Political Culture and Stalinism

Abstract

If a large variety of ways of operationalizing the concept of political culture is found within the behaviouralist idiom, the same is all the more true within interpretivism. While the stringent scientific standards of behaviouralism are not always adhered to in political culture research, at least standards exist. Interpretivism begins, as we saw in the Introduction, by denying the need for such standards. Accordingly, a wide range of uses of political culture could be marshalled as examples of interpretivism, from historiography as well as political science. But rather than beginning with a broad survey, we will follow a procedure similar to that adopted in earlier chapters, of looking in detail at a representative example. In this case, however, we need to go further; we will examine a use of political culture that to some extent has to be inferred and constructed from a number of sources. The initial and main source for this use is Robert C. Tucker’s political cultural interpretation of Stalinism. However, the use we will develop and assess goes beyond Tucker’s in some ways and limits it in others. Our purpose in so doing is twofold: to present interpretive political culture research in its most persuasive light, and to distinguish it clearly from the hybrid uses with which, the Introduction argued, it is often intertwined, as it is in Tucker’s work. Although vulnerable to criticism, the interpretive use that we will develop is, therefore, far from being a straw man.