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‘Nothing but Survival?’ On David Easton's Concept of Political Persistence
Author(s) -
Bang Henrik
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
scandinavian political studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.65
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-9477
pISSN - 0080-6757
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9477.1982.tb00439.x
Subject(s) - nothing , persistence (discontinuity) , politics , epistemology , positivism , constraint (computer aided design) , interpreter , positive economics , sociology , social science , political science , philosophy , law , mathematics , economics , computer science , geometry , geotechnical engineering , programming language , engineering
How do you catch the fish you are after in a text‐analysis, and what are the effects of your world‐view upon your abilities to fish? Although the analytic positivists can indeed help us to answer these questions, their world‐view has nevertheless functioned as a constraint upon the development of political theory by ignoring (more or less) the methods of the understanding traditions. Because, if you fail to understand the complex of problems in a given text‐system, you are also in danger of analysing and criticizing nothing but your own misunderstandings ‐ of kidding no‐one but yourself. In the case of David Easton's concept of political persistence, such analytic misunderstandings have helped to produce a one‐dimensional picture of the systems model, which, however, can be dissolved by uniting world‐view, metascience, and science of respectively the analysts and the interpreters within the framework of the critical traditions.