System, Development and Modernisation
Modern stated o*re so large
and complex that we have to be selective. to draw som^^mits to the amount
of comparison needed between them. It wou'0 be a lifetime's work to make
a comparison between the entire cl^-tll''es of two modem states in the
way that anthropologists can G0 with those of two primitive tribes, and
at any given moment our ^formation would always be incomplete. We therefore
isolate ^or attention those aspects which are most important, and for
this ^"T^ose we have to define the political system; that'set of
intercono^ed interactions which controls society as a whole.
The politic system might be regarded, as Talcott Parsons did, as one of
a number of subsystems of the overall social system; or, with Easton,
it c^" be distinguished as an entity for study on its own, engaged
in t^^sactions with the social system which constitutes the nearer part
^t its environment.' The choice is ours, and for reasons which I shal^-
6ive in a moment, I prefer the second approach. But whichever v^6 choose,
we must at all times remember that the political sys ^tn is not a real
entity, but a conceptual one. The political sys^6^ is not a group of people,
a huddle of buildings, or even a cweV^y constructed machine. It is a set
of social relationships, and its boundary is set by the limit of those
relationships, wherever th-^1 happens to fall.
It is partly for this reason that the broader concept of political system
is at^ctive, since that way its boundary appears to coincide with that
o^ ^e state, and from the point of view of a student of intemation^1 relations
this would seem to be convenient. But unfortunately it is misleading for
the student of comparative politics, ar"c3ln two ways.
On the ^s hand, the political system of many states - for example, 0 'ra^il
- does not impinge directly on the lives of a significant fractio*"
of its inhabitants. They live their lives in what, as we have already
^en, the anthropologists call an encapsulated society:
one which ^sts within the territory of the state without forming
'part of it.2 Such encapsulated societies exist on a different time-scale
from the 'modem' society of the state as a whole, so that studies of them
have a value for students of primitive societies over a relatively long
time, and a number of such studies co-exist in the 'anthropologists' present'
which we have already mentioned, though the societies of which they form
the principal significant trace may now be much modified, or even, as
in the case of the Brazilian forest Indians, destroyed. We must take account
of such descriptions, therefore, in our efforts to understand the political
systems of the societies which encapsulate them, but we have to remember
that they are in no way reliable descriptions of life in the political
system as a whole. ,
On the other hand, the boundary of the nation state of today, as we have
also seen, is penetrated from outside by many different influences.3 Indeed,
many international-relations theorists regard domestic and international
politics as only aspects of one interrelated whole. One cannot understand
the political system of the United Kingdom without at least taking account
of the view that since 1967 its financial arrangements have been dictated
by the *gnomes of Zurich', or the United States without considering its
insatiable need for oil which has become noticeably more expensive since
1973. Our delimitation of the political system and its interactions must
take account of these influences.
The political system - this abstract concept made up of interrelationships
with a definable boundary - is political because it-is concerned with
the making of decisions about the allocation of power resources.' And
this allocation is disputable because power resources are limited. By
power resources we .mean those things which people want, which if controlled
by governments enable them to maintain their power over those they rule.
In material terms this means food, clothing, housing and energy, or the
equivalent cost of those items, the supply of which is, at any given point
in time, itself limited. But such is the indefinable nature of political
power that it also means the ability to use force to control them, the
habit of exercising authority which we call status, and the limitations
on access to authority which are often loosely and inaccurately termed
class.
The reason is that, given the finite nature of resources, the ability
to control them without the constant use of force depends on the inherited
authority of government. Inherited, that is, in the sense that no one
is ever born into a society which is going to wait until he is grown up
to settle its political organisation. Every human being always finds politics
waiting for him, with the rules already settled in favour of the incumbents
and with a corresponding advantage for
those on whom they confer favour. Those rules, which are designed to maintain
the existing order, are in the first instance directed towards one prime
aim - to minimise conflict. And the most important of them, the fundamental
rules that underpin all the others. are the rules governing the constitution
and operation of the political system.
