Hostname: page-component-5db58dd55d-f6s65 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-06-18T16:31:34.246Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Culture and Political Development: Herder's Suggestive Insights*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

F. M. Barnard*
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan

Extract

When in the early thirties Harold Lasswell declared that “political symbols and practices are so intimately intertwined with the larger array of symbols and practices in culture that it is necessary to extend the scope of political investigation to include the fundamental features of the culture setting”, he was very much a voice in the wilderness. Today Lasswell's words have almost become commonplace in the vocabulary of political science. In this, as in many other current concerns, Lasswell's early work has rightly been judged seminal. It substantially contributed towards the prolific expansion of the academic boundaries of political enquiry within the last three decades, in particular to the growth of interest in psychological and sociological approaches. Increasingly students of political behavior in both ‘established’ and ‘emergent’ nations have come to realize that purely formal and legalistic conceptual frameworks are inadequate to provide meaningful answers to such problems as persistence and change, socialization, political cohesion, and the complex bases of political authority and legitimacy. This realization, though it has made political science a more rather than less problematical undertaking, nonetheless has had the result of adding new dimensions or perspectives to its analytical vision. Indeed, in the course of this development the very notion of the political has undergone a profound re-appraisal.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1969

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.