The Quest for Political Stability

Abstract

F ALL the purposes that political systems exist to serve, there is none more basic to their institutional vitality than the task of maintaining internal social stability. For, when political systems fail at the performance of this task, they do so at the risk of revolution and with peril to their own survival. This stabilizing function of government is perhaps most accurately described as the continuous mediation of social conflict and the adjustment of competitive group demands upon the economic resources of a community. It is, of course, a basic contribution of governmental institutions to society, and a contribution that can be dispensed with only in communities at a primitive level of technology, where in a relatively stable environment social order is primarily the product of such informal controls as custom and public opinion. But in societies at stages of development beyond the primitive-societies, that is, which are characterized by change and the constant necessity for social adaptation-the need for institutions charged with the specific function of maintaining social stability is obvious, and this need is one of the principal factors out of which governmental institutions emerge.' There is, however, perhaps no circumstance that has been more productive of social strain and philosophical dispute in modern history than the fact that two quite different and, from many points of view, diametrically opposed systems of political institutions have been found equally suitable for this basic function of maintaining internal stability. These two systems are, of course, that which bears the familiar title of constitutional democracy, and the system usually given the somewhat more revealing label of authoritarianism. Fierce ideological passions have been aroused over the relative merits of these alternative political systems, with particular attention focused upon the extent to which each satisfies or conflicts with man's basic moral aspirations. And yet history, unmoved by this ideological fervor, has on occasion found each of these systems suitable for the performance of the basic stabilizing function of government. While this does not necessarily establish the irrelevance of a normative approach to politics, since the directions taken by history have to some extent been determined by men's moral commitments, it does point up the fact that from the point of view of utility there is no clear choice to be made between constitutionalism and authoritarianism as a stabilizing system. As each has had its day of triumph, each in turn has no less often been a casualty of history. From the historical record, therefore, it is apparent that while constitutionalism and authoritarianism both embody institutions and techniques through which the task of stabilization can be accomplished, the stabilizing mechanisms of either society may prove insufficient to meet the demands placed upon them by the pressures of the environment. It is the purpose of this essay to examine the principal characteristics of these two forms of government, with a view to illuminating the