The State Tradition in Germany: Continuities and Changes

Abstract

Even though it is only some analytical dimensions of political culture that will be dealt with in this chapter, some conceptual clarifications are called for (see also Chapter 1). Political culture can be understood as a set of collectively shared ideas about the political world. Three different kinds of cultural manifestations, however, have to be distinguished which differ in their relation to political action and the importance of which can vary tremendously between political societies:

• (a) ways of life or codes of behaviour or political styles (that is to say, ideas or designs for living which have become social institutions on which what is to be done in public depends);

• (b) Weltbilder or mentalities (that is to say, ideas which constitute a frame of mind by which thinking and feelings, and indirectly actions as well, are conditioned);

• (c) a group’s culture in the narrow sense of the word; the group’s points of reference or the set of cultural meanings, ideas and symbols typical of a group, and the way they are produced, reproduced and communicated in public. As contrasted with the two other manifestations of culture which have become an integrated part of social structures or mentalities, they make up a society’s ‘superstructure’ on which it depends what can be said in the public.