ABSTRACT
The hegemony of the naturalistic conception of politics is, as I have stated earlier, both a manifestation and a catalyst of the growing significance of functional-rational thinking in a modernizing civilization (see section 6.6 of Chapter 5, section 2.4 of Chapter 6, section 8 of Chapter 9, and section 4 of Chapter 10). It too forms a conceptual model that steers expectations about the behavior of others and about one’s own behavior and that, as long as people subscribe to it, will inevitably be confirmed by empirical research. In the process, modernization gets additional impetus. Throughout the book, this conception and its communitarian counterpart have already been touched upon several times in passing. There, it proved that Dahl, Lindblom, and numerous other pluralistic political scientists had regularly grappled with this conception. However, they were continually drawn toward it, above all through their attempt to develop a more scientific political science. In the following, I shall examine this naturalistic conception more closely.
