Even if “functionalism” is a relative newcomer to the study of politics, its theoretical roots are in the classics of political science. Thus it is ironic to note that the political theorists who have reintroduced the notion of functionalism have relied upon models inspired by anthropological and sociological theory.

Every functionalist approach is fundamentally holistic and system-oriented. Functionalist theorists may be in error when they deny their common origin, whether direct or metaphorical, in biology. If “the great curse of functionalism is its ‘ism,’ the least of its weaknesses is its plural.” There is more than one functionalism. With respect to political science alone, the author considers the contributions to functional theory of Ernst Haas, Karl Deutsch, David Easton, Gabriel Almond, and Amitai Etzioni.

An outline of the author's own research is then presented in the light of the works considered. He argues for a more rigorous functionalism – a “functionalism of functions” which would be derived from specifically political behaviour, rather than cross-disciplinary borrowings from other sciences that are theoretically more fertile. The ideal would be the development of a polito-logique of the emergence of political from social phenomena which would depart from the core or nerve centre of political functioning: the interplay of the four essential functions of government, legislation, administration, and adjudication.

Although they are usually differentiated, political and social systems overlap and are interdependent. It is useful to consider them as a single organism, responsive to internal as well as external exigencies. With the notions of function, level, perspective, and field of analysis, the author indicates how one can move from a model of the functions of the State (Fonctionnement de l'état) to a dynamic conception of the state in operation (L'état en fonctionnement). Finally, the author emphasizes the importance of not denying the political, but of remaining at the level of the political, in order to achieve the greatest theoretical success.

In his study of the spatial symbolism of primitive societies, Robert Hertz noted that the left was the side associated with weakness and evil, the right being on the contrary linked to purity, strength, and religion. The works of I. Wile and V. Fritsch, among others, have confirmed this privileged – though not universal – association of right with the positive side of the dichotomies which together with left-right form symbolic constellations used to interpret the social as well as the physical environment.

These studies – based on the comparison of religious rituals, social customs, and languages – have not considered or considered only incidentally the use made of the left-right classification for the ordering of one's political landscape. This article is a partial attempt to do so from the answers of American, French, French-Canadian, and English-Canadian respondents to a questionnaire administered in 1967–8. The respondents were asked to locate selected religious and profane concepts in an extreme left to extreme right visual scale.

The hypothesis that the students interviewed, like the primitives studied by Hertz, would see religion on the right was verified for the concepts God, religion, and clergyman but not for Jesus Christ which tended to be located on the left. The deviance of Jesus Christ, rather than taken as ground for rejecting the hypothesis, is explained by the non-religious, the man-like rather than God-like qualities associated with that concept.

Mr Colton's conclusion is that we ought to assume human aggressiveness and territorial instincts in the hope that “Deprived of all chance of rushing into the millennium, statesmen might concentrate on bringing a measure of rationality to this century.” This might well be a sensible way for statesmen to act, but there is nothing in the “new biology” which justifies any sort of assumption on human aggressiveness. The arguments propounded by Lorenz and Ardrey have been thoroughly criticized by a great many biologists and other scientists. These critics quite rightly call into question both the validity of concepts such as “instinct” and “imperative” in describing human behaviour, and the processes by which Ardrey and Lorenz extrapolate from the behaviour of lower animals to human behaviour. Of the two, the errors of Ardrey are by far the greater.