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Trends in the Study of Chinese Political Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Peter R. Moody Jr.
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Extract

A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology, if not ancient times, but came to the fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the Western pattern. The mainstream political science version of political culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change. Modernization theory went out of fashion in the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it. More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture, and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.

Type
State of the Field
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 139 , September 1994 , pp. 731 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1994

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References

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40. Ibid. p. 104.

41. Ibid. p. 116.

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