Now it is possible, and entirely meaningful, to describe a political system
in terms of its rules, in its own legal language.4 Ask someone in Britain
how the country is governed and he will describe the rules and the way
in which they are made and changed: Magna Carta, the Act of Settlement,
the Great Reform Act, the Statute of Westminster and the relationship
of the monarch, Parliament, the law courts, and the county councils. Ask
an American and she will talk of the Constitution, the President, Congress,
the Supreme Court and the states.
Separately, each description will be quite clear and easy to understand.
Put them together, however, and problems of comparison will not take long
to emerge. Britain has no president; the United States no prime minister.
Congress and Parliament are clearly both some form of elected assembly,
but they are very different both .in appearance and procedure. And Americans
not only do not hold elections in the sameway as the British, but not
exactly in the same way from one state to another.
Over the past twenty years, therefore, many political scientists have
been trying to develop a common language to describe the political systems,
not only of the United States and Great Britain, but of all other countries
as well. To do so they have tried to return to first principles and consider
what it is that the abstract political system must do in order to exist
at all.3
First and foremost it is a decision-making process. It exists to make
decisions, and to do so it must receive demands on which to act, and information
on which to decide. It must also receive personnel to make the decisions,
and it may also (and in practice always does) receive a great deal of
resources, both material and moral, with which to enforce its decisions.
These we can collectively designate as inputs. Its decisions, the rules
by which they are enforced and its interpretation of them, are its outputs.
The first attempt to label these inputs and outputs for the purposes of
comparative politics was made in 1960 by Almond and Coleman.6 Outputs
were.already familiar as the powers of government set out by the makers
of the American Constitution, and since followed by most other constitutional
lawyers. However to distinguish the functions from the bodies set up to
embody them, Almond and Coleman labelled them, rather than the legislative,
executive and judicial powers, the functions of rule-making, rule-application
and rule-ad judication. By doing so they made it easier to discern that,
for example, when Congress impeaches the President of the United States,
it is, although formally designated a legislature, actually exercising
the function of rule-ad judication, and there are many other such examples
of overlapping functions in all constitutions, some deliberate and some
accidental.
Almond and Coleman broke new ground when they turned to the ^ inputs,
as these had been largely ignored by earlier writers. One of them they
termed political communication.7 This strictly speaking, y however, is
not an input, but a method by which inputs and outputs ' are conveyed,
and I therefore propose to treat it separately in chapter 4.
Almond and Coleman's other three categories are: (i) Political socialisation
and recruitment; (ii) Interest articulation; and (iii) Interest aggregation.
Political socialisation and recruitment, which are rather odd but not
incompatible bedfellows, consist of the process of education forming citizens'
attitudes to politics; and those structures that exist for the recruitment
of people into political or administrative office. ,
Interest articulation refers to the process by which people express *
their needs and wishes. They can be divided into demands upon the system
and expressions of support for it.
Interest aggregation means the process of linking together various interests
into a more or less coherent programme of action on which a decision can
be taken.
Almond and Powell, adapting the earlier classification, have distinguished
interest articulation and interest aggregation, together with political
communication, and the three output \ functions of rule-making, rule-application
and rule-ad Judication, as conversion functions, that is, those processes
which enable the o;
political system to convert demands and supports into political decisions.
Among these decisions are some, undoubtedly, affecting political socialisation
and recruitment, which are seen by Almond and Powell as pattern maintenance
functions. The efficiency of the system in doing each of these things
they describe as its capabilities.
What is not at all clear, however, even in the revised model, is just
;
why these, and not any other categories, should have been chosen. This
leads such writers, moreover, in their earlier work, often to i equate
greater efficiency with greater technical complexity, and at the same
time to obliterate what seems to be an essential distinction between demands
and supports, for it is impossible to imagine a control system that does
not convert one, demands, into the other, supports. Certainly they do
recognise that inputs may arise within
the ranks of the decision-makers
themselves. These they term variously *withinputs' and 'intraputs'. But
there remains an impression that the initiative for political action comes
in the main from outside, and that is something which this categorisation
does not enable us easily to determine.
