PROFESSOR LAZARSFELD ONCE REFERRED TO SOCIOLOGY AS BEING IN A sense a residuary legatee, the surviving part of a very general study, out of which specializations have successively been shaped.

The same might be said of political science. In the West the first deliberate and reflective studies of political life were made in Greece at the end of the th century BC, and in the succeeding century. The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, some of the pamphlets attributed to Xenophon, above all the normative and empirical studies of Plato and Aristotle were among the direct ancestors of contemporary political science. Parallel examples are to be found in the intellectual history of China, India and Islam. It seems that at certain stages in the development of great societies questions of legitimacy, power and leadership assume supreme importance; and intense intellectual effort, using the best analytical tools available, is devoted to the study of man as brought to a focus in the study of politics.

THE USE OF THE CYBERNETIC MODEL IN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY HAS provided the tools for a more precise categorization of a multiplicity of political phenomena. A whole series of often very diverse activities with few reciprocal links are classified around the concepts of ‘pressures’, ‘demands’ and ‘supports’ brought to bear on the system. ‘Inputs’ flow from outside the system and outputs respond from within. This provides the social scientist with a more refined theoretical instrument for analysis and classification. As such, David Easton's system is va1uable. It is perhaps the most representative of its kind.

ALL POLITICAL CULTURES ARE MIXED AND CHANGING. WHAT IS interesting in the English case, however, is the way in which a veritable army of scholars has seized on the deferential component. Other features in the overall cultural pattern have been neglected. This paper is devoted to an examination of the concept of deference as it is applied to English politics. In particular it will focus on the different meanings that the concept has assumed in the literature describing and analysing the popular political attitudes, and those aspects of the political system, including stability, which it has been used to explain. My concluding argument is that deference, as the concept is frequently applied to English political culture, has attained the status of a stereotype and that it is applied to such variegated and sometimes conflicting data that it has outlived its usefulness as a term in academic currency.