History, Culture, And Personality

As being a pioneer and a leading scholar in the field of contemporary Chinese political culture study among western scholars, Lucian Pye is well-known for his psycho-cultural interpretation of Chinese political culture. Why does he develop such a special interest in Chinese political culture? What makes him use some theories and concepts coming from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology and cultural anthropology to study political culture? What does the psycho-cultural interpretation mean? How does he study Chinese political culture in making use of the approach of psycho-cultural interpretation? What does the strength and weakness of the psycho-cultural interpretation have? How should we evaluate Pye's study about Chinese political culture? The aim of this dissertation is to answer these questions.First, why does he develop such a special interest in Chinese political culture, and why is he opted for the interpretation of politics from a psycho-cultural angle? Pye was born and brought up in China, which gave us a clue that why he has been attracted by China and Chinese politics. The main reasons that made him focus on the field of political culture, however, should be traced back to the background of the era and academic currents in American social science in the first half of 20th century as well as the influences of his tutors and colleagues upon him during the stage of his intellectual development. The trauma experienced by human in the first half of 20th century stimulated and invited social scientists to ask why human's actions could go for the directions that could make disasters. Almost every discipline in American social science has formed a school which intended to emphasize the influences of culture or psyche upon human actions in explaining social phenomenon. Some leading scholars of behavoral movement in political science have also encouraged taking new theories and approaches of adjacent disciplines such as psychology and sociology into political science research. Pushed by such academic currents Pye was greatly influenced by Gabriel Almond, his tutor, the person who first brought forward the concept of political culture; Harold Lasswell and Nathan Neites, both well known as political psychologist; especially Erik Erikson, an exceptional representative of Neo-Freudian, who provided him with some very important psychological analytic tools in his political culture study.Second, what does the psycho-cultural interpretation mean? According to the characteristics in Pye's political culture study, we understand that what he called the approach of psycho-cultural interpretation not only means borrowing some analytic tools from psychology, sociology and the others, but also refers to the orientation of his study, that is, the psychological or cultural bases of political actions on the part of human being. His psycho-cultural interpretations of Chinese politics are characterized by the following features:explaining political culture from a historical perspective and various comparative perspective, the theme of his study focusing on the formation of the view of power and authority, being concerned with the relationship between culture, personality and political actions, preference for the study of political elites on the balance of microanalysis and macroanalysis. In short, Pye is a scholar who pays much attention to the understanding of psycho-cultural bases of political actions, stressing the heuristic meaning of questions, influenced deeply by Neo Freudian, analyzing politics with historical perspective and useful tools and theories from other disciplines.Third, how does Pye study Chinese political culture with the approach of psycho-cultural interpretation? According to there dimensions in the Pye's study of political cultures, we will analyze these different aspects respectively.To begin with, on the dimension of the sense of national identity and collective expectations about legitimacy and the role of power and authority, Pye trys to discover the obstacles that have operated to impede China's modernization from the perspective of the crisis of culture identity and authority crisis which often prevail in transitional societies. In his opinion the Chinese have been spared the crises of culture identity common to most other transitional societies. However, the Chinese experienced more profound crisis of authority than the others. Some of the reasons could be attributed to the fact that the problem in cultural identity have been translated into the problems of authorities, to the fact that the sense of frustration and incompetent the Chinese felt in their course of modernization both had been exaggerated. On the other hand, the factors helping to produce the circumstances in which the crises of authority readily happen should be found in some particular and enduring characteristics of Chinese traditional social system and political system, of Chinese political culture, as well as the results of family socialization.On the dimension of group, that is, the elite and the mass, Pye takes the theory of the needs of personality and the concept of self-identity into analyzing the reasons of the ambivalences in Chinese political culture. According to Pye, Chinese political culture is characterized by contradictory tendencies, including the tension between consensus and factions, both driven by the sense of safety, and the co-existence of an elitist high political culture and a populist heterodox political culture, lots of elements in the two cultures both shared by the elites and the mass. In contemporary China the contradictory of political culture manifests itself in a dualistic co-existence of idealism of Mao Zedong and pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping. Pye points out that the reason for the co-existence of the two cultures lies in a common origin at an even deeper psychological level:the ambiguous line of the relationship of the self to others.On the dimension of leaders, Pye mixes both the points of view of Lasswell who emphasized the importance of life-histories in research and of Erikson who created the approach of psycho-history into his study of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and so on. He analyzes Mao's personality traits from the perspective of psychoanalysis by extracting the most important section in Mao's life history, the relationship between Mao's style of leadership and his personality traits. Pye points out that if we find out the coherence in Mao's personality traits the contradictory of Mao's style of leadership will be well-understood, that if we want to understand Deng's unique style of leadership which is both built on the tradition and beyond the tradition we should go back to the particularity of his political socialization and the influences of Chinese traditional elitist political culture upon him.No one can deny Lucian Pye's contributions to the study of Chinese political culture, however, what he had done both received compliments and critiques. Does the psycho-cultural interpretation have its irreplaceable value among various interpretations of political culture? What the advantages and disadvantages it have? Comparing to the approach of questionnaire survey in political culture study, the psycho-cultural interpretation of political culture is better at the width and depth of explanation than the questionnaire survey. At the same time it also has the weakness of subjectivity and of being less convincible. In the psycho-cultural interpretation of Chinese political culture on the part of Lucian Pye there indeed exists some fallacies. However, on account of the fact that no method is perfect the only choice for us is to improve it by accepting various critiques.