73-97.
Kelley, Robert, 'Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon',
American Historical Review 82, 1977, 531-562.
Kelley, Robert, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
Kelley, Robert, Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public
Policy, and the Sacramento Valley 1850-1986 (Berkeley and London:
University of California Press, 1989).
Kolakowski, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and
Dissolution. Volume II: The Golden Age (trans. P. S. Falla) (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978).
Konrad, George, Antipolitics: An Essay (trans. Richard E. Allen) (New York
and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
Krisch, Henry, 'Changing Political Culture and Political Stability in the
 Bibliography 199

German Democratic Republic', Studies in Comparative Communism 19,

1986,41-53.
Kroeber, A. L. and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts
and Definitions (New York: Vintage Books, n.d.) (originally published as
Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology,
Harvard University 47, 1952).
Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1983).
Laitin, David D. and Aaron Wildavsky, 'Political Culture and Political Pref-
erences', American Political Science Review 82, 1988, 589-596.
Lane, Christel, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society - The Soviet
Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Lane, Christel, 'Legitimacy and Power in the Soviet Union Through Socialist
Ritual', British Journal of Political Science 14, 1984, 207-217.
Leach, Edmund, Social Amhropology (London: Fontana, 1982).
Lehman, Edward W., 'On the Concept of Political Culture: A Theoretical
Reassessment', Social Forces 50, 1972, 361-370.
Lemke, Christiane, 'New Issues in the Politics of the German Democratic
Republic: A Question of Political Culture?', Journal of Communist Studies
2, 1986, 351-358.
Levi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (volume 1) (trans. Claire
Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf) (New York and London: Basic
Books, 1963).
Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History
of Interwar Russia (London: Methuen, 1985).
Lewis, Paul G., 'Obstacles to the Establishment of Political Legitimacy
in Communist Poland', British Journal of Political Science 12, 1982,
125-147.
Lewis, Paul G., 'Legitimation and Political Crises: East European Develop-
ments in the Post-Stalin Period', in Paul G. Lewis (ed.), Eastern Europe:
Political Crisis and Legitimation (New York: StMartin's Press, 1984).
Lieberson, Jonathan, 'Interpreting the Interpreter', New York Review of Books
31, 15 March 1985, 39-46.
Lijphart, Arend, 'Comparative Politics and Comparative Method', American
Political Science Review 65, 1971, 682-693.
McKay, James, 'An Exploratory Synthesis of Primordjal and Mobilizationist
Approaches to Ethnic Phenomena', Ethnic and Racial Studies 5, 1982,
395-420.
Mann, Michael, 'The Social Cohesion of American Liberal Democracy',
American Sociological Review 35, 1970, 423-439.
Merelman, Richard M., 'On Culture and Politics in America: A Perspective
from Structural Anthropology', British Journal of Political Science 19,
1989,465-493.
Meyer, Alfred G., 'Communist Revolutions and Cultural Change', Studies in
Comparative Communism 5, 1972, 345-372.
Meyer, Alfred G., 'The Use of the Term Culture in the Soviet Union',
200 Bibliography

