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Unit 5: Political Socialisation

specified the major agencies of political socialisation will be. Conversely, the greater the degree of Notes
change in a non-totalitarian polity, the more diffused the major agencies of political socialisation
will be. The more basic the degree of revolution in a polity, the more specified the agencies of
political socialisation will be.” The paramount fact may, however, not be lost sight of that though
political socialisation may involve political orientations and behaviour patterns from the
maintenance and replication of a given political system to its transformation or total destruction,
it, as a matter of fact, strives to emphasise the point that “the test for a stable political system is
whether the socialising agencies are sufficiently flexible and inter-dependent to allow change
without violent disruption.”
The process of political socialisation in the form of the acquisition of political orientations and
patterns of behaviour is as applicable to non-democratic societies as it is to the democratic ones,
though it cannot be denied that the emphasis placed on the role of the ‘agents’ or the system of
mechanism may vary both in kind and in its effectiveness. An open society allowing room for
dissent and opposition has a plural character wherein multifarious interests operate for the purpose
of inculcating a multifaceted variety of political norms and values. Opposed to this is the case of
a totalitarian society where the men in power impose their ideology or political values on the
people as a whole with a view to de-educate the old and re-educate the young generations. The
totalitarian societies “differ from modern democracies in the degree of control they exercise over
the political socialisation of their members. All governments seek directly or indirectly to socialise
members of society to varying degrees by the control of information, but in the totalitarian society,
the control is all-pervasive.”
A totalitarian state is one that seeks to control all aspects of society and lays stress on the socialisation
in general and political socialisation in particular. The ideology of the state “becomes the official
basis of all the actions and pervades all activities. Political socialisation is not and cannot be left to
find its own channels; nor to purview uncontrolled knowledge, values and attitudes which may
contradict or undermine that ideology. The minds of men must be captured, guided and harnessed
to the needs of the state through the vehicle of its ideology.” This is evident from the statements
of great totalitarian leaders like Adolph Hitler: “We have set before ourselves the task of inoculating
our youth with the spirit of this community of people at a very early age. And this new Reich will
give its youth to no one but itself, take youth and give to youth its own education and its own
upbringing.” Likewise, V.I. Lenin said: “Only by radically remoulding the teaching organisation
and training of the young shall we be able to ensure that the results of the efforts of the younger
generation will be the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society that is a communist
society.”
A deeper examination in this regard, however, leads to this astonishing impression that the process
of political socialisation is essentially a conservative concept, regardless of the case of democratic
and totalitarian societies, in view of the fact that its real concern is with the survival or maintenance
of a political system. Whether it is a free and open society like that of the United States or Britain,
or it is the opposite of that as we find in China, the net over-all effect of political socialisation “is
in the direction of supporting the status quo, or at least the major aspects of the existing political
regime.” As Greenstein says: “Political socialisation in both stable and unstable societies is likely
to maintain existing patterns.

What do you mean by totalitarian societies?

5.2 Agents of Political Socialisation

If political socialisation concerns itself with the orientation of the individuals towards political
objects, let us look into the role of the ‘agents’ which play their part in the process of norm-

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