defines as ‘the authoritative allocation of values for society as a whole’ (1971: 134).
Politics, he contends, is far better defined in this way. Such a definition avoids the
ambiguity of the state concept but, at the same time, it is not so broad that it
considers all social activity to be political. After all, a political system refers to the
allocation of values for society as a whole. It, therefore, confines the term ‘political’
to public matters, so that, as far as Easton is concerned, the pursuit of power that
may take place in trade unions, churches, families and the like is not part of politics
itself.
The notion of a political system makes it possible to sharply differentiate the
political from the social. It also resolves historical problems that afflict the concept
of the state. Whereas the state only arose in the seventeenth century (in Easton’s
‘modernist’ view), the concept of the political system can embrace politics as a
process existing not only in medieval and ancient times, but in tribal societies which
had no significant concentrations of power at all. Once we free politics from the
state, we can also talk about a political system existing at the international level,
authoritatively allocating values for the global community.
In his later work, Easton contends that a political system can persist through
change so that one could argue that a system continues to allocate values
authoritatively while its structures change dramatically. Thus it could be said, for
example, that a political system persisted in Germany while the imperial order fell
to the Weimar Republic, which yielded to the Nazi regime that was replaced by a
very different order after the Second World War (Easton, 1965: 83).
Easton’s concept of the political system is, he claims, superior to the concept of
the state. The latter is ambiguous, limited and ideological. Even though Robert Dahl
is critical (as we will see) of Easton’s particular definition, he too prefers to speak
of a ‘political system’ which can exist at many levels, and which he defines as any
persistent pattern of human relationships involving, to a significant extent, control,
influence, power or authority (1976: 3).The linguistic and radical argument
The linguistic analysts were a philosophical school fashionable in the 1950s and
1960s in Britain and the USA. Their doyen, T.D. Weldon, wrote an extremely
influential book, The Vocabulary of Politics, in 1953, in which he argued that
analysts are only competent to tackle what linguistic analysts called ‘second order’
problems. This referred to the words politicians use, and not the realities to which
these words are supposed to refer. The concept of the state is (Weldon argued) a
hopelessly muddled term, frequently invested with dangerously misleading mystical
overtones. Practical political activists use it but it is an unphilosophical ‘first order’
term that has imported into political theory its confusions from the world of practice.
Whereas we all know (as citizens) that the USA and Switzerland are states whereas
Surrey and the United Nations are not, the term has no interest for political
philosophers (1953: 47–9).
We refer to the radical argument as one that is in favour of radical democracy
and sees the concept of the state as a barrier to this end. Why conceive of politics
in statist terms when we want people at all levels of society to participate in running
their own affairs? Radicals come in many forms. Some see the term guilty of a kind18 Part 1 Classical ideas