Approaching the problem of steering mechanisms from the viewpoint of cybernetics,
Deutsch identified other important properties which we should seek to
identify in any political system. A cybernetic system is a self-steering
mechanism guided by analysis of consequences of its own decisions. Knowledge
of these consequences, which is termed feedback, is literally fed back
from the output to the input side of the process. Hence just as inputs
are converted into outputs, in turn the outputs are monitored for specific
inputs. Using the analogy of a gunsight, Deutsch reminds us that such
a mechanism will have to have the capacity to anticipate what the future
course of events may be, and to modify the information received by the
input side accordingly. The gun must fire, not at the aircraft, but in
front of it, so that by the time the shell arrives the aircraft will be
at the correct position in space to be hit by it. In this instance this
correction is known as gain, an allowance.for the delay in response to
a decision which is known as lag*
I propose, therefore, in using the term 'political system' to use it as
equivalent to government, that is to say, that system of interaction which
forms the fundamental control mechanism within a society. The boundary
between it and the rest of society, as I have already said, is not a clear-cut
one. It runs not between individuals, but between the different roles
they play. Most people do not participate in making demands in politics
most of the time. But they cannot opt out of it when it makes demands
upon them, at a minimum when they are called upon to pay their taxes.
Politics is an essential part of modern societies; it is certainly never
absent.
I would further argue that there are only two main types of inputs to
the political system: positive and negative.9 Positive inputs, which enable
the government to perform its functions at all, include support in the
widest sense, but more particularly the resources to make decisions. Negative
inputs are demands on government for action or payment. :
There are also only two main types of outputs. Political decisions as
such are not outputs, any more than a tap is water, or a switch electricity.
Positive outputs are rewards; negative outputs are sanctions or punishments.
The prime purpose of the political system is to survive. Like any other
system, it can either adapt to changes in its environment, it can change
its environment to suit it, or it can, and usually does, do
Politics, Power and Revolution
both. It utilises its outputs
to maximise support for it, and to minimise the demands made upon it,
within the parameters of the society in which it operates, and under the
general constraint of the principle of economy of effort. Given unlimited
resources there would be no problem in maintaining support indefinitely.
Scarcity, population growth, natural disasters and international influences,
however, limit resources in almost all modem political systems, so that
the allocation of resources is the fundamental task they face. It is the
curious characteristic of politics that a very small amount of power,
correctly used, can be sufficient to gain control over a very large quantity
of resources, both physical and human. To understand fully how any individual
government is actually operating, therefore, it is necessary to trace
the direction and intensity of all the possible functional flows, and
of their interactions - a simple equation of power between government
and society would not only be misleading, but meaningless. To trace them,
we must first label them.
The government puts out resources to perform the function of power resource
extraction by which, in turn, it takes in necessary support.
Being challenged continuously concerning its right to do this, it puts
out more resources in input control in order to regulate and where necessary
screen out demands coming in.
It will. further, regulate society in its own interests, through the general
function of interest arbitration which can be either positive or negative.
By positive interest arbitration it strengthens interests and thus attaches
them to itself, at the same time depriving the society at large of the
resources implied; by negative interest arbitration it does the reverse.
However, the strengthening of interests soon implies a challenge to the
authority of the government itself and will lead to corrective action
being applied, so that the two processes are in fact continuous. The principal
means employed can be simplified into taxes on the strong and subsidies
for the weak, but since the resources for the maintenance of the system
in each case are drawn from the social system and the political system
of itself produces nothing, the maintenance of the political system in
its existing form is only possible for so long as sufficient groups within
the society have an expectation of getting something out of it.
In Table 1 the symbols P and F refer to inputs to and outputs from the
political system respectively; Q and E to inputs to and outputs from the
social system with which it is conterminous. The symbols + and - (read
positive and negative) identify the direction of flow.
The principle of the economy
of effort goes right to the heart of the system, however. Thus though
all governments owe their origins at some time, and their continued maintenance
ultimately, to their faculty of coercion, they do not choose to operate
in the coercive mode for most purposes because it involves a disproportionate
drain on their resources and weakens them for their ultimate task, their
own defence against an external attack or natural disaster. What happens
when they do will be the subject of a later chapter. Basically, however,
the principle is very similar to that on which banks operate. No government
has anything like enough force at its disposal to subdue all its citizens
if they all rise in revolt simultaneously. But since they rarely, if ever,
do so, governments can continue to operate for very long periods of time
with very small reserves, and the longer they have operated, the greater
the confidence that they will continue to do so, and the greater the degree
of actual positive popular support on which they can count.