Appendix B of Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of

Concepts and Definitions.
Meyer, Stephen, 'Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the
Ford Factory, 1914-192l',JournalofSocialHi story 14,1980,67-82.
Middleton, David and Derek Edwards, 'Conversational Remembering: a
Social Psychological Approach', in David Middleton and Derek Edwards
(eds), Collective Remembering (London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage,
1990).
Millar, James R. (ed.), Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of
Former Soviet Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Moreno, Fransisco Jose, Legitimacy and Stability in Latin America: A Study
of Chilean Political Culture (New York: New York University Press;
London: University of London Press, 1969).
Natanson, Maurice, 'Introduction', in Schutz, Collected Papers I.
Natanson, Maurice, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986).
Norton, Anne, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political
Culture (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1986).
Nowak, Stefan, 'Values and Attitudes of the Polish People', Scientific
American 245, 1981, 23-3i.
Pateman, Carole, 'Criticizing Empirical Theorists of Democracy: A Comment
on Skinner', Political Theory 2, 1974, 215-218.
Patrick, Glenda M., 'Political Culture', in Giovanni Sartori (ed.), Social
Science Concepts: A Systemic Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA and London:
Sage, 1984).
Pateman, Carole, 'Political Culture, Political Structure and Political Change',
British Journal of Political Science 1, 1971, 291-305.
Patterson, Samuel J., 'The Political Cultures of the American States', Journal
of Politics 30, 1968, 187-209.
Paul, David W., The Cultural Limits of Revolutionary Politics (Boulder, CO:
East European Quarterly; distributed by Columbia University Press, New
York, 1979).
Pipes, Richard, Russia Under the Old Regime (New York: Scribners Sons,
1974).
Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought
and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1975).
Putnam, Robert D., 'Studying Elite Political Culture: The Case of Ideology',
American Political Science Review 65, 1981, 651-681.
Pye, Lucian W., 'Culture and Political Science: Problems in the Evaluation
of the Concept of Political Culture', in Louis Schneider and Charles M.
Bonjean (eds), The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Pye, Lucian W., 'Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism',
American Political Science Review 84, 1990, 3-19.
Pye, Lucian W. with Mary W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural
 Bibliography 201

Dimension of Authority (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, 1985).
Pye, Lucian W. and Sidney Verba (eds), Political Culture and Political
Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
Pynsent, Robert B. (ed.), T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937). Volume 2: Thinker and
Critic (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Reed, John Shelton, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass
Society (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books-D. C. Heath, 1972).
Richardson, Bradley M., The Political Culture of Japan (Berkeley: University
of California Press, J 974).
Rigby, T. H., 'Stalinism and the Mono-Organizational Society', in Robert C.
Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1977).
Rigby, T. H., 'Introduction: Political Legitimacy, Weber and Communist
Mono-Organizational Systems', in T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher (eds),
Political Legitimation in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Roberts, Geoffrey K., "'Normal" or "Critical"?: Progress Reports on the
Condition of West Germany's Political Culture', European Journal of
Political Research 12, 1984, 423-431.
Roseberry, William, 'Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropol-
ogy', Social Research 49, 1982, 1013-1028.
Rosenbaum, Walter A., Political Culture (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons,
1975).
Rothschild, Joseph, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central
Europe Since World War ll (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989).
Runciman, W. G., 'Some Recent Contributions to the Theory of Democracy',
European Journal of Sociology 6, 1965, 174-185.
Rusinow, Dennison (ed.), Yugoslavia: A Fractured Federalism (Washington
DC: Wilson Center Press, 1988).
Schulze, Hagen (ed.), Nation-Building in Central Europe (Leamington Spa:
Berg, 1987).
Schulze, Hagen, The Course of Gennan Nationalism: From Frederick the
Great to Bismarck, 1763-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
Schutz, Alfred, Collected Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
Sharrock, Wes and Bob Anderson, The Ethnomethodologists (Chichester:
Ellis Horwood; London and New York: Tavistock, 1986).
Shklar, Judith N., Montesquieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Shlaes, Amity, Gennany: The Empire Within (New York: Farrar; Straus and
Giroux, 1991).
Skilling, H. Gordon, 'Sixty-eight in Historical Perspective', International
Journal33, 1978, 678-701.
Skinner, Quentin, 'The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics:
A Plague on Both Their Houses', Political Theory 1, 1973, 287-306.
202 Bibliography

Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986).
Smith, Gordon, 'A Model of the Bureaucratic Culture', Political Studies 22,
1974, 31-43.
Sochor, Zenovia A., Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Contro-
versy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Solomon, Richard H., Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971 ).
Staniszkis, Jadwiga, 'On Some Contradictions of Socialist Society: The Case
of Poland', Soviet Studies 31, 1979, 167-187.
Taylor, Charles, 'Interpretation and the Sciences of Man', Review of Meta-
physics 25, 1971, 3-51.
Thompson, Michael, Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory
(Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1990).
Timpanaro, Sebastiana, On Materialism (London: NLB, 1975).
Treadgold, Donald W., Twentieth Century Russia (7th edn) (Boulder, CO:
Westview, 1990).
Trzeciakowski, Lech, The Kulturkampfin Prussian Poland (New York: East
European Monographs; distributed by Columbia University Press, 1990).
Tucker, Robert C., The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and
Post-Stalin Change (London and Dunmow: Pall Mall, 1963).
Tucker, Robert C., 'Communism and Political Culture', Newsletter on Com-
parative Studies of Communism 4, 1971, 3-12.
Tucker, Robert C., 'Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Society',
Political Science Quanerly 88, 1973, 173-190.
Tucker, Robert C., Stalin as Revolutionary 1879-1929: A Study in History
and Personality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).
Tucker, Robert C., 'Communist Revolutions, National Cultures, and the
Divided Nations', Studies in Comparative Communism 7, 1974, 235-245.
Tucker, Robert C., Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From
Lenin To Gorbachev (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987).
Tucker, Robert C., Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928-1941
(New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990).
Urban, Michael E., The Ideology of Administration: American and Soviet
Cases (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982).
Urban, Michael E., 'Conceptualizing Political Power in the USSR: Patterns
of Binding and Bonding', Studies in Comparative Communism 18, 1985,
207-226.
Urban, Michael E. and John McClure, 'The Folklore of State Socialism:
Semiotics and the Study of the Soviet State', Soviet Studies 35, 1983,
471-486.
VanderMeer, Philip R., The Hoosier Politician: Officeholding and Political
Culture in Indiana 1896-1920 (Urbana and Chicago: lllinois University
Press, 1985).
Wagner, Roy, The Invention of Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1975).
 Bibliography 203

Waller, Michael, 'What Is to Count as Ideology in Soviet Politics?', in Stephen

White and Alex Pravda (eds), Ideology and Soviet Politics (London:
Macmillan, 1988).
Walker, Rachel, 'Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty
Signifier and the Double Bind', British Journal of Political Science 19,
1989, 161-189.
Wei, Yung, 'A Methodological Critique of Current Studies on Chinese
Political Culture', Journal of Politics 38, 1976, 114-140.
Weir, Robert M., 'The Last of American Freemen': Studies in the Political
Culture of the Colonial and Revolutionary South (Macon, GA: Mercer
University Press, 1986 ).
Welch, Stephen, 'Issues in the Study of Political Culture: The Example of
Communist Party States', British Journal of Political Science 17, 1987,
479-500.
Welch, Stephen, 'Political Culture and Communism: Definition and Use',
Journal of Communist Studies 5, 1989, 91-98.
White, Stephen, 'Political Socialization in the USSR: A Study in Failure?',
Studies in Comparative Communism 10, 1977, 328-342.
White, Stephen, 'Continuity and Change in Soviet Political Culture: An
Emigre Study', Comparative Political Studies 11, 1978, 391-395.
White, Stephen, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan,
1979).
White, Stephen, 'Political Culture in Communist States: Some Problems of
Theory and Method' (Research Note), Comparative Politics 16, 1984,
351-365.
White, Stephen, 'Propagating Communist Values in the USSR', Problems of
Communism 34, 1985, 1-17.
Wildavsky, Aaron, 'Change in Political Culture', Politics 20, 1985, 95-102.
Wildavsky, Aaron, 'Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A
Cultural Theory of Preference Formation', American Political Science
Review 81, 1987, 3-21.
Williams, Raymond, Marxism and literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977).
Williams, Robert C., 'The Nationalization of Early Soviet Culture', Russian
History 9, 1982, 157-172.
Winters, Stanley B. (ed.), T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937). Volume 1: Thinker
and Politician (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Yaney, George, 'Bureaucracy as Culture: A Comment', Slavic Review 41,
1982, 104-111.
Index

