The scope and development of political sociology

 The concern with political power, organization and authority has been of paramount
importance in the history of reflection of society. These reflections tend to focus on
political organizations and institutions as well as on power and authority as the major forces
of social human activity. Within this common tradition of view, three major sub streams
of reflection are discerned by the author.
1. Greek philosophy
2. Philosophy found in every civilization and elaborated in great empires
3. Reflection of political life as represented by Ibn Khaldun
 All these three trends contributed to various degrees of the development of modern political
sociology. It is only with the transformation of the various forms of socio-political thought
into modern social thought and analysis that this comparative stream united in the more
general trend of modern political sociology.
 The most central and basic change in this transformation was of course the shift from the
philosophical emphasis to the more sociological one. This changes and transformation
constitute the crux of development of modern sociology. Those changes were
1. The growing emphasis on social and political thought on the differentiation of the
civil and political orders, the growing perception of civil society as a distinct,
autonomous entity. The entity was not submerged under political or natural order
but was an autonomous force.
2. Second change was that the modern sociological inquiry was rooted in what may
be called the dialectical dissociation of patterns of individual behavior and
orientations among the transcendental and moral order. There was a growing
recognition of the great variety of possible orientations and commitments of
individuals to the transcendental and moral realm and that they develop to a large
extent in social settings.
3. The growing recognition of the great variety of different types of social order, of
their changeability and of the recognition of the temporal dimension or the
determination of such variety and changeability. The recognition of the variety of
types of social, or political order goes back to Aristotle, as does the relation between
such variety and different types of civic attitudes and moral postures of individuals.
 4. The recognition of importance of environmental factors as influencing or even
determining social order in general and the variety of the types of such order in
particular.

 The various components that gave rise to sociological analysis and continuous
crystallization of problems of research goes back to the major philosophical traditions from
the eighteenth century i.e. to the utilitarian and idealistic schools. But with the passage of
time they loosened their connection to these traditions and acquired some autonomy of
their own terms of their own specific approaches, problems and concepts. These trends of
thought and analysis have necessarily shaped the development of political sociology
proper.
 The general social conditions that gave rise to modern sociology have been often closely
related to or concomitant with the general development of modernity, of modern society
and of polity.
 One of the major aspects in this connection of society and polity was the dichotomy of
‘state’ and ‘society’ as two distinct relatively autonomous and closely interrelated entities.
This dichotomy was focused around --- liberality vs authority, stability and continuity vs
change (elaborate from pg 7).
 The persistence of the dichotomy could be discerned with the further development of
sociological analysis. It is when other analytical concepts like class, class relations,
bureaucracy and mass society were merged in the definition of basic problems concerning
the nature of the modern social order. Here the author refers to the work of Max Weber,
Karl Manheim and their emphasis on bureaucracy.
 Now, within the general framework of sociological thought and analysis in general and
modern political sociology in particular, there developed various trends of analysis. These
set of trends of research set out from different starting points thus creating a separate
tradition. The author focus around the analysis of internal components of political system
and activities and other trends that focus mainly around comparative analysis. Some of
them are
1. One aspect of the internal structure of the political system around which an
important tradition of research developed was the study of recruitment,
 composition and changes of the various political elites of their relations with
various non elite groups, and of the pattern of political organization and
mobilization used by them.
2. Secondly, the study of different types of political organization. In this context came
also the various studies of the rules of the political game as practiced by those who
participate in it. Many such studies were purely formal legal type, but many others
had already gone beyond this and attempted more systematic analysis of the rules.
3. Thirdly, the study of political participation of different groups and strata. Here, two
sub streams can be discerned: first, the study of voting and secondly, the study of
the pattern of influence, of political processes and of private political ideologies. In
this context there developed studies of the ways in which different societies
“socialize” their members into becoming subjects or citizens.
 Thus, gradually these various trends of research tended to converge around some of the
more perennial central problems of political sociology. As such, studies of patterns of
political struggle and of the recruitment and circulation of elites became, through the
emphasis on their relations to conflicts on the one hand and through attempts to study social
cleavages and conflicts in their consensual and dissensual effects on the political system
on the other.
 Besides, there developed more specific, basic problems of modern political sociology
around which the problems of research began to converge. The first such problem has been
that of the sociological nature of political power, relations, organizations and institutions
as a distinct aspect. Here, there developed three major focuses of interest. They are
1. Description of the formal, “static” characteristic or attributes of the political
system
2. The nature of its relations, of its inputs and outputs with other spheres of the social
order
3. The conditions of the stability, continuity and change of a political system in
general and of various specific types of political systems in particular.

Thus, there formed diverse definitions of the attributes of the political system and its relation to
other parts of the social system. (elaborate the points in Pg 10).
Besides, the growing conceptual analytical and theoretical convergence in political sociology is
becoming more and more evident in various streams of research, by they anthropological,
historical, macro-sociological or psychological studies. Yet in each of these tends to go in its own
direction. However great the concrete diversity of the varied researches and approaches of political
sociology, their broad, largely implicit problems were still rooted in the basic dichotomy of state
verses society and in the concomitant assumptions about the existence of two strong, viable and
relatively autonomous units or spheres of life designated as “state” and “society”.

To conclude, the author notes that the explorations of the relations among the political and the
varieties of centrality and authority enables a reformulation of many of the central questions of
political sociology, especially on the problems of legitimation of political systems, of the quest for
participation in the political sphere. Perhaps the most important reorientation that can be derived
from the reformulation of the relations between various aspects of consensus and the sources of
legitimation of the political systems relates to the changeabilty and transformability of political
systems.