Popular support will be maximised if, in addition, the government can
be seen to be doing visibly useful things for its citizens. However to
do so requires a great deal of money, and in consequence the first task
of government is to extract from the society it governs the resources
it requires for its chosen programme. The principal way in which this
is done is by taxation, which in the modem state has almost completely
superseded the system of individual fees and charges for specific services
which earlier governments used. Taxes are not paid voluntarily; they are
extracted from citizens more or less painlessly with the aid of a series
of bargains to supply remedies for specific demands which the citizens
or their representatives present, but they are extracted nevertheless,
and ;h; first task of a successful government is to maintain the function
of power resource extraction.
Given adequate resources, the government can then embark on a strategy
of maximising supports and minimising demands in which its use of positive
and negative outputs is very keenly attuned to the needs of the situation.
A government which in this way is keenly
aware of the desires of its citizens we often term a democracy; one that
does not is loosely termed a dictatorship, particular if coercion is used
to limit demands upon the system. But before using these or any other
terms, we must be careful that we really understand what we mean by them.
We have now considered the principal aspects of the theory of system which
has been used as the basis for the study of comparative politics. Clearly
the identification of a political system, or even the identification of
certain functions performed by the political system at one time, is not
enough.
We have to do three things more. First, we have to leam to classify within
the structure we have developed so as to use the variables we derive to
show up useful and interesting differences between states. Secondly, we
have to be prepared, as I said in chapter 1, to view the political system
across time and develop-mentally, so that we see the system not just as
it is. but as it has come to be, and how we expect it to develop in the
future. History is part of this, but political science differs from history
in striving to derive predictive models. We are therefore concerned not
only with the maintenance of the system and its adaptation, and with the
nature and efficiency of the communications on which it depends, but with
the capabilities of the political system, its capacity -for change. Thirdly,
we have to go out to find the information we need, and to start work.
Classification as a means of organising information is essential, and
the first system of classification propounded for states was that used
by Aristotle himself, who divided them between those ruled by the One,
the Few, and the Many.10 This distinction, even though it was not developed
for use on modem complex states at all, is still useful, but as we shall
see, only in a limited sense. It appeals to the most important of our
popular feelings about politics, the sense of how far - if at all - the
system appears to respond to our own individual wishes, and in an age
when democracy is almost universally espoused as the ambition of each
and every political system, it still operates as the chief criterion for
determining just how far any given state or political system can be truly
regarded as democratic.
But the mere number of the rulers (read decision-makers) in a modem system
is not an adequate guide to the way in which the system as a whole actually
operates, even assuming that we could determine the exact number. For
one thing, the capacity of the ultimate decision-makers is determined
by their effectiveness. This depends both on the amount and accuracy of
the information that reaches them, and on their capacity to implement
their decisions once taken. Even the Caribbean ruler who in 1962 personally
shot
his political prisoners with a machine-gun had in other, more complex
respects, to depend on others to act on his orders." Once a ruler
depends on others, his autocracy is qualified, and so, in practice, the
rule of the One becomes the rule of the Few. Not only must the others
continue to render their services, but they may and do act in his name,
and place the responsibility on his shoulders.
Concepts such as the Few and the Many, on the other hand, are irritatingly
imprecise. One of the few definite things that can be said, for example,
about the fourteen families traditionally said to control El Salvador
is that intermarriage and breeding combine to make the actual number quite
meaningless. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of modern states have
what Aristotle would have called 'mixed' constitutions; that is to say,
they combine elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy in differing
proportions. Rule application is vested primarily in the hands of one
person (a president) or a few (a cabinet, a praesidium or a junta);
the need to sanction rule-making in many (a popularly elected legislature).
Not only are the structures of such systems overlapping and complex, but,
as we have already noted, they exist in an evolutionary context and may
well have diverged considerably from the ideal types they profess to represent.
Consequently, various modem writers have sought to identify a number of
criteria by which to distinguish two or more broad types of political
system. This process has taken place under the influence of cold war thinking
and the rivalry of the superpowers,'each of which professes a belief in
their system, which excludes enthusiasm for that of the rival system.
