Authority Patterns: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry

The paper proposes a novel (even if not wholly unprecedented) solution to an old and fundamental problem: What should be the scope of political studies? Arguments have long been directed against the conventional equation of the scope of the field with the study of “state-organizations” and structures that directly impinge upon such organizations. The arguments are convincing. However, the principal proposed alternatives have important flaws of their own. These alternatives are the extension of the scope of the field to phenomena “functionally” similar to state-organizations and the inclusion in polititcal study of all “asymmetrical” social relations—power, influence, or control relations. By means of the classificatory method of “progressive differentiation,” an alternative that seems preferable is worked out: equating political study with the study of authority patterns in any and all social units. That conception of the subject matter of the field, it is argued, avoids all the difficulties raised by other conceptions and affords all of their advantages. Above all, it reconciles subjective interests with scientific (or disciplinary) imperatives and achieves a proper trade-off between the numerousness and homogeneity of phenomena covered by the field—a trade-off critical for the achievement of general, testable, informative empirical theory. A concluding section discusses the place in political study, thus conceived, of the study of international relations and of recent work in “political economy,” which appears to focus on symmetrical, not asymmetrical, interactions.