The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (272 page)

Systems theory takes the political or social system as the proper unit of analysis. It was introduced to sociology and politics principally by Talcott Parsons (
The Structure of Social Action
, 1937; Parsons and Shils ,
Toward a General Theory of Social Action
, 1951), and by David Easton (
The Political System,
1953). Parsons, for instance, spoke of a social system as containing four subsystems, devoted to ‘adaptivity’, ‘goal-seeking’, ‘integration’, and ‘latency’, which relate respectively to the economy, politics, society, and the family. Both Parsons and Easton were influenced by biologists' models of ecological systems.
Except for its cousin world systems analysis, systems analysis is no longer taken seriously. Its terms were too vaguely defined and its relationship with empirical evidence was too haphazard; it was never clear what would count as a test, still less a falsification, of systems theory. However, systems theory did stress, however obscurely, some truths that have been periodically rediscovered since
Aristotle
: especially that taking the individual as the unit of analysis misses interactions which can only be explained by reference to ‘society’. Not many individualists are so extreme as to believe that ‘there is no such thing as society’ in the reported phrase of Barones Thatcher .

 
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See
consent
.

 
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See
Afghanistan War (2001)
.

 
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Guerrilla and terrorist group in Sri Lanka fighting since 1983 for a separate Tamil state against the majority Sinhalese community.

 
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(1880–1962)
Fabian
socialist who achieved considerable reputation as both historian and social theorist. His
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
(1926) examined the controversy between followers of
Marx
and those of
Weber
about whether capitalism explained Protestantism or vice versa. Tawney supported Weber, in so far as he argued that Protestant capitalism had a special character and was responsible for the development of modern Western society. His
Equality
(1931) was an influential book in developing the social objectives of the Labour Party. In that he believed that the 1944 Education Act and steeply progressive taxation would do much to enhance the ‘life chances’ of the least privileged in society, he can be said to represent a form of socialism which later became disreputable. But he also used to ask, ‘Do the English still prefer to be governed by Old Etonians?’, rhetorically suggesting the kind of opening of government to a wider social circle which has proved more persistent than socialism.
LA 

 
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Taylor , Harriet
(néeHardy)
,

(1807–58)
Feminist writer. Married in 1826 to a wholesale trader, John Taylor , through whom she soon met J. S.
Mill
and became his companion. She married Mill in 1851 after her husband's death. They lived a lonely and ascetic life, having quarrelled with all their friends, but devoted themselves to providing ‘mental pemmican’ (preserved dried meat) for ‘thinkers, when there are any after us’. This gloomy picture should be set against Mill's wholehearted praise for ‘her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings’. He stated that she was responsible for the chapter The Probable Future of the Labouring Class’ in his
Principles of Political Economy
(1848). Her ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ was published in 1851 under Mill's name. The intellectual partnership of the Mills is very like that of the
Condorcets
, and has the common feature that contemporaries blamed the husband's commitment to feminism on the wife.