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Political Culture and American Political Development: Liberty, Union, and the Liberal Bipolarity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

J. David Greenstone
J. David Greenstone
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
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Extract

The connections between ideas of political culture and political development are intrinsically problematic. The term development typically refers to change, contingency, and the impact of causal forces in reshaping a social or political order. The concept draws on the powerful intuition that no feature of human experience, including language itself, is exempt from change and transformation. By contrast, culture typically refers to the framework of symbols, norms, assumptions, and expectations with which a people make sense of their experiences and formulate appropriate courses of action. At least for long periods, this interpretive framework molds the process of social change and limits the extent to which it occurs. Here, the controlling intuition is that without some stable set of meanings no complex human discourse can be really coherent—for there is no stable marker against which change itself can be measured. It is easy enough, of course, to assert that a particular political regime exhibits both a distinctive culture and a particular pattern of development. But it is another matter to indicate the precise relationship between the two.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 1 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

I am indebted to the editors and reviewers of this journal for suggestions about the first half of this article. The second half benefited from comments by Isaac Balbus, Paul Peterson, Richard Shweder, and participants in conferences and workshops at the University of Chicago and Temple University. Nathan Tarcov taught me much about Lincoln. Most of all I acknowledge the many students and research assistants who have helped me explore the development of American political culture.

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