Abercrombie, Nicholas, 28, 29 Bolsheviks, Bolshevism, see Leninism

Adelman, Jonathan R., 83 Boon, James A., 184n
Almond, Gabriel A., 30, 35 Brady, Ivan, 184n
as co-author of The Civic Culture, 4, Brooke, John L., 150
11, 14-22,23-9 passim, 31, 40, Brower, Daniel R., 90
65, 75-6, 118, 145, 157, 160 Brown, Archie, 11, 32, 47-9, 51-6, 65,
definition of political culture, 3-4, 5, 77, 100
47, 74,97, 163,165 Brown, Robert, I66n
on political culture in communist Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., 180-ln
studies, 11, 48, 54 Buker, Eloise A., 137
Anderson, Benedict, 121 Burant, Stephen R., 51, 181n
Anderson, Bob, 186n Burlatsky, Fyodor, 53
Andrle, Vladimir, 92-3
anthropology, 4, 12, 88, 100-6, 116, Central Europe, idea of, 60-1, 161
119, 120, 143,151, 164 Chilton, Stephen, 35-6
Appleby, Joyce, 186n China, 8, 83, 145
Archer, Margaret S., 36-7, 39 civic culture, 15, 20, 21,28-9, 65,
Arendt, Hannah, 89-90, 92-5 passim 116-17
Ascherson, Neal, 187n Clark, Katerina, 86, 94
atomization, 89-90, 92, 93, 115, 162 Cohen, Abner, 102-3, 104, 112
Cohen, Anthony P., 102-3, 104
Baker, Jean H., 153-4, 155-6 Cohen, Stephen F., 83-4
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 86, 87 Coleman, James S., 30, 35
Banfield, Edward, 145 collectivization, 84, 85, 87
Banning, Lance, 107-8 Collier, David, 66
Barghoom, Frederick C., 75 comparative method, 12, 65-6
Barnard, F. M., 4 Conradt, David, 23
Barry, Brian M., 16-17, 18-19, Cornelius, Wayne A., 75
28,64-5 Craig, Ann L., 75
Basham, Richard, 101, 102 Crick, Bernard, 3
Bauer, Raymond A., 36, 52 cultural lag, 30-4, 78, 88, 116, 148,
behaviouralism, 2-4, 6, 8, 9, 30, 45, 47, 157, 161
64-5, 73-4, 80, 116, 135, 158 cultural revolution
Bell, Daniel, 36, 39, 92, 93 meanings in Sovietology, 84-5
Berend, Ivan T., 175n see also Tucker, Robert C.
Berger, Arthur Asa, 143 culture
Berger, Peter L., 108-10, 111 anthropological usage, 1, 4,
Bernstein, Richard J., 186n 12,100-1,105,112,115,
Bialer, Seweryn, 173n 119, 163-4
Bill, James A., 170n and identity, 101, 102, 104, 119-20,
Black, Cyril E., 33, 37, 58, 59, 170n 163
Bogdanov, Alexander, 82, 84 Czechoslovakia, 49, 52, 54-6,

