데이비드 이스턴의 정치 개념 비판

초록

This article aims to critically review D. Easton's concept of the political(politics), one of most dominant definitions of the political, that it seems to lack enough understanding and strict critique. He intended to provide the concept of the political which can be differentiable from other activities, revealing the nature of the political life on the persecutive that political scientists need an orienting concept for a more systematic study. He defines the political as ‘an authoritative allocation of values for a society’ on a politico-anthropological investigation in his book The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (1953). His definition of the political is constructed from the combination of a systematic function of value allocation, authoritative enforcement, and an application for a whole society, through which he tried to claim the identity and uniqueness of the political aspect of social life. Although many scholars have criticized Easton's concept for limitations of its application scope, the problem can be resolved when the concepts of value allocation and authority are broadly interpreted. The real problem is that it would be difficult for his concept of the political to reveal its nature and identity. ‘Value allocation’ is not an unique, but an universal phenomenon which we are able to find out in almost every organization. ‘Authoritative enforcement’ and ‘the application for a whole society’ also would not save its conceptual discernment. Furthermore it is difficult to claim conceptual usefulness due to a sort of circular reasoning in which society and the political presuppose each other for its existence. Eventually he does not seem to succeed in revealing the uniqueness of the political and, in effect, his concept is paradoxically reduced to power concept which he criticizes as secondary.

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