universities, and international institutions are not political because the state is either
not involved at all or at least directly, at any rate, in running their affairs.
However, it does not follow from this that we cannot define the state, or that
the state is not an important concept and institution for political scientists to study.
Indeed, we will argue that it is impossible to ignore the state, and that unless one
can contend that the state no longer exists, it can and must be defined.The argument of David Easton
At no point does Easton suggest that the state does not exist, and Dahl, his fellow
behaviouralist, speaks explicitly of the state as ‘the Government’ (1976: 10). In a
more recent book, Easton identifies with those who argue that the state has never
really been left out (1990: 299n).
Nevertheless, we must consider Easton’s argument that the concept of the polit-
ical system is a much clearer and more flexible idea than the concept of the state.
Easton’s notion might seem ingenious but in fact it has serious difficulties of its
own. Easton’s argument is that when we define a political system as the authoritative
allocation of values for society as a whole, we can say that the conflict within a
tribe which leads to secession of one of its clans is ‘exactly similar’ to conflicts
between states in international institutions (1971: 111). But what is the meaning
of ‘society as a whole’?
Easton defines society as a ‘special kind of human grouping’ in which people
develop ‘a sense of belonging together’ (1971: 135). When secession occurs within
a tribe or war between states takes place, there would seem to be the absence, not
the presence, of that sense of belonging together which Easton defines as a society.
To say that tribes and international orders, which involved warring states, are
‘genuine societies’ (1971: 141) seems to empty the term society of any content. The
same problem afflicts his argument that a political system can persist through change
even though (in the case of Germany, for example) the authorities and the regimes
not only change drastically, but are divided until 1990 into two warring halves.
The political system appears to be a shadowy abstraction that could only perish if
all popular participants were physically obliterated. It could be argued that Easton’s
‘political system’ seems no less mysterious than (the target of his 1981 article)
Poulantzas’s elusive state.
In later definitions, Easton speaks of the political system not as a ‘something’
that authoritatively allocates values for society as a whole, but as that which takes
decisions ‘considered binding by most members of society, most of the time’ (1990:
3). But this does not solve his problem. Indeed, in an early review of The Political
System, Dahl raises the problem of Easton’s definition, by asking how many have
to obey before an ‘allocation’ is deemed binding. Criminals, as Dahl points out, do
not believe that criminal statutes must be obeyed (Hoffman, 1995: 28). The point
is a good one, and it is not answered by saying that most of the members of society,
most of the time, have to consider allocations binding. What happens if the order
is an authoritarian one in which relatively few people support the regime? Moreover,
what counts as genuine support as opposed to compliance based upon fear? Think
of ‘popular support’ in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
How useful is it to say that people considered the allocations binding? This is a20 Part 1 Classical ideas