Overview
First Published in 1990, The Analysis of Political Structure is a major work of theory by one of our leading political scientists. David Easton here comes to grips with the nature of political structure, the way in which a political system is organized for making decisions, or its regime. Current methodologies within political science have failed to anticipate regime changes. We know little about the conditions for the emergence, maintenance, or decline of democratic or authoritarian types of regime structures. For example, the changes in Eastern Europe have come as a complete surprise. This liability to predict is, Easton argues, in part due to the limitations of the decompositional research typical of political science. Easton applies a method informed by theories of structuralism to the largely untouched field of political analysis. He takes a holistic systems analysis approach in place of predominant decompositional methods and argues that the organizational structure of political systems decides the forms regimes take. To support his case, Easton notably engages the work of Nicos Poulantzas, a leading structural Althusserian Marxist. He shows how Poulantzas’ work supports the new statist movement, which fails to account for the variety of forms of regimes. This is a must read for students and scholars of political science.
Full Product Details
Author: David Easton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.810kg
ISBN: 9781032900124
ISBN 10: 1032900121
Pages: 354
Publication Date: 01 November 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Review of the original publication: “This is clearly a major work detailed in treatment, lucid in exposition and, most important of all, richly suggestive in analysis- by one of our most distinguished contemporary theorists. Professor Easton has demonstrated, once again, his extraordinary talents as both intellectual critic and constructive philosopher.” - Albert Somit, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Author Information
David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist. At the forefront of both the behavioralist and post-behavioralist revolutions in the discipline of political science during the 1950s and 1970s, Easton provided the discipline's most widely used definition of politics as the authoritative allocation of values for the society. He was appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine in 1997.
