[Note for bibliographic reference: Melberg, Hans O. (1997), Why (not) use the
cultural approach? Review of Tucker, Part I www.oocities.org/hmelberg/papers/980205.htm]
Why (not) use the cultural approach?
Review of Tucker, Part I
by Hans O. Melberg
Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev
Robert C. Tucker
W.W. Norton, New York/London, 1987
ISBN: 0 393 02489 X
214 pages
Introduction
In the preface to Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia Robert C.
Tucker writes that
"While rich in specialized research, Soviet studies in the West are remiss in
their failure so far to produce a general interpretation of Russia's historical experience
in the seventy-year aftermath of the revolutions of 1917. This book aims to fulfil that
gap." (p. vii)
Tucker's answer to the claimed failure, is to focus on the cultural approach to Soviet
studies. For instance, he approvingly quotes Kroeber and Kluckhohn who argued that culture
could be "a major concept in a possible unified science of human behaviour" (p.
2).
One way of attacking Tucker's argument, would be to claim that culture is only one of
several variables that can explain events in Russian history. Hence, the relative
importance of culture as a variable or the reliability of explanations based on culture
may be so weak that it does not justify using culture as the major concept to
understand events in Russia. Tucker's answer to this charge, is that the value of the
concept does not depends upon its explanatory power, but rather its fruitfulness in terms
of suggesting questions for further research and as a frame for organizing large amounts
of information. I find it difficult to understand this "culture-as-a-frame"
approach, and I shall argue that Tucker in practice ends up using culture as an
explanatory variable.
Defining culture
According to Tucker "culture is a society's costumary way of life, comprising both
accepted modes of thought and belief and accepted patterns of conduct." (vii). This
is a so-called anthropological definition of culture, as opposed to a psychological
definition, since behaviour (not only attitudes) is included. To understand the
difference, consider attitudes and behaviour with respect to income tax returns in two
countries. Assume that the population of both countries claim that it is morally
unacceptable to cheat on the income tax return form (or accept bribes). However, when it
comes to actual behaviour most people in one country cheat, while people in the other
country generally behave according to the stated moral norm. Does this not indicate a real
cultural difference between the two countries?
I have previously argued against making behaviour a part of the definition of culture
(see The Cultural approach to Russian politics). Tucker argues that the exclusion of
behaviour from the definition of culture has adverse implications for research orientation
and theory (p. 4). I shall return to this question later, suffice to say here that it is
not true that excluding behaviour from the definition of culture leads me to ignore some
cultural differences. First, I think that behind every behavioural difference there is
always a non-behavioural difference. The population of the two countries in our example
cannot have exactly the same beliefs, preferences, norms and emotions (and other
non-behavioural variables) and still behave differently. Second, my approach does not
exclude the use of behaviour as an indicator of these non-behavioural differences.
Using culture as a frame
After noting that including behaviour in the definition of culture may cause problems for
the explanatory use of culture, Tucker claims that the value of the concept of culture
does not depends on its explanatory power. As he writes:
"My question is this: does the scholarly value of the concept of political culture
turn on its explanatory potency? Might not the central value of a concept like that of
political culture be that it assists us to take our bearings in the study of the political
life of a society, to focus on what is happening or not happening, to describe and analyse
and order many significant data, and to raise fruitful questions for thought and research
- without explaining anything? May it not be, further, that political culture and its
vicissitudes comprise a great deal of what it is we should wish to explain" (p. 4)
This is a frequently quoted paragraph, but I think its the persuasive force is weaker
than the number of quotations would suggests. Let me deal with it step by step.
Take the last sentence that culture "comprise a great deal of what it is we should
wish to explain." The sentence is odd because it does not justify using culture as a
frame instead of using culture as an explanatory variable. If he means that we want to
explain behaviour (defined by him as a cultural variable), nobody would object. If he
means that we want to explain why people have certain cultural trait when we use culture
as an explanatory variable, nobody would object (although this is a separate project from
the one connecting culture to its claimed consequences). In no way does it determine
whether behaviour should be included in the definition of culture, or the value of the
approach using culture as a frame.