It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that such classifications tend to
emphasise the differences between what may most neutrally be termed the
liberal democracies of western Europe and the peoples* democracies of
eastern Europe; Europe being, in intellectual terms, still the principal
arena in which this competition is manifest.
Thus Dahl, who in his Modern Political Analysis began with the Aristotelian
criterion as his point ofdeparture,11 has come to distinguish two broad
types of political systems which he has termed polyarchies and hierarchies,
according to such criteria as the existence of a separation of powers,
the independence or otherwise of the judiciary and civil service, the
existence or otherwise of the judiciary and civil service, the existence
or otherwise of competitive parties, and formally organised pressure groups
with open access to the decision-makers.13 This distinction draws in turn
on Friedrich's distinction14 between totalitarian states and others, according
to six criteria:
(i) an official ideology,
to which everyone is supposed to adhere;
(ii) a single mass party usually led by one man, organised hierarchically;
(iii) monopoly of the effective use of all weapons by party and bureaucracy;
(iv) monopoly of the means of effective mass communication;
(v) a system of terroristic police control; and (vi) central control and
direction of the economy.
In recent years the concept of totalitarianism has come under strong attack,
both from eastern Europe and from specialists on eastern Europe. The former
point out that the six criteria link together three principal historical
instances: Mussolini's Italy (1922-44), Hitler's Germany (1933^5) and
the Soviet Union under Stalin (1928-53), and they reject this linking
as propagandist, principally (though not entirely) because they see the
purpose of the Soviet Union as being entirely opposed to that of the other
two instances. The latter, on the other hand, have failed to find evidence
that the overwhelming control claimed for the state by the proponents
of the model does in fact exist in the Soviet Union today. They identify
competing power-centres and interest groups within Soviet society, and
dismiss the 'rational actor' model of Soviet decision-making in favour
of a 'bureaucratic polities' interpretation (see chapter 8). "'Other
eastern European states, notably Poland and Hungary, have diverged from
the model substantially on the criteria of centralised control of the
economy, and acceptance of the ruling ideology.
By loosening the definition of totalitarian somewhat, Crick extends to
eleven the number of criteria by which he distinguishes between autocratic,
totalitarian and republican regimes.16 In theoretical terms this seems
a retrograde step. Understanding of the underlying processes can only
be reached by establishing a framework within which the underlying relationships
between the criteria can be understood. Extending the number of criteria
may in itself, therefore, not be particularly informative, and in any
case even those who adhere to the totalitarian model have never been able
to argue that there are very many of them in the world at large.
Blondel has proposed three axes of classification which could enable us
to link all such criteria.17 These are the radical-conservative dimension,
the democratic-monarchical dimension, and the liberal-authoritarian dimension.
These are helpful distinctions which we shall find it useful to bear in
mind in what follows. For I propose to take an approach which is rather
different, but is, nevertheless, based on the same imperative, to relate
the
universe of states to underlying processes. All classifications, however
detailed, will be actively misleading in so far as they distinguish categories
at one moment of historical time. For within the universe of states we
can find order only if we recognise that we are looking at an evolving
pattern, and that the confusion stems from the conflict of two principles:
1 Each political system has some freedom to evolve according to its own
internal political dynamics; and
2 All political systems have (peen shaped by the influence of two periods
of political evolution which have occurred in the last 200 years, each
of which has altered (in ways that are not wholly compatible) prevailing
ideas about the relationship of the individual to the state.
Thus most states today wear a formal aspect of government which is of
one of two types: the parliamentary or the presidential state." Both
are historical variants of what Verney has called the 'Convention Theory'
state.19 'Convention* refers to the fact that in it all conversion functions
are exercised by an assembly (alternatively termed a Convention), and
'Theory' to the fact that in all states this form of government either
never has existed at the national level, or it has never existed for very
long when it has existed. It is more a theoretical model of what government
ought to be like; a/transplantation of the principle of direct democracy
into modem dress.