204
 Index 205

57, 58, 60, 62, 77; see also Garton Ash, Timothy, 60-1
Slovaks Gati, Charles, 174n
Czudnowski, Moshe M., 75-6 Geertz, Clifford, 5, 9, 81, 98, 104-8,
110, 114, 115, 119, 138, 162
Dahl, Robert A., 2, 3 Gellner, Ernest, 122-3, 124, 128,
Davies, Norman, 125-9, 130 130-1, 135, 138, 140
Dawisha, Karen, 59, 61 German-speaking diaspora, 60, 126,
DeGroot, David, 101, 102 132, 188n
Devine, Donald J., l67n Germany, 12, 15-24, 46, 60, 77, 164
DiFranceisco, Wayne, 76 history, 131-4
dissident writers (in Eastern Europe), (also Prussia) and Poland, history,
57-8 125, 126, 128, 129-31, 132. 134
Dittmer, Lowell, l88n Germany, East, 23, 168n
Dominguez, Jorge, 47, 49 Gerner, Kristian, 56-7, 61-2
Douglas, Mary, 13, 136, 141, 142 Getty, J. Arch, 18ln
Dubcek, Alexander, 55 Gibbins, John R., 37-9
Eastern Europe, 12, 36,57-63,78, 116, Giddens, Anthony, 3
132, 161, l75n Gill, Graeme, 87, 94
Easton, David, 69 Girvin, Brian, 118
Eckstein, Harry, 20, 46 Gitelman, Zvi, 76, 172n
Edwards, Derek, 112 Glazer, Nathan, 103
Elazar, Daniel J., 71-2, 145-6, 157 Gluckman, Max, 101
Eley, Geoff, 90 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 53, 54, 83, 97
elite, 10, 12, 117, 134-5, 155 Gray, Jack, II
administrative/ political, in the Soviet Great Britain, 15-22, 29, 35, 153
Union, 83,94, 95, 96,115 Great Purge, 85, 87
role in democracy, 20,27-8,41, 79, Greenberg, Kenneth S., 151-2
116-17, 160, 164 Grew, Raymond, 32, 33
role in formation of national identity,
123-4, 128, 129-31, 134 Hahn, Jeffrey W., 17ln
Elkins, David J., 66-7, 69 Hardgrave, Robert L., 170n
Ellis, Richard, 141-5, 151 Hartz, Louis, 152, 154, 157
emigres, 36, 49, 50, 66, 76, l72n Havel, Vaclav, 58, 60
empirical theory of democracy, 15, 28-9 Hayward, Max, 86
Epstein, A. L., 101, 104 Herder, J. G., 3, 4
ethnicity, 103-4, 155 Hill, Ronald J., 97
ethnomethodology, l:i, 111-2 historiography, 147-8, 158; see also
United States
Fagen,RichardR., 48 Hobsbawm, Eric, 122, 123, 124
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 83, 84-5 Hofstadter, Richard, 149, 150,
Five-Year Plans, 84, 85, 87, 90 151, 155
Formisano, Ronald P., 149-50, 156 Hofstede, Geert, 68-9, 74, 161
France, 25, 35, 132 Hough, Jerry F., 18ln
Freeman, Derek, 100 Howe, Daniel Walker, 153-4,
Frentzel-Zagorska, Janina, 56 155-6
Friedrich, Carl J., 18ln Hughes, H. Stuart, 19ln
functionalism, 142, 145 Hungary, 49, 58
Huntington, Samuel P., 47,49
Garfinkel, Harold, 111, 112 Husser!, Edmund, 113
206 Index

