CULTURE POLITICAL

Although insights into political culture have been part of
political reflection since classical antiquity, two develop-
ments in the context of the French Revolution laid the
groundwork for modern understandings. First, when
members of the Third Estate declared “We are the peo-
ple,” they were overturning centuries of thought about
political power, captured most succinctly by Louis XIV’s
infamous definition of absolutism: “L’etat, c’est moi ” (“I
am the State”). Henceforth, sovereignty was seen to reside
in society rather than in the monarch and his divine
rights. A century later, Max Weber turned this political
claim into a scientific one when he defined legitimacy as
that which is considered to be legitimate—not only by
elites but by the population in general; to understand the
political power of the state, social science must therefore
attend to its reception and sources in society. Second,
when Jean-Jacques Rousseau retheorized the social con-
tract as one in which individual interests were taken up in
an overarching “General Will” of the collectivity, he raised
the question of how social solidarity could be maintained
in the absence of recourse to divine right. His answer was
“civil religion,” symbols and rituals that establish and
dramatize the sense of collective belonging and purpose. A
century later, Émile Durkheim took up these themes
when he questioned whether modern, complex societies
could generate sufficient solidarity to function in a stable
manner. Durkheim’s interest in what he called collective
effervescence (generated in and through communal ritu-
als) and collective representations (embodied in symbols
as well as more abstractly in “collective conscience”)
extended Rousseau’s concerns and has underwritten con-
temporary analyses of political culture as the sets of sym-
bols and meanings involved in securing and exercising
political power.