The relationship here between Verney's view and Aristotle's on the one
hand, or Almond and Coleman's on the other, is through this differentiation
between the executive and the legislative powers, which we originally
owe to Locke, and its more sophisticated transplantation into the notions
of rule-application and rule-making. Locke however also spoke of a third
power, one which has scarcely ever been specifically incorporated into
the Constitution of any modem state, but which is implicit in the structure
of all states, namely the federative power - the power to conduct relations
with other states." An exception is the USSR, which amended its Constitution
after the United Nations was created to give individual Union Republics
the right to conduct direct relations with other states. The federative
power was never found very attractive by other theorists who were very
reluctant in applying it to the actual study of states. It appeared that
the federative power, such as it was, was exercised either by the executive,
or, worse, by the army. And the eighteenth-century solution to the problem
was to reject the notion altogether and to replace it by the concept of
a discrete judicial power. The judicial power, under the functional name
of rule-ad judication, has been transplanted into modem terminology without
necessarily getting away from the fact that, by and large, with the possible
exception of the United States, the executive branch of government is
that branch which in most states exercises the judicial power. We cannot
easily distinguish the judicial from the executive in most states, even
where the belief exists that there is an abstract entity called law existing
independently of the power of government.
The effectiveness of power can be tested, in Dahl's terms, by the degree
of subsystem autonomy and the number of subsystems within the political
system as a whole." It is clearly very relevant to any assessment
of the power of central government to determine the extent to which the
state is differentiated into subordinate units, or the extent to which
it is centralised.
The majority of states are strongly centralised. Some, but by no means
all, have a considerable degree of regional autonomy, and in a few this
is so great that the formal state is little more than a confederation
of competing areas or tribes. DahFs interest in this range of possibilities
is natural enough, since, being an American, he lives in a federal state
- one in which the balance between central power and regional autonomy
is very carefully fixed. However federalism is the product of a political
compromise, and so very unusual - a compromise between centripetal and
centrifugal forces, the demands of central power and the demand for independence.21
But this compromise is inherently unstable, with a tendency towards greater
centralisation; and there are very few states in the world that are federal
states at any one time. It just so happens that in our own time most of
them happen to be rather important, .and therefore we have to pay more
attention to federalism than perhaps its historical existence might specifically
warrant.
MODERNISATION AND DEVELOPMENT
.Before leaving Aristotle, we might note that he did not just classify
states by the rule of the One, and the rule of the Few and the rule of
the Many. He also classified them as good and bad. Nowadays this is called
a value-judgement, and we are taught by some writers to shun it like the
plague. If we describe a state as being good or bad it indicates we are
contaminated by some kind of ideological viewpoint. Well, people will
have views on whether states are good or bad, and these do creep into
their views of the world, so we must face up to the problem. The whole
attitude of many people to the world is characterised by the distinction,
for example, between
what is and what is not
democracy; the notion of the 'totalitarian model' of states in reality,
as opposed to the concept of totalitaria-nism in theory. All this derives
from a very clear ideal of us and them; they do things differently from
us, and we do not like the way they do it, and therefore advance from
their type of system to our type of system is just that - an advance.
It is not just simply a shift sideways to them; it is a stage in progress.
Hence, when one turns to discussing the development of political systems
it is tempting to discuss them in terms of something called modernisation.
;
But political modernisation is a very troublesome concept to identify,
let alone to apply systematically. Perhaps as you read this you are looking
out on the glass, steel and concrete of a college. factory or block of
flats which represent, in visual terms, a stage of modernisation of building
techniques. As you look, you are aware that in turn this depends on a
process of economic modernisation, if you will, involving such trends
as the growth of corporations, economies of scale, mass production, greater
use of machinery, and substitution of natural products by synthetic ones.
But it is not clear that the government of the town in which that building
stands,'or indeed the political system of any country in the world, has
changed in the sense that builders have changed from the use of stone
and wood to the use of concrete and glass, and the growth in size of political
units is not in itself a guarantee of greater political effectiveness,
and may well be the reverse.
As you will see, one of the constants in human nature is the inclination
to take oneself too seriously. This means that in every age thinkers have
instinctively thought of themselves as being the climax of a process of
discovery, without realising adequately that they in turn will be superseded
by others. And modernisation, therefore, is only the process of arriving
at the present which itself is only a brief moment before the future.
Not only may it not represent an improvement, it may, as our own century
has shown, sometimes represent a giant leap backwards.