idealism, 9, 12, 91-4, 96-8, 105-6, Lijphart, Arend, 65- 6

114, 119, 138-41, 148, 158, 161-2 Linton, Ralph, 81
identity, see culture Luckmann, Thomas, 108-10, Ill
Inglehart, Ronald, 11, 25-6, 31, 39-44, Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 82
66,68,69, 76
lnkeles, Alex, 36, 52 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 100
interest group, 102, 163 Manchester School (in anthropology),
interests, 103-4, 113, 116-17, 141, 101
162, 163-4 Mann, Michael, 27, 29
interpretivism, 2, 4-6, 7-9, 10, 12, 45, Mannheim, Karl, 106
47, 71, 80, 84, 88, 99, 117, 135, Marx, Marxism, 28, 51, 78, 82-3, 86,
137, 161-2 87, 144
Italy, 15-22, 24 Marxism-Leninism, 53, 95, 96
Masaryk, T. G., 55, 77, 173n
James, Harold, 133 mass, 10, 20, 27-8, 92, 124, 128,
Jancar, Barbara, 47, 51 129-31, 134-5
Japan,43 McAuley, Mary, 51, 65, 176n
Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 62 McClure, John, 189n
Jessop, Bob, 28, 29, 37, 169n McKay, James, 185n
Jowitt, Kenneth, 182n Mead, Margaret, 100
Joyce, Josiah, 153 Meisner, Maurice, 179n
Merelman, Richard M., 137, 139-41
Kallenburg,Arthur, 166n Mexico, 15-22, 75, 77
Keenan, Edward L., 87-8 Meyer, Alfred G., 6, 82-3, 147,
Keesing, Roger M., 101, 102 161-2, l78n
Kelley, Robert, 150,151,155-7,158 Meyer, Stephen, 185n
Kluckhohn, Clyde, 100, 101 Middleton, David, 112
Kolakowski, Leszek, 179n Millar, James R., 172n
Konrad, George, 60 Miller, John, 69-70, 73
Krisch, Henry, 168n Mitchell, J. C., I 0 I
Kroeber, A. L., 100, 101 mobilization,48,87,89,92,94
Kulturkampf, 128, 129-31, 132, 134 modernization, II, 30, 32-5, 37, 44, 45,
Kundera, Milan, 59, 174n 64, 116, 122-3, 160
Moreno, Fransisco Jose, 68
Laitin, David D., 135, 190n Moynihan, Daniel P., 103
Lane, Christel, 96, 183n myth, 20, 82, 86-7, 91, 94, 123-4, 127,
Leach, Edmund, 184n 137, 173n
legitimacy, 27-8, 52-3
Lehman, Edward W., 177 naming, act of, 120, 121-2, 146
Lemke, Christiane, 42, 168n Natanson, Maurice, 186n
Lenin, V.I., 3, 51, 81-4; see also national character, 167n
Leninism national identity, nominal, 128-9, 130,
Leninism, 12, 82-3, 84, 86, 89, 92, 94; 131, 132-3
see also Marxism-Leninism nationalism, 118-19, 122-4, 127, 128,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 119, 136-7, 130-1, 132, 134
138, 139 NEP (New Economic Policy), 83-4
Lewin, Moshe, 85, 90 Northern Ireland, 25
Lewis, Paul G., 169n, 187n Norton, Anne, 152
Lieberson, Jonathan, 105 Nowak, Stefan, 56
 Index 207
Pashukanis, E. B., 84 Ranger, Terence, 187n
Pateman, Carole, 28-9, 37, 169n Ranki, Gyorgy, 175n
Patrick, Glenda M., 70 'rationality-activist model', 19-20, 28
Patterson, Samuel J., 192n Reed, John Shelton, 153
Paul, David W., 55, 62 resocialization, 46-9, 50-1, 52-4,
perestroilw, 53, 97 56,63,95
phenomenology, phenomenological Richardson, Bradley M., 70, 76
social theory, 9, 12-13, 98, 99, Rigby, T. H.,89,94,95,96
108-17, llS-22, 134-5, 136, 139, Roberts, Geoffrey K., 23-4, 42
141-2, 146, 157, 158, 162-5 Roseberry, William, ll4
defined, 108-9 Rosenbaum, Walter A., 25
and national identity, 118-22, Rothschild, Joseph, 59
131, 134 Runciman, W. G., 20
relationship to thick description, 110, Rusinow, Dennison, 59
114, 162 Russia, 50-1, 87, 147
Pilsudski, Joseph, 61-2 and Poland, 125-6
