THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY

Sebastian de Grazia

(August 1917), a political philosopher

and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, died on Sunday in Princeton,
N.J. he was 83 in 2000.
He was born in Chicago and received a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in
political science from the University of Chicago. During World War II he
served in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington.
A. The Community and Belief System
What is it that makes a group of people of Community?
Religious and Political beliefs.
Without commonness of belief system, No political community can
be said to exist.
The concept of Anomie (Emile Durkheim)
-When no body of common values and sentiments exists, a person
feels isolates or lost, without standards. (Confusion, Loss of
Orientation)
Ruler
-used to denote the entity, tangible or intangible, which members of a
community believe able to control those aspects of the environment
most necessary for the commonweal.
Directives
-like the term ruler, refers to peoples beliefs.
-this directives embody the communitys ideas of good and bad.
B. Anxiety and Belief
System of beliefs acquires major psychological function for the child
only after he experiences certain shocks.
4 Important Situations of Anxiety in the early history of the human
organism (clues left by Durkheim Anomie)
1. Absence of attendants
2. Withdrawal of affection by attendants
3. Discovery of the limitations of the attendants
4. Partial abandonment by attendants
The relationship of Anomie to Separation-anxiety
-with the deterioration of childs system of beliefs about the world and
terminates with acquisition of a new or revised set of beliefs.

Belief system serve as protection against the anxiety of separation

provoked by such situations.
C. The Genesis of Political belief Systems
For good or evil, anthropomorphic beliefs cannot be stifled in the
child. Outside the home, parental information finds support in the
schools.
- It is more understandable to the child that the king or congress of
the president makes the law; and if people are not good in
thought and deed, they are punished.
- The political world of the child under 5 years of age is people
with awe-inspiring chief executive, fantastic policemen, soldiers,
firemen (for firemen control fires and save people), together with
good people (law abiding citizens), who are happy and content,
and bad (law breaking persons), who are jailed or hanged.
The religious and political ideologies of the modern child do not
change appreciably until adolescence.
D. The Political Void in Adolescence
The age of maturity - 21 years of age- the age of voting, brings the
equivalence of the status-giving customs of the simple societies.
E. Anomie and Obligations
Two types of Anomie:
1. Moderate form called Simple anomie
- Its influence is persuasive; insidious, one might say it. It affords a
clear example of the interconnection of all aspects of the life of
man as political animal.
2. a severe called Acute anomie
- Is when traditional institutions such as religion and government
fail to exercise the moral restraints on a capitalist society.
F. Mass Movement
When men find their present and future painful to behold, they
search for new ideologies, and oftentimes, like the man with a
toothache who believed the time when he had no toothache his
happiest, they glanced backward toward a golden age.
Belief system deteriorate when members are convinced of one or the
other two things- that their ruler is either unable or unwilling to
provide for them in the manner prescribed in the ideology.
Once the vast mass of people feel that the ruler cannot carry out his
obligations, a belief system that offers a new order, yet in which the
old will be revived, spreads like a fire through dry brush.