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Representation and the Nature of Political Systems*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Francis X. Sutton
Francis X. Sutton
Affiliation:
New York
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Extract

The study of comparative politics is currently invigorated by a world-wide perspective. There is now a lively concern with the politics of societies hitherto little regarded or left comfortably to specialists, and these societies often challenge familiar assumptions based on Western experience. Efforts to understand unfamiliar institutions or why formally similar political institutions perform differently in different societies inevitably forces attention outward from the political focus into wider reaches of each society.

Type
Articles
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , October 1959 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1959

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References

1 I have found Maine's discussion of primogeniture in his Ancient Law particularly instructive on the ideas developed here. Weber used the notion of a Verband extensively in his work. In their translation of the first part of Weber's systematic treatise, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Parsons, and Henderson, have translated Verband as “corporate group”, Theory of Economic and Social Organization (New York, 1947), pp. 145–148.Google Scholar

2 Radcliffe-Brown has used precisely this classification (with different terminology). Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe, Illinois, 1952), p. 191.Google Scholar

3 Cf. Parsons, and Shils, , Toward a General Theory of Action (Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 192–195.Google Scholar

4 I shall assume some familiarity with the concepts of universalism and particularism, ascription and achievement, as developed by Parsons and Linton respectively. I shall also make use of the idea of an “association” as a very general term for social structures like business firms, hospitals, governmental agencies, etc., which have delimited functions and are largely ruled by norms of universalism and achievement.

5 Harvard University Press (for London School of Economics), 1954.

6 I restrict myself here to gumsa organisation. There is a different form (gumlao).

7 Leach omits this last point from his list but from other evidence in his monograph I conclude he did it through oversight.

8 Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (ed.), African Political Systems (New York, 1940), p. 275.Google Scholar

9 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1954), pp. 211 ff.Google Scholar

10 The typology of societies was developed at some length in the SSRC conference presentation from which this paper derives.

11 Nadel's, S. F.A Black Byzantium (Oxford, 1942)Google Scholar gives a good picture of this kind of structure in a Nigerian kingdom. I have also found instruction in Funck-Brentano's account of French villages before 1789, The Old Regime in France (London, 1929), ch. VIIIGoogle Scholar, and in Marion Smith's picture of the integration of Indian villages into wider political structures (American Anthropologist, 54, 1952, pp. 41–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar). “Federative” is perhaps too loose a term for what I have in mind; where there is a centralized “capital”, the solidarity is radial and there is motivated opposition among the points (village committees) at the periphery.

12 Cf. the survey of the backgrounds of parliamentary representatives in various European countries (including the Soviet Union) by Dogan, Mattei, L’origine sociale du personnel parliamentaire dans l’Est et l’Ouest del’Europe {Transactions of 2nd World Congress of Sociology, 1954, II, pp. 175–179).Google Scholar

13 On this latter see the paper by Bottomore, pp. 143–153 in the Transactions just cited.