Culture is the symbolic process through which human beings cognitively order reality and transmit their ways of life. Human beings are creatures of culture, having culture-specific orientations to reality (i.e., forms of consciousness) and culture-induced motivations that vary across history, types of societies, and individual experience: political problems — those problems related to the structure of authority relationships and distribution of power — are, therefore, necessarily cultural problems. The core phenomena in any problem of politics, indeed in any problem concerning humanity, are phenomena that have at their center human minds who animate them and who, in turn, are themselves symbolic or cultural processes occurring in the brain; thus, to understand and explain problems of politics one must understand and explain the relevant symbolic and mental processes, which is to understand and explain human actors' forms of consciousness and motivations. The problems that any social science must address are cultural problems in their various manifestations; the mentalist perspective, which the present paper represents, is the perspective which specifically focuses on them.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the nature of political action, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; and, Liah Greenfeld, “The Political Significance of Culture,” Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.
- 2.
Liah Greenfeld, “The Trouble with Social Science,” Critical Review 17, 2005, Nos. 1–2, pp. 101–116. Also see the edition of Critical Review entitled Is Social Science Hopeless? Jeffrey Friedman (Ed.), dedicated to the nature of the problem of social science and contemporary social scientific practice: Critical Review 16, 2004, Nos. 2–3, pp. 143–351.
- 3.
“Science and Literature as Social Institutions,” Nationalism and the Mind, op. cit.
- 4.
For representative work in the mentalist tradition see, among others, Oliver Benoit, “Ressentiment and the Gairy Social Revolution,” in Small Axe, February 2007, pp. 95–111; Jonathan Eastwood, The Rise of Nationalism in Venezuela, Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2006; Chandler Rosenberger, “Other People's Wars: George Antonius, Historian as Liberator,” Historically Speaking, July 2005, and “The Dissident Mind: Václav Havel as Revolutionary Intellectual,” The Journal of the Historical Society, September 2006; James Stergios, “Language and Italian Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism, 2005, pp. 8–24; as well as the work of Liah Greenfeld.
- 5.
For more on this subject, see Durkheim's Suicide: A Study in Sociology. For an in-depth treatment of Durkheim's contribution to the mentalist tradition, see Liah Greenfeld's “Main Currents and Sociological Thought” in Frost and Mahoney (Eds.), Political Reason in the Age of Ideology: Essays in Honor of Raymond Aron, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007.
- 6.
For more on Weber's concept of rationalization, see “Nationalism and Modern Economy: Communing with the Spirit of Max Weber” in Nationalism and the Mind, op.cit.; and “Main Currents and Sociological Thought,” op. cit. Jonathan Eastwood's discussion of Weber's theory of interests is also insightful: “The Role of Ideas in Weber's Theory of Interests,” Critical Review 17, Nos. 1–2, 2005, pp. 89–100.
- 7.
See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (Trans.), New York: Routledge, 2005.
- 8.
Jonathan Eastwood, “The Role of Ideas in Weber's Theory of Interest,” op. cit.
- 9.
“Nationalism and the Mind” in Nationalism and the Mind, op. cit.
- 10.
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- 11.
This conception of the social order wherein the individual is the central unit in the system of social stratification finds its ideal type in individualistic-civic nationalism. Representative cases include those of the United States and Australia, the political and social institutions of which were fashioned according to the social consciousness given by nationalism, thereby leading to the realization in practice of the ideal type of individualistic-civic nationalism. A discussion of the implications of different types of nationalism follows in the next section. For more, see Liah Green-feld and Jonathan Eastwood, “National Identity,” in Carles Boix and Susan Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 256–273.
- 12.
On the relationship between nationalism and religion, see “The Modern Religion?” in Nationalism and the Mind, op. cit.
- 13.
For a detailed discussion on the state, see “Nationalism and Modernity” in Nationalism and the Mind, op. cit.; Also, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, op. cit., pp. 21–26, among others.
- 14.
See the French, German, and Russian cases in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, op. cit..
- 15.
Michael J. Totten, The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2008, pp. A13.
- 16.
For more see Liah Greenfeld and Daniel Chirot, “Nationalism and Aggression,” Theory and Society 23, 1994, pp. 79–130.
- 17.
- 18.
Nationalism, to reiterate, as one form of consciousness, is not a human universal: nationalism is, rather, historical and contingent. Seeing nationalism as a human universal has its root in two problems that have affinities with one another: (1) The first problem concerns observers who have nationalist forms of consciousness and who do not recognize the historical and accidental nature of their perspectives; and, (2) The second problem concerns the dominance of the empirically unjustified Marxian materialist perspective that is regnant in the social sciences which vigorously maintains the universality of nationalism against the universe of counterfactuals that resist this perspective. This latter problem affects even those observers who do not have nationalist forms of consciousness, given that the materialist perspective constitutes a defining condition in the genesis of the perspectives of the non-mentalist social sciences which these observers utilize. Indeed, this materialist perspective is so forceful as to kill off the science in such “social science.”
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Greenfeld, L., Malczewski, E. (2010). Politics as a Cultural Phenomenon. In: Leicht, K.T., Jenkins, J.C. (eds) Handbook of Politics. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68930-2_22
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