¹ For a list of ten such definitions (a sample, not an inventory) see Harry Eckstein, “The Concept ‘Political System,’” Paper presented at the 1963 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.

² No fewer than 145 different definitions of the term “state” are claimed to have been identified by Titus, Charles H.. See his “A Nomenclature in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, 25 (February 1931), 45–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ For a choice example of this view, see Dunning, William Archibald, A History of Political Theories (New York: Macmillan, 1902)Google Scholar.

⁴ I am ignoring here certain much earlier normative political philosophers who are discussed below. The reason for ignoring them at this point is stated in the later passages.

⁵ See the very large literature on “primitive” political systems: e.g., Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E. E., African Political Systems (London: Oxford University Press, 1940)Google Scholar; I. Schapera; Government and Politics in Tribal Societies (London: Watts, 1956)Google Scholar; Richards, A. I., editor, East African Chiefs (London: Faber, 1960)Google Scholar; and Mair, Lucy, Primitive Government (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962)Google Scholar.

⁶ Weber, Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford, 1946), p. 83 Google Scholar.

⁷ Merriam, Charles, Public and Private Governments (New Haven: Yale, 1944)Google Scholar.

⁸ See especially Dahl, Robert A., “Business and Politics: An Appraisal of Political Science,” American Political Science Review, 53 (March 1959), 1–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ For a more extensive critique of the traditional conception of politics, see Easton, David, The Political System (New York: Knopf, 1953)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Examples are Almond, Gabriel A., “Comparative Political Systems,” Journal of Politics, 18 (August 1956), 391–409 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Almond, and Coleman, James S., editors, The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, “‘Voting’ and the Equilibrium of the American Political System,” in American Voting Behavior, ed. Burdick, Eugene and Brodbeck, Arthur J. (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and Apter, David E., “A Comparative Method for the Study of Politics,” American Journal of Sociology, 64 (1958), 221–237 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ E.g., Parsons, Talcott and Smelser, Neil J., Economy and Society (Glencoe: Free Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

¹² This criticism does not apply to works that do not define politics functionally but urge a functional approach to the subject otherwise defined. For example, Almond's widely influential functional approach to the study of political systems is mainly tied to a conception of politics that stresses, à la Weber, an instrument of action rather than a social function: legitimate coercion. In his definition of 1966, legitimate coercion (plus territorial jurisdiction) is all that is advanced; in the definition of 1960, functional language is merely added to the original notion—probably to make the definition of the subject look as functional as the approach to its study. (See note 10, above, for references.)

¹³ Bourricaud: Political structures have the task of forging a common will out of conflicting wills in a society. Spiro: Political structures are those institutions of a society that “process” their “issues.” See Bourricaud, Francois, “Science politique et sociologie,” Revue française de science politique, 8 (June 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Spiro, Herbert J., “Comparative Politics: A Comprehensive Approach,” American Political Science Review, 25 (September 1962), 577–596 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Parsons, , Structure and Process in Modern Societies (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960), p. 42 Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Catlin, George E. G., A Study of the Principles of Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Catlin was by no means the only man to perceive the problem, or to try to solve it. His contributions were in fact overshadowed by those along similar lines of Harold Lasswell.

¹⁷ “Pure” means “unmixed with symmetric interactions” here. For the reasons that this is questionable, see below.

¹⁸ Easton, , The Political System, p. 117 Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Catlin was quite aware of this problem. (See A Study of the Principles of Politics, p. 66.) He specifically counsels that politics, as a discipline, must not concern itself with “all the life of the community,” only with those activities in it that are, somehow, political. On the other hand, recognizing that not much is left clearly nonpolitical by his definition, he also counsels Aristotelian wholism in holding that politics is present in all social relationships. Easton rightly extends this view to Lasswell's conception of politics, although not to his substantive work. (See The Political System, pp. 119–124.)

²⁰ Easton, p. 123.

²¹ It is probable that the criteria will seem “obvious” when stated. If so, all the better—and all the more reason for making them explicit. Points obvious when stated, after all, are not always obvious when not stated. The unfortunate tacks others have taken in exercises of this kind attest to that.

²² Dahl, Robert A. and Lindblom, Charles E., Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New York: Harper and Row, 1953)Google Scholar.

²³ Banfield, Edward, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Levy, Marion J. Jr., The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Politics, Economics, and Welfare, p. 94.

²⁶ De Grazia, Sebastian, The Political Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948)Google Scholar.

²⁷ I am aware that, as a taxonomy of social relationships, the figure (and the argument it represents) is incomplete. The reason is that I am not, at this point, concerned with all social relationships, only with the place of political ones among them. No doubt, however, this involves a weakness: a full, methodical taxonomy of social relationships conceivably might, but probably will not, look different.

²⁸ For a sense of the confusion surrounding the term, see Peabody, Robert L., Organizational Authority (New York: Atherton, 1964 Google Scholar), chaps. 1–2, and Friedrich, Carl J., ed., Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 153 Google Scholar.

