Tradition Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term tradition has a significant history of usage in the field of political science and particularly in the subfield of political theory. There are, however, to two quite different uses of the term, which are sometimes reflected in dictionary definitions. The root of the term is the Latin tradition that refers to an act of handing over, and traditum connoting the thing transmitted or handed down from the past to the present. For example, tradition in Roman law was a method of transferring ownership of property.

The primary contemporary meaning of tradition can be labeled indigenous, and is a reference to an inherited pattern of thought and action, such as a religious practice, which involves concrete instances of the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another. For example, in Christianity, and particular in Roman Catholicism, church authority is based on what is termed the sacred tradition, and many political and social practices ranging from Fourth of July celebrations in the U.S. to forms of political campaigning worldwide reflect this concept of tradition.

There is, however, a secondary and more general sense of tradition labeled analytical, involving scholars and other commentators specifying, according to their own criteria, general aspects of cultural continuity. This can apply to social attitudes, customs, and institutions or to characteristic manners, methods, and styles of behavior. When Louis Hartz wrote his influential work on Liberal Tradition in America (1955), he was not speaking about a consciously embraced and self-ascribed tradition, but instead about what he believed he had identified as persistent characteristics of American thought and social relations. Often when historians, social scientists, and political philosophers and political theorists write about something such as the Western tradition of political thought or about American political thought, they select iconic authors and texts among which they claim to perceive certain family resemblances.

The indigenous and analytical senses of tradition are, however, often mistakenly, and sometimes purposively, conflated. Although Hartz, for example, was at times clear about the fact that he was describing a liberal tradition from the external perspective of the historian, he often implied that what he was depicting was an actual historically indigenous pattern of thought—one that had been consciously and intentionally passed from generation to generation.

Connotations Of Tradition

The concept of tradition often carries either a positive or negative normative valence. In some cases, it is viewed as a conservative source of authority with varying degrees of acceptance regarding development and change. Edmund Burke defended this sense of tradition in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), while, as in the case of the Enlightenment, the idea of progress often entailed the rejection of traditional authority and institutions. Edward Shils’s Tradition (1981) was also a defense of tradition in the face of modern attitudes and particularly those he saw as characteristic of contemporary social science. In the social sciences, the term traditional society often neutrally contrasts with industrial, urbanized, capitalist modern society. The term is applied to a wide range of no modern societies, as varied as tribal groups on the one hand, and medieval European states on the other. It is also sometimes employed as a judgmental term, often implying negative traits associated with being backward and nonscientific. However, it is also occasionally valorized and associated with close-knit social units and communal values.

Tradition In Political Theory

The issue of what constitutes a tradition has been most salient in the study of the history of political theory. The texts constituting the classic canon were incorporated during the mid-nineteenth century into the emerging field of political science as a historico-philosophical narrative of the progressive development of Western political thought. This narrative, inspired by German philosophy, provided a provenance both for American democratic political institutions and for the discipline of political science. Despite a fundamental shift, after the turn of the century, in the discipline’s images of both democratic theory and science, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, no significant challenge to the symbiotic relationship between political science and the subfield of political theory.

This relationship was subsequently disrupted by two distinct intellectual movements. On one hand, the rise of behavioral political science, however, led to the depreciation of what came to be referred to as traditional political theory by political scientists who were intent on emulating what they believed were the methods of natural science. On the other hand, by this point, the image of what had become known as the tradition of Western political thought, which George Sabine celebrated in his 1937 A History of Political Theory, as a story of the triumph of liberal democracy, had been significantly altered by émigré scholars such as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Hannah Arendt, as well as by others such as Sheldon Wolin. These scholars transformed the narrative into a story of the crisis and decline of both liberalism and political science. The study of the great tradition, from Plato to Marx, became devoted to an account of how the tradition had gone wrong and to the recovery of past truth.

By the 1970s, significant questions were being raised, from various perspectives—by a number of scholars such as Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and John G. Gunnell—as to whether the idea of the tradition, when viewed as progress or declination, was anything more than the retrospective imposition of rhetorical philosophical myths. These normative constructs, it was argued, distorted the meaning of both texts and contexts and neglected to recognize actual historical traditions of political thought.

Conclusion

Subsequent scholarship in the history of political thought has contributed significantly to more sophisticated debates and analyses regarding the nature of historical and textual interpretation; it has also contributed to the production of more credible histories of indigenous traditions of political thought and action. Although this has led to a better understanding of the concept of tradition and the difference between indigenous and analytical concepts, the problem of conflating the two has hardly been resolved in neither the literature of political theory nor political science in general. The different concepts to which tradition is attached remain open to considerable scholarly critical analysis and further clarification.

Bibliography:

Abramson, Jeffrey. Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Doubleday, 1958.
Gunnell, John G. Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1979.
Phillips, Mark S., and Gordon Schochet, eds. Questions of Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Pocock, J. G. A. Politics, Language, and Time. New York: Atheneum, 1971.
Shils, Edward. Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

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