The Debate about Political Culture

Last year the blog had three posts on this issue – identifying a range of material I needed to get my head around and which is summarised in the table of the previous post. The balance of argument was clearly in favour of those who considered that national political cultures exist. But then, last week, I came across a management thinker (Brendan McSweeney) who disputed this and had, for the past 15 years at least, been conducting a strong critique of the work of Geert Hofstede (1928-2020) who surveyed IBM personnel in various parts of the world in the 1960s and  then started to generalise his findings and suggest certain national characteristics.

Hofstede and his younger Netherlands colleague Frans Trompenaars were the focus of the critique – but not others such as the World Values team whose work has enjoyed a high profile in the last 30 years, or individuals such as Howard Wiarda, Lawrence Harrison or Richard Lewis (although the latter may have been judged to be too pop management to be worthy of critique) 

Time clearly for one of my tables in which I list and summarise the key texts in a particular field. I’ll start with the books which vary tremendously in accessibility – with one 2014 intellectual history standing out as quite exceptional in its comprehensiveness – not just of disciplinary fields but in its summary of popular texts about such nations as the Italians, Japanese, Russians and Spaniards. That is Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance which so impressed me that I wanted to have a conversation with him – only to learn that he, very sadly, died in 2015. And other key figures have also passed away recently – Lawrence Harrison also in 2015, Geert Hofstede in 2020 and Ronald Inglehart less than a year ago.

In the spirit of Wiarda’s book, my table includes titles which appealed to both the general reading public and more specialised readers and even includes a few titles which reflect the “zeitgeist” such as Peter Gay and Daniel Rodgers. There are 30 books in the list so I’ll start with the first ten 

Book Title	Takeaway
On Germany; Madame de Stael (1813)	The link gives excerpts from the first of what is a 3 volume analysis of the customs, literature, philosophy and religion of the country as it was at the beginning of the 19th century. That’s a remarkable 1000 pages and more!
Democracy in America; Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)	A book which resonates still - after almost 200 years. Amazing insights
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards – an exercise in comparative psychology; Salvador de Madariaga (1931)	An early effort in the comparative field
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword Ruth Benedict 1948	Benedict was one of the founders of US anthropology and is one of many Westerners to try to penetrate the Japanese soul
The Authoritarian Personality Theodor Adorno 1950	Adorno moved his Frankfurt school from Nazi Germany to New York and used the surveys the School had done of workers of the period to try to understand how Nazism had taken root
Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life  Zevedei Barbu 1956	Barbu was Romanian and my political sociology tutor at Glasgow University in the early 1960s. The book has 3 parts – starting with the “democratic personality”; then looking at “the psychology of Nazism” where he has comments on Adorno; and finally “the psychology of communism”
The Civil Culture – political attitudes and democracy in five nations; Almond and Verba (1963)	The first real comparative studies of political culture – by US political scientists
The Italians Luigi Barzini 1965	One of the early best-sellers
Beyond Culture Edward T Hall (1976)	Hall was another US anthropologist but his writing shows great sensitivity and draws on wide reading in other fields
Hidden Differences – doing business with the Japanese Edward and Mildred Hall 1990	A short guidebook to doing business with the Japanese which starts with a summary of the general approach used by Hall