‘Nothing but Survival?’ On David Easton's Concept of Political Persistence

How do you catch the fish you are after in a text-analysis, and what are the effects of your world-view upon your abilities to fish? Although the analytic positivists can indeed help us to answer these questions, their world-view has nevertheless functioned as a constraint upon the development of political theory by ignoring (more or less) the methods of the understanding traditions. Because, if you fail to understand the complex of problems in a given text-system, you are also in danger of analysing and criticizing nothing but your own misunderstandings - of kidding no-one but yourself. In the case of David Easton's concept of political persistence, such analytic misunderstandings have helped to produce a one-dimensional picture of the systems model, which, however, can be dissolved by uniting world-view, metascience, and science of respectively the analysts and the interpreters within the framework of the critical traditions.