I sat with him as his minister, Lord Mancroft, gave an after dinner talk on the
government’s relations with the industry. This speech, I then and there learned,
had been composed, except for its whimsy, by my friend and his opposite
number in the trade association. They would nod and make remarks sotto
voce as they followed their copies of the minister’s rendition of their joint
composition.
The facts were clear but I needed some construct that would pull together
these observations of attitude and expectation into a tool for systematic compara-
tive analysis. I found it in the concept of ‘‘culture’’ which Talcott Parsons had
deployed in hisTheory of Social Action( 1951 ), drawing largely on the work of Max
Weber. In my 1956 discussion of British pressure politics, a central theme was ‘‘the
cultural context,’’ consisting of certain general ideas which determined not only the
process of group representation, but also in a degree the very substance of these
interests.
- 2 From Culture to Institutions
In this use of the concept of culture as a tool of analysis, social scientists were reXecting
the modern liberal belief in the autonomy of the mind as a basic force in the social and
political process. We had groped for a term to express this point of methodology.
‘‘Ideology’’ (Karl Mannheim) overemphasized the limiting function of ideas. ‘‘The
role of ideas in history’’ (Crane Brinton) was too intellectual. ‘‘Operative ideals’’
(A. D. Lindsay) asserted that ideas can have consequences, but focused narrowly on
the normative aspect. ‘‘Culture,’’ however, has the necessary breadth by embracing the
normative, the cognitive, and the aVectual aspects of ‘‘the ordered set of symbols’’
(Parsons) by which the members of a group sharing them similarly see and sense the
situation, physical and social, constituting their environment. Its further use in
political study was greatly advanced by a brilliant paper presented by Gabriel Almond
at a conference in 1955 —the same meeting, incidentally, at which I presented my paper
on British pressure groups and parties. His term ‘‘political culture’’ has continued to
be used in the profession and in everyday speech.
The concept of political culture supplied the missing link between political philosophy
and political behavior. In a political culture ideas drawn from political philosophy are
embodied in the motivations of political actors, dictating what ought and ought not to be
done and what can and cannot be done. Such a body of incentives and restraints on
behavior is a political institution. The political culture is not itself an institution. The
political culture is the body of dos and don’ts, cans and can’ts which is embodied in
various institutions, the actual patterns of intended behavior.
700 samuel h. beer