POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE MODERN GREEK CONCEPT OF SELF.

P OLITICAL SCIENTISTS, aware of the significance of social structure and cultural patterns for an understanding of political processes, have attempted to formulate conceptual frameworks and models which incorporate cultural and sociological phenomena.' From a scientific perspective these attempts raise basic methodological problems regarding the validity of the approaches used. A requisite for the development of science in the social sciences, as well as in the natural sciences, is that the findings of one discipline should not contradict the findings of any other discipline. Related is the broader requirement that the findings of each discipline interrelate with those of the other disciplines, leading eventually to an overall theoretical framework. Sherif argues for a 'levels of analysis' approach to the study of social phenomena, whereby social processes would be investigated at a multiplicity of levels: the individual level, the small group level, and the more encompassing organizational or institutional level.2 The study of any one issue or problem may well require a multilevelled approach, while research at any one level could serve as a check on research at all other levels. Many of the current efforts of political scientists to use both the tools and the findings of the other social sciences have unfortunately gone astray.3 Although anthropologists, for example, have dealt extensively with the divergent views of self operative in different cultures, and although psychologists have concerned themselves with analyses of the ego, political scientists have not meaningfully related these findings to political processes. This paper shall deal with the political implications of a given set of self attitudes. Using modern Greece as a case study, an effort shall be made to show that the view of self which a people holds, by determining an individual's conception of his relationship to the world around him, significantly affects the functioning of a political system. If the interrelationship of the view of self, cultural patterns, social structure and political institutions can be more clearly delineated, then the processes of modernization, political development and democracy may become better understood. 29