³⁰ Note, for example, the following ambivalence in Weber's use of the concept: (1) Authority is held to exist in many types of “corporate groups” (i.e., in our terms, social units) and to involve “the legitimate exercise of imperative control.” An aspect of such control is the use of coercion regarded as rightfully exercised. (2) The state is defined by its “monopoly of legitimate coercion.” Clearly (2) contradicts (1) unless (1) is confined to “stateless” societies. The ambivalence arises, in my view, from the wish—more typical of political scientists than of sociologists—to make too rigid distinctions between polities and other social units.

³¹ The notion of extensiveness in fact figures in some definitions of political systems. The most explicit example is Apter's: Polities are the most generalized membership units of societies with defined responsibility for maintaining the societies and enjoying a monopoly of coercive power. Other definitions imply the same more awkwardly: e.g., one of Almond's definitions which includes the notion of an “autonomous society”; or the much earlier one of MacIver which includes the notion of a “territorially demarcated community” among numerous other definitional attributes; or Dahl and Lindblom's notion of government as having “the last word” over other organizations in an “area.” See Apter, “A Comparative Method for the Study of Politics”; Almond and Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas; MacIver, Robert M., The Modern State (London: Oxford, 1926), p. 22 Google Scholar; Dahl, and Lindblom, , Politics, Economics, and Welfare, p. 42 Google Scholar.

³² See Dahl, “Business and Politics,” for documentation in one area of private authority.

³³ I refer here to studies mainly concerned with the systematic study of authority patterns—such as that of Peabody. Authority being ubiquitous, references to authority patterns, or potentially relevant materials, may be found in virtually all studies of social institutions, but chiefly in their interstices, between the lines, in connection with other matters, without special emphasis or systematic treatment.

³⁴ A useful work to consult on both points is Verba, Sidney, Small Groups and Political Behavior: A Study of Leadership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

³⁵ Much of the recent literature on this subject is summarized in Curry, R. L. Jr., and Wade, L. L., A Theory of Political Exchange (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968)Google Scholar, and some of its anticipations are summarized in Buchanan, James M. and Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 323–340 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a sense, most of the literature on political competition, anyway in democracies, is concerned with the subject, even if economic postulates or methods of reasoning are not explicitly used.

³⁶ See, for example, Rosenau, James N., Linkage Politics: Essays on the Convergence of National and International Systems (New York: Free Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

³⁷ For a list of such possible “exchanges,” see Riker, William H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale, 1962), pp. 108–114 Google Scholar.

³⁸ This, in turn, should not really bother anyone. No one has ever held that theories of politics can avoid all nonpolitical factors.

³⁹ If theories resemble both those of economics and international relations, these two bodies of theory should resemble one another. In this connection, note that “entrepreneurial,” i.e., economic, theories of international relations are now beginning to emerge. (A good example is Frohlich, Norman and Oppenheimer, Joe A., “Entrepreneurial Politics and Foreign Policy,” World Politics, 24 (Supplement, 1972), 151–178 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ Dahl, , “Business and Politics,” pp. 3–9 Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Easton, , The Political System, p. 134 (my italics)Google Scholar.

⁴² Easton, p. 134.

⁴³ Easton, p. 130.

⁴⁴ Grazia De, , The Political Community, p. 330 Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Ten years ago I wrote an essay on the development of “comparative politics” from its remote ancestry in Aristotle to the present. (See “A Perspective on Comparative Politics,” in Comparative Politics: A Reader, ed. Eckstein, and Apter, [New York: Free Press, 1963], pp. 3–32.Google Scholar) The essay concluded with a problem to which, at the time, no solution had been worked out. As long as political studies emphasized formallegal aspects of state-organizations they had a certain focus and simplicity. The tendency in the field, for good reasons, was to deemphasize that subject matter. But the result of doing so was loss of focus and simplicity and, as a result, a loss of bearings in regard to what the field was all about, especially as a field of specialization. Political scientists often did not practice what they preached: they continued, in their work, to deal chiefly with state-organizations, while disavowing the reasons for doing so (in the manner of Easton). Or, if they did follow their own prescriptions, they seemed to equate politics with “the whole of social life in all its facets.” The problem, then, was to find a different, but still focused and relatively simple, conception of the subject of the field.

The present essay presents my answer to that problem. It also implies that there are two fundamental sciences of society: that dealing with symmetrical social relationships and that dealing with asymmetric ones in social units—“economics” and “politics.” Between these, a comprehensive science of social interaction must build bridges, of course, as must many particular explanations of particular social occurrences. Since the science of symmetrical interaction is well-developed (and suitable to what are generally considered “hard” methods of thought and inquiry) there has been a tendency recently to develop “economic” theories applicable to political phenomena. This is a useful tendency. But it would be more useful still if a concomitant effort were made to develop “political” theories of economics—and of politics.