This problem is well illustrated by the well-known developmental model
of Edward B Shils, which formalises concepts widely used in speech and
in the press.23 He distinguishes, on the one hand. the rule of the Few,
which he calls oligarchy, from the rule of the Many, democracy. He then
proceeds to sub-divide these types by two different criteria: what he
takes to be the actual effective degree to which the concept is applied,
and for what purpose the government concerned advocates it.
He thus derives two types of democracy: political democracy, such as exists
in western Europe and the United States, charac-
. tensed by free elections, competitive parties, pressure groups, and
so on; and tutelary democracy, such as was characteristic of Pakistan
under Ayub Khan (1958-68), where the government holds many rights in abeyance
on the pretext that the people need to be educated before being ready
for political democracy. This category might include many military governments
that, as in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil in 1978-9, promise free
elections once they have ended illiteracy, taught everyone who to vote
for, and given them an official party to support - but there must surely
be serious doubts whether democracy is the right word for it.
And it is in fact very difficult to distinguish tutelary democracy from
the first of Shils' three categories ofoligarchy, which he calls modernising
oligarchy. This is where the rulers justify their restraint on public
self-assertion on the grounds that to do so will promote economic development.
Naturally modernising oligarchy can be made to look attractive, particularly
if judiciously contrasted with its old-fashioned counterpart, traditional
oligarchy', where nothing is ever done because the rulers like things
the way they are.
Lastly, however, Shils offers a third category, that of totalitarian oligarchy.
This is rule from the centre directed by an ideology which justifies it
on the grounds that it is in the true interests of the masses and backed
by a coercive apparatus which demands positive and not merely negative
acceptance.
Although these three types correspond to popular ideas of differences
between states - and especially to types which were fashionable in the
1950s when the scheme was outlined - the way in which the differences
are drawn is not really up to the strain of actual classification. Was
Brazil under General Medici (1970-4) a modernising oligarchy, as it professed
to be, or a totalitarian oligarchy as Amnesty International tended to
regard it? Not only is there, it seems, no very hard-and-fast line to
be drawn between democracy and oligarchy, but the divisions between the
subtypes are just as uncertain. And the scheme makes no mention of perhaps
the most fruitful subtype possible, that of totalitarian democracy, which
in the hands ofJ.L. Talmon did so much to illuminate the way in which
earlier ideals found a logical development in the so-called people's democracies
of eastern Europe after the Second World . War.24
The problem is a basic one, and it is that we can only go so far, owhen
dealing with the modem, complex political system, with whole systems,
and nothing at all if we are shackled by a time-bound concept of modernisation.
Though it is undoubtedly difficult to do so, we have to think in terms
of a continuum of historical develop-
ment stretching past us into the future. And we have to be very much more
precise about details, and ask ourselves what kind of structures this
political system has developed in order to carry out the functions it
purports to be serving.
Almond and Powell's" development model rests in the first instance
on the concept of authority, following the distinction made by Weber between
patriarchal, patrimonial and feudal authority.26
Patriarchal authority is authority vested solely in the representative
of the lineage; patrimonial authority depends on the possession of goods,
or lands having value; feudal authority involves a bargain between the
holders of each of these concepts for a series of reciprocal obligations
of service and protection. The most decentralised of the lot, is the feudal
system of authority, where there are two types of patrimonial authority
in conflict. In other words the representatives of the lineage in the
first instance hold centralised authority which js, however, counterposed
by other people who have a right to authority withih their own areas and
over whose traditional rights he has no authority at all; the differentiation
of subsystems, to use a more modern terminology.
Out of the patrimonial states there has been developed, in turn, what
has been called the historical bureaucratic state. This is the kind of
state and others described in Eisenstadt, the state in which the system
of government itself becomes so formalised that it operates whether or
not there is a competent representative of the lineage actually in charge."
In other words, every so often, human inheritance being what it is, either
the inheritance fails or there is a "time of troubles* when there
are many contenders for the throne. But the bureaucratic structure by
that time is such that decisions continue to be made, that the system
continues to work; the field boundaries are still delimited; the harvest
is still gathered, a tenth is dished out to the priests, and a pittance
is dished out to the poor, if they are lucky. The whole system continues
to work on the basis that it always has worked, just because the degree
of sophistication of the system has become sufficiently elaborate for
the system itself to continue in a state of equilibrium, regardless of
dynastic considerations. And it is out of this historical bureaucratic
system that modem states have derived.