Another set of arguments is that we can use culture to "take our bearings in the
study of the political life of a society, to focus on what is happening or not happening,
to describe and analyse and order many significant data." Once again, nobody would
object to focus on "what is happening or not happening" (indeed, there is no
third alternative between the two to take interest in). Of course, some things might be
more interesting than others, and presumably Tucker thinks that we can find the most
interesting parts if we use a cultural approach. The question then turns to the criterion
for being "interesting." One such criterion is causal significance; a frame that
draws attention to the causally significant variables is valuable. However, the argument
cannot be that the cultural approach draws attention to cultural traits that are causally
important in explaining events in Russian history, since the context of the argument is
precisely one in which he tries to establish the value of the cultural approach without
appealing to explanatory power. One might try alternative criteria for "being
significant", such as "importance for human welfare", but this is an
inherently subjective criterion. In sum, I fail to see how the arguments justify the
"culture-as-a-frame" approach.
Somewhat more useful is the suggestion that the concept of culture can be used to order
large amounts of data, but it is unclear exactly what this means. I know what it is to
order something chronologically and alphabetically; but I do not know what it is to order
my information about Russian history "culturally". Maybe it can be done, but I
have so far failed to understand how (see the discussion of this in my review Welch's The
Concept of Political Culture). Perhaps it amounts to organizing information into
chapters about "the legal culture", "the political culture", "the
popular culture", "the leadership culture" and so on, but I fail to see the
great benefits of doing this.
As for the argument that the concept of culture is valuable since is "raise
fruitful questions," I, once again, do not understand exactly how this works.
Previously, I have argued against making "fruitfulness" a criterion for a model
since what is a "fruitful" model for you need not be a "fruitful"
model for me. I have now revised my views slightly since I realize that
"fruitfulness" is only partly subjective. For instance, while reading Peter
Atkins' book "The Periodic Kingdom", I realized that the different ways of
arranging the elements also affected the likelihood of discovering new elements. For
instance, an alphabetical listing would not reveal the same gaps that the first periodic
table did, which in turn suggested that there were elements which we had not found (see p.
119 in Atkins for a 3-D alternative to the traditional table). Hence, I now admit that
different frames also differ in their fruitfulness, but this is a long way from accepting
that the cultural frame is best for Russian studies. There might be differences between
the natural and the social sciences which makes "fruitfulness" less suited as a
criteria for models in the social sciences (there is no good analogy to "missing
elements" in Russian history). There might also be alternative models which are
better for Russian studies.
Using culture as an explanatory variable
After justifying the inclusion of behaviour in the definition of culture by arguing that
he want to use the concept simply as a frame, Tucker - inconsistently - goes on to use
culture as an explanatory variable. As he explicitly states "In addition to
interpreting the Stalinist revolution in cultural terms, this essay has attempted to
explain it so" (p. 96). Similarly he uses culture as an explanatory variable related
to the single party state (p. 40 ff.), the growth of Stalinism (p. 53 and p. 73), the
means used by Stalin (p. 83). Consider, for example, the following quotation: "Risen
from simple, often peasant origins, these New Believers were culturally disposed to think
of Russia as a new Orthodox tsardom of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist persuasion ..." (p.
118). In sum, Tucker does not stick to the culture as a frame perspective, since he often
uses culture as an explanatory variable. One might argue that the famous quotation (p. 4)
does not exclude the explanatory use of culture, but his definition of culture is
justified by virtue of it not being an explanatory variable - and as such the dual use is
inconsistent.
How reliable are explanations based on cultural variables? In the previously mentioned
article (The cultural approach to Russian politics), I argued against too much emphasis on
culture. To make a cultural explanation work, you first have to prove that the people of
Russia have a certain cultural trait. Next you have to show exactly how this trait was the
causal factor behind the event in question. Both steps are difficult, since we are dealing
with variables that are difficult to define and quantify. Not only are both steps
difficult, they are often ignored. Instead of spelling out the exact mechanisms linking
the traits and the claimed consequences, Tucker links culture and events by phrases such
as "suggestive resemblance" (p. 6), "seeming constancies" (p. 7)
"parallel" (p. 112), "re-emergence of Russian absolutism" (p. 115);
"again, not surprisingly in view of Russian tradition ..." (p. 95), and to end
with a full sentence: "It was not, however, mere caprice or accident that this
happened. Stalinist revolutionism from above had a prehistory in the political culture of
Russian tsarism; it existed as a pattern in the Russian past ..." (p. 88-89). In my
opinion, the establishing the links between culture and its claimed consequences, should
be much more rigorous than these phrases suggest.
The proof of the pudding ...
