Cultural Theory and Political Culture. New Directions and Proposals

Apologies usually come at the end. Sometimes, however, as here, they take the form of a preface explaining background reasons for writing a book. Five years ago I decided to study the transitory political culture of Greece during the last fifty years. Upon coining to Lund , however, I realized that such a research project would be to no avail, not only because of the extremely limited literature, but also due to two further reasons.

The first was the unsettled character of Greek politics. Five years ago the situation was too vague for a non-speculative analysis. The Socialists' electoral victory in 1981 was a nodal point in the country's political history which heralded quite divergent social recastings and political representational rearrangements. If one wanted to analyse systematically and impartially the past, the present aspects and the future trends of Greek political culture, one had to wait to observe any more or less stabilizing features to arise from that unclear transitory conjucture. Features have now matured which allow the realization of the original plan. In 1980, however, I could not but postpone the study.

The second reason was theoretical. In order to speak about Greece 's political culture it was of outmost importance to argue about the precise nature of the concept of political culture, and what there is about it which is "political" and which is "cultural". The concept of culture seems to be assigned a promising theoretical significance for social theory when extracted from its social-anthropological setting. In addition the early sixties' theory of political culture was too obsolete to cope with modern political reality. I thus felt that I first had to deal with both the theory of culture and political culture instead of immediately undertaking an empirical study of Greek politics from a cultural political perspective. Hence the theoretical character of the book.

I should say, nevertheless, that the theoretical treatment of my subject is not contigent upon personal caprice. Rather I have attempted to synthesize various strands of modern social and political theory into a meaningful framework, advancing aspects of others' important arguments that seem to me unfinished, for example, Bauman's culture-as-praxis thesis and Offe's insights into what a contemporary theory of political culture would be. Yet it is up to the reader to judge whether I succeeded in filling some gaps in theory or whether the line of argumentation I followed was the appropriate one.