It will be noticed that Almond and Powell do not, as I have sought to
do, stress the duality of the origins of government. They accept the fact
of government, and with it, implicitly, the assumption that it is beneficial
to society. I want to stress that there are always two elements in conflict
in government: government and the people, the claim to power and its acceptance,
or reward and punishment. Government is interaction, not action.
Almond and Powell provide a special category for the secularised city
states: very small states such as Liechtenstein, San Marino or Monaco,
but probably not Andorra or Luxembourg. Secularisation refers simply to
the fact that the religious element has, in modem times, been taken out
of their government, which presumably excludes the Vatican City State,
but it is very hard to see why.
From this point onwards Almond and Powell view development as a process
of political mobilisation', that is, the bringing of more and more people
into the political life of the community. Certainly the mobilisation of
individuals does mean at the same time taking account of their interests.
To bring them into the political system, they have to be getting something
out of it if they are going to be required to continue to put something
into it. It is, of course, possible to find, even today, systems in which
large sectors of the population are not incorporated in the structure,
and so a category is provided for pre-mobilised modern systems.
Finally, they conclude with two categories of mobilised systems, in which
mass participation is both required and encouraged, and so is qualitatively
different. One is the democratic state in which the desire of the people
to produce inputs is fully accepted and channelled, even when it is a
question of demands rather than supports. The other is the authoritarian
system, where the support is wanted but demands are not.
To summarise, therefore. Almond and Powell see the evolution of modem
states as following an historical path from the patriarchal-patrimonial
level, through the feudal states and the historical-bureaucratic states,
to the pre-mobilised modem states;
modem, that is, in that they still exist in today's world, but are not
mobilised in the sense that the mobilised modem state requires or permits.
And in these mobilised modem states, the common factor is that people
participate widely in politics, some because they want to do so, some
because they are made to do so, and some for both reasons.
For me the possibilities are somewhat more complex (see Table 2). The
distinctive features in which I differ from Almond and Powell and, indeed,
from most of the authorities which I am going to discuss are two. First
of all, the dualism which they discern as coming into evolution of states
at the division between the authoritarian and democratic states of today
1 see as running throughout the whole course of human history. Indeed,
this conflict, natural because politics is institutionalised conflict,
provides the basic dynamic, as I see it, for all experimentation with
political forms. We may have forgotten, or become habituated to the
essentially violent and self-imposed way in which we have acquired our
governments. But the facts are still fundamental to our understanding
of how they work today. All governments exercise just as much power as
they believe they can get away with. It is in the extension or, conversely,
in the limitation of these powers that all modem governments have been
shaped.
Secondly, precisely because this dynamic is continuous and fundamental,
I have no difficulty in accounting for the ways in which the process of
political change ebbs and flows. It does not follow a cycle of change
from one form of government to another, returning to the beginning, as
Plato and later Polybius suggested," nor, as the Victorians (among
whom I count Marx himself) would have it, is there an irresistible progress
in the sense that political systems evolve along a single line towards
a predictable future state. Of course, human beings learn by experience,
but even with books to aid them, memories grow cold and old men die.
Table! Varieties of government
Primitive Agrarian Imperial Assembly Apparat
tribe band kingdom theocracy horde empire dictatorship feudal presidential
caesarism federal party praetorian
city anarchy parliamentary
What above all makes it difficult to identify discernible categories of states is the fact that, however complex they are, they are made up of very simple assemblages of horizontal and vertical links, replicating the tribe and band of primitive times. It is easy to make fun of this idea, for the notion of modern man as an ape in spaceman^ clothing is richly comic. But it is, none the less, uncomfortably true. It follows that the replacement or mutation of a relatively small number of links in the system by which interests are balanced, amounts to a fundamental change in the system as a whole. In this respect at least, the industrious Constitution-makers of the nineteenth century, with their obsession with detailed legal checks and balances, were not misguided, though they failed to allow for the realities behind the systems they sought to construct.
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