censorship, the media is dominated by capitalist enterprises, or the state, and
thus rival, radical, views are prevented from being expressed. Any socio-
economic barrier to the carrying out of desires is thus held to be an infringe-
ment on freedom, with the obvious inference that there can be no liberty
without equality. Much of the clash between these second and third meanings
of political freedom relates to deep philosophical divisions in the debate often
described as being between the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ conceptions ofliberty.
Functionalism
Functionalism, along with its related theories ofstructural functionalism
andsystems theory, has been one of the most influential of all social science
theories, not only in political science and sociology, but in anthropology
(where it originated) and several cognate disciplines. Associated withDur-
kheim, functionalism is an attempt to construct a way of comparing both the
structures and the operations of all social systems by finding necessary elements
common to any stable social system. Much of its origin depends on analogies
with biological systems, and in just the way that a biologist might study the role
of some physiological aspect, some set of cells, in the maintenance of life,
functionalists have tried to understand what are the necessary ‘functions’ that
must be carried out in any political system if it is to cope with its environment
and achieve its goals, and to locate the ‘structures’ (political parties, socializing
agencies like churches, etc.) which facilitate the functioning. The theory,
which played a considerable part in thepolitical developmentresearches of
the post-war years, has never been uncontroversial. In particular it has been
accused, because of its stress on understanding the sources of stability in
political systems, of innate conservatism. However, although perhaps less
prominent than in the immediate post-war decades, it is by no means dead
as a theoretical perspective, and may well be the only large-scale theory social
scientists have with which to challenge the thinking ofMarxismon its own
level. In fact the main cause of decline in the acceptance of functionalism has
been the rise to prominence ofrational choice theorywhich, by making the
individual actor all important, took the concentration away from the struc-
tures. An increasing awareness that institutions cannot be ignored has caused
many social scientists to return in practice to a form of functionalism, though
usually without accepting the partially discredited label.
Fundamentalism
Religious fundamentalism has become a journalistic code word for describing
the political excesses of movements whose identity is defined by strict
adherence to a religious belief. The word ‘fundamentalism’ has therefore taken
Fundamentalism