Individuality and Politics

Abstract

One domain that can provide valuable sociological data for the study of the status of the individual in the ways of thinking of a people is that of politics. The prevailing political culture of each society can explicitly reveal whether the concept of the individual exists in the ways of thinking of the people of that society or not. In other words, our proposition is that in every society there is a mutual relationship between how man is conceived according to the patterns of the ways of thinking of the members of that society and the way the basic political institutions of the society are developed. In this respect, an investigation of the nature of the relationships between ruler and the ruled in general, and of prevailing conceptions of participation of individual members of society in the structure of the political power in particular, may be elucidating. Yet, it should be stressed that what we are proposing does not concern the relationship between policies, strategic or tactical political plans and political actions which, as we emphasized in Chapter 4, do not correspond to the cultural characteristics of a people in a linear way.