Political Culture and American Political Development: Liberty, Union, and the Liberal Bipolarity

Abstract

The connections between ideas of political culture and political development are intrinsically problematic. The termdevelopmenttypically refers to change, contingency, and the impact of causal forces in reshaping a social or political order. The concept draws on the powerful intuition that no feature of human experience, including language itself, is exempt from change and transformation. By contrast,culturetypically refers to the framework of symbols, norms, assumptions, and expectations with which a people make sense of their experiences and formulate appropriate courses of action. At least for long periods, this interpretive framework molds the process of social change and limits the extent to which it occurs. Here, the controlling intuition is that without some stable set of meanings no complex human discourse can be really coherent—for there is no stable marker against which change itself can be measured. It is easy enough, of course, to assert that a particular political regime exhibits both a distinctive culture and a particular pattern of development. But it is another matter to indicate the precise relationship between the two.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.