The Political System Besieged by the State

HE EDITOR has asked me to address myself to the future of systems analysis in political science over t:he next twenty years. I shall deal with this question in a particularistic way. Instead of examining the whole conceptual framework called systems analysis and pointing up its successes, shortcomings, and future prospects, I shall focus only on the idea of the political system itself. Central to the development of systemrrs analysis as a theoretical approach is a serious commitment to the study of politics as a system of behavior and institutions. It is this idea that is being challenged today by the resurrection of an older concept, that of the state. Given the recent diffusion of the latter notion throughout the social sciences in the United States-it has had a continuing life in other parts of the world-we may well wonder whether the next couple of decades will witness a permanent return to this earlier theoretical approach. The state, a concept that many of us thought had beeni polished off a quarter of a century ago, has now risen from the grave to haunt us once again. Until the 1950s, the state was one of the dominant gross orienting concepts in political science throughout the West, not only in Marxist thinking (with which it is today closely associated), but in conventional social science as well. The idea of a political system had been consciously developed in the 1950s as a way of avoiding the irresolvable ambiguities surrounding the term.' If today the state appears to be challenging the conceptual dominance of the political system, as it does, it is none too soon to raise the question as to where the state may be leading us.