So far I have made some methodological comments on Tucker's use of culture as a frame and
as an explanatory variable. The ultimate proof of the pudding is, of course, whether
Tucker manages to come up with good explanations. The frame itself is only a tool to be
judged by its fruits. I will discuss three examples in which Tucker claims that the
cultural approach improves our understanding: the split in the Bolshevik leadership in the
1920s, the link between the first and second Stalinist revolution and the crisis of
communism in the 1980s.
Split in the 1920s
According to Tucker, "we still lack an adequate analysis of the rifts that appeared
then [in the 1920s] in the Bolshevik leadership." One reasons for this, he claims, is
that "in addressing the policy differences, scholars have not done so in
political-culture terms. The clashing tendencies in the leadership have not been
identified as divergent offshoots of Lenin's Bolshevism as a culture" (p. 59).
Tucker argues that there were three factions in the leadership; the right, the left and
the National Bolsheviks. This is different from the conventional view that there were two
factions, the right and the left, and that Stalin was an opportunist with no real
ideological platform on his own. I do not know enough about the historical details to
quarrel with Tucker here. There are two questions. First, is it really true that the
conventional wisdom is wrong. And second, is it true that problem with the conventional
wisdom is caused by a lack of attention to culture? I do not know.
Link between Stalin's revolutions
Tucker claims that the "Russian historical perspective can contribute in still a
further important way to our understanding of Stalinism: it helps make intelligible the
relationship between the first and second phases of the Stalinist revolution" (p.
91). The first phase was from 1928-33, then there was a kind of a pause during most of
1934, after which the second phase started when Kirov was murdered in December. He then
goes on to say that "A partial explanation of this linkage can be derived from the
thesis that the Stalinist revolution from above recapitulated in essentials its tsarist
predecessor's pattern. The latter involved the binding (zakreposhchenie) of all classes of
the population ..." (p. 92). Hence, the link is that the first phases bound the
workers and the peasants to the state, while the second phase completed the binding
process by enslaving the bureaucracy and the party to the "traditional" Russian
all-powerful ruler.
Once again I lack the detailed knowledge to examine this argument closely. It is
clearly true that the Purges made everybody dependent upon Stalin's good-will, but I do
not know whether this is a cultural phenomena or something we would miss if we did not use
a cultural frame. True, this kind of binding had occurred in the past, but this does not
prove that it is a pattern which had to be repeated, or that it was the actual cause of
Stalin's Purges.
Crisis
Can the cultural perspective help us to understand the collapse of communism in Russia? In
1981 Tucker wrote the following which deserves to be quoted in full:
"Here is the context for understanding the crisis of society in contemporary
Russia. Every society has its real existence in the minds of its members, their sense of
constitution together an association with historical significance, of common participation
in a worthwhile collective enterprise. This is what the society's sustaining myth
signifies. In the Soviet case, as a consequence of all the shocks that the history
reviewed here has administered, the myth no longer sustains more than a small minority, if
that. People en masse have stopped believing in the transcendent importance of a
future collective condition called 'communism'. They have stopped believing in the
likelihood of the society arriving at it through the leading role of the Communist Party,
or through themselves as 'builders of communism' ... In a society with an official culture
founded on just those beliefs, this spells a deep crisis" (p.132)
The main argument, that the system was is crisis because people had stopped believing
in the core ideas, is certainly correct. Whether it is the cultural perspective which
makes us aware of this, is more questionable. One might argue, as Tucker, that "As a
system of power expressed in military and police institutions, Soviet Communism remains
very strong. But as a culture it is in deep trouble, because the belief-system on which it
was founded has lost vitality" (p. 136). The argument is, in sum, that the cultural
perspective was better than the power perspective in predicting the crisis on Communism in
Russia.
It is true that some who believed in the totalitarian model exaggerated the stability
of Communism in Russia (e.g. Hanna Arendt). However, it is also true that some from this
school also seriously discussed the possibility of a future crisis (e.g. Brzezinsky).
Moreover, even those who believed in totalitarianism would count the loss of belief as a
weakening of the system. They would, however, also emphasise that in a system such as the
USSR, the loss of belief among the population did not necessarily translate into systemic
change. It was the elite who was in charge, and they possessed the means to suppress the
rest of the population. Only mistakes in the leadership could cause the system to
collapse. In this sense the totalitarian perspective was proved correct; The system did
not collapse when people lost belief in communism, it collapsed when the elite changed the
system so that they no longer could suppress the discontent.
Click to read part II
[Note for bibliographic reference: Melberg, Hans O. (1997), Why (not) use the
cultural approach? Review of Tucker, Part I www.oocities.org/hmelberg/papers/980205.htm]