David Easton is considered one of the founding fathers of political science. He has had a tremendous, in particular tacit, influence on the development of modern political analysis. Ironically, however, his concept of political system is generally thought of as a minor offspring of Parsons’s theory of the social system. Nearly all of Easton’s critics presume that his political system is based on an analogy with biology. Like Parsons, they say, Easton considers the political system society’s goal-attaining system, which functions primarily as an instrument for securing economic adaptation and as a medium for sustaining social pattern maintenance and normative integration. The result, they conclude, is a very bad empirical and moral theory which, unlike Parsons’s, is logically flawed, conceptually fuzzy, empirically almost useless, morally shady and highly elitist in nature. However, if one instead begins from carefully listening to what Easton says that political systems persistence is all about, an entirely different story appears. This reminds one much more about how networks, discourses, practices, ideas, contingencies and risks are thought about today in new, anti-essentialist approaches to policy articulation and delivery generated outside the mainstream than about conventional method-driven comparative research in the mainstream. Easton’s story is about the formation of a new approach to fact and values which is targeted to overcome the search in mainstream political science for equilibrium, linear causes, exogenous variables and normally distributed outcomes. Values and facts, are regarded as each other’s preconditions, stability and change are claimed to belong to the same genus, the ‘political’ is identified by what it does, that is its outputs rather than its inputs, and the political world is specified as a network of loosely connected levels and relations ranging from the local to the global. All this points towards a new political science and political theory tied to a critical outlook and attitude, which is intrinsically skeptical towards the status quo and at the same time open to new images and ideas about how values are authoritatively articulated and allocated for people and populations for the sake of making their life better without simultaneously undermining their struggles for free and equal access to and recognition in the political decision-making processes (and vice versa).