Pipes, Richard, !Sin see also Soviet Union
Pocock, J. G. A., 19ln Ryle, Gilbert, 104
Poland, 12, 23, 49, 56, 58, 61-2,
125-31, 164 Sacks, Harvey, 112
political culture Saussure, Ferdinand de, 136, 137
casual uses, 10, 149 Schulze, Hagen, 132, 133
romparative and sociological uses Schutz, Alfred, 9, 108-11, 114, 115,
defined,6-7 117, 120, 158, 163
and culture in general, 4, 163-4 Seton Watson, Hugh, 59
definition, 3-4, 5-6, 12, 47-8, 66, Sharkansky, Ira, 71-2
71, 81, 100, ISO Sharrock, Wes, 186n
hybrid uses, 6, 7-8, 47 Shklar, Judith N., 72-3
and ideology, 12, 28, 52, 91, 95, 99, Shlaes, Amity, 188n
106, 117 Simeon, Richard E. B., 66-7, 69
normative uses, 10 Skilling, H. Gordon, 55
and political change, II, 30, 45, 46-7 Skinner, Quentin, 169n
as residual category, 40, 44, 67-8, 69, Slovaks, distinctness from Czechs, 55
70, 160 Smith, Anthony D., 123-4, 132
and stability, 15-16,20-1,22-3, Smith, Gordon, 183n
24-6 Sochor, Zenovia A., 82
see also behaviouralism; interpret- social constructionism, 12, 112
ivism; phenomenology and under socialist realism, 86
individual countries socialization, 21, 31-2,40, 41, 56, 57,
political development, 30, 32 128, 134; see also resocialization
postindustrial society, 30, 36-7, 39 sociology, 7, 8, 15-16
postmoderrtism, 8, 30, 37-9 Solidarity, 56, 61-2
Prague Spring, 54, 56, 60 Solomon, Richard H., 8
Proletkult, 82, 84 Soviet Union, 12, 48-54, 75-6, 133, 147
Putnam, Robert D., 10 in the Brezhnev era, 95-7, 137
Pye, Lucian W., 4, 8, 30, 33-4, 70, 145 and Eastern Europe, 55, 57, 58-9,
Pye, Mary W., 167n 61, 116
Pynsent, Robert B., 174n nationalities within, 69-70
see also Leninism; Russia; Stalinism
208 Index
Stalin, Joseph, 85, 86-7,88,91 United States, 15-22, 29, 71-2,
Stalinism, 12, 52, 56, 80, 84-94, 96, 97, 139-40, 145-6
106, 115, 121, 147, 162 historiography, 107, 148-57
Staniszkis, Jadwiga, 187n the South, 151-3
structuralism, 9, 13, 136-41, 143, Urban, Michael E., 95-6, 189n
145, 158 urbanization, impact on anthropology,
survey methodology, 3, 6, 39, 41-2, 100-3, 112
49-50,68, 116, 157-8
VanderMeer, Philip R., ISO
Taylor, Charles, 5 Verba, Sidney, 4, 22-3, 30
Taylor, F. W., 93 as co-author of The Civic Culture, see
thick description, 5, 9, 81, 88, 98, Almond, Gabriel A.
99, 104-6, 114, 115, 147-8, Verstehen, verstehende Soziologie, 4-5,
158, 161-2 104, 110, 114
defined, 104-5
see also phenomenology Wagner, Roy, 106
Third Way, 60-1 Wal~sa, Lech, 61
Thompson, Michael, 141-5, 151 Walker, Rachel, 95-6
Timpanaro, Sebastian, 138 Waller, Michael, 91, 95
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 4, 17, 18 War Communism, 83, 87, 88
Toffler, Alvin, 36 Weber, Max, 96, 144; see also Verstehen
totalitarianism, 49, 60, 85, 89-90, 92, Wei, Yung, 167n
18ln; see also Stalinism Weir, Robert M., 150, 152, 153
Treadgold, Donald W., 180n West Germany, see Germany
Truman, David, 166n White, Stephen, 5-6, 8, 48, 50-4, 57,
Trzeciakowski, Lech, 129-30 65, 71, 78, 87, 147
Tucker, Robert C., 12, 80-91, 93-98, Wightman, Gordon, 49, 54-6, 77
99-100, 106, 147, 163 Wildavsky, Aaron, 13, 141-6, 151, 158
Turner, Bryan S., 28, 29, 38 Williams, Raymond, 78
Tylor, E. B., 100 Williams, Robert C., 86
Winters, Stanley B., 173n

Yaney, George, 97