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Joseph Schumpeter, a great economist and social scientist of the last generation, whose career was almost equally divided between Central European and American universities, and who lived close to the crises of the 1930s and '40s, published a book in 1942 under the title, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The book has had great influence, and can be read today with profit. It was written in the aftergloom of the great depression, during the early triumphs of Fascism and Nazism in 1940 and 1941, when the future of capitalism, socialism, and democracy all were in doubt. Schumpeter projected a future of declining capitalism, and rising socialism. He thought that democracy under socialism might be no more impaired and problematic than it was under capitalism.He wrote a concluding chapter in the second edition which appeared in 1946, and which took into account the political-economic situation at the end of the war, with the Soviet Union then astride a devastated Europe. In this last chapter he argues that we should not identify the future of socialism with that of the Soviet Union, that what we had observed and were observing in the first three decades of Soviet existence was not a necessary expression of socialism. There was a lot of Czarist Russia in the mix. If Schumpeter were writing today, I don't believe he would argue that socialism has a brighter future than capitalism. The relationship between the two has turned out to be a good deal more complex and intertwined than Schumpeter anticipated.

Three important questions are raised by the "return to the state" movement of recent years. First, are the pluralist, structural functionalist, and Marxist literatures of political science societally reductionist, as this movement contends? Second, does the neostatist paradigm remedy these defects and provide a superior analytical model? Third, regardless of the substantive merits of these arguments, are there heuristic benefits flowing from this critique of the literature? Examination of the evidence leads to a rejection of the first two criticisms. The answer to the third question is more complex. There is merit to the argument that administrative and institutional history has been neglected in the political science of the last decades. This is hardly a "paradigmatic shift"; and it has been purchased at the exorbitant price of encouraging a generation of graduate students to reject their professional history and to engage in vague conceptualization.

"Miss Cooper: Loneliness is a terrible thing don't you agree?Anne: Yes, I do agree. A terrible thing ….Miss Meacham: She's not an 'alone' type.Miss Cooper: Is any type an 'alone' type, Miss Meacham … ?"(From Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, (1955, 78, 92)In Separate Tables, the hit of the 1955 New York theatrical season, the Irish playwright, Terence Rattigan, used the metaphor of solitary diners in a second-rate residential hotel in Cornwall to convey the loneliness of the human condition. It may be a bit far fetched to use this metaphor to describe the condition of political science in the 1980s. But in some sense the various schools and sects of political science now sit at separate tables, each with its own conception of proper political science, but each protecting some secret island of vulnerability.It was not always so. If we recall the state of the profession a quarter of a century ago, let us say in the early 1960s, David Easton's (1953) and David Truman's (1955) scoldings of the profession for its backwardness among the social science disciplines, had been taken to heart by a substantial and productive cadre of young political scientists. In 1961 Robert Dahl wrote his Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest reflecting the sure confidence of a successful movement, whose leaders were rapidly becoming the most visible figures in the profession. Neither Dahl nor Heinz Eulau, whose Behavioral Persuasion appeared in 1963 made exaggerated or exclusive claims for the new political science.

In dem Beitrag wird die Politische-Kultur-Forschung der BRD vorgestellt. Der Einfluß der amerikanischen Sozialwissenschaft wird aufgezeigt. Anhand der theoretischen Entwicklung der Politischen-Kultur-Forschung in den 50er und 60er Jahren werden die aktuellen Entwicklungstendenzen eingeschätzt und bewertet. Über die Art der Theorie, ihren Erklärungswert und ihren Ort im Gefüge der Politikwissenschaft wird nachgedacht. Die verschiedenen Aspekte des Politischen-Kultur-Konzeptes werden skizziert. Vier verschiedene Kritik-Ansätze an dieser Konzeption werden in ihren Argumentationslinien dargestellt, um dann Dauerhaftigkeit und Wandel der Politischen Kultur zu untersuchen. Dazu werden die drei Bereiche der Politischen-Kultur-Forschung beschrieben, die sich regional festschreiben: Politische Kultur (1) in den fortgeschrittenen Industrieländern, (2) in den kommunistischen Gesellschaften, (3) als politische, ökonomische und religiöse Kultur bei der Modernisierung asiatischer Länder. Auf der Grundlage der Überlegungen wird dann eine Bilanz zum gegenwärtigen Stand der politischen Kultur-Forschung gezogen. Abschließend wird ein systematischer Ansatz der Politischen-Kultur-Forschung vorgestellt, der in der Struktur und den Leistungen des politischen Systems verankert ist. (KW)