The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (190 page)

 
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Any form of explanation of politics by drawing an analogy to a human or animal body, or ecological system. For example, in Shakespeare's
Coriolanus
, the aristocrat Menenius Agrippa describes the plebeian's revolt by a parable beginning, ‘There was a time when all the body's members | Rebelled against the belly.’ In the philosophy of science, analogy has traditionally been regarded as a species of inductive reasoning. Consequently, the problem of the justification of analogical argument is usually understood in terms of the strength of inductive support. The new and unfamiliar is often explained analogically in terms of the familiar and intelligible. And this merely confirms popular usage where the argument from analogy is closely identified with the argument from resemblances. We also know in a common-sense way that analogies, in fact, have no probative force in themselves, they merely fit where they touch, some proving illuminating, others not so. The organic analogy, however, is immensely popular and persuasive. The notion that social entities are essentially like organic systems and capable of being explained by the laws of those systems is one of the commonest features of modern European thinking, a feature perhaps which reached its fullest development with Herbert
Spencer
. What Spencer and many other Victorian organicists tended to ignore, however, was that individual organisms have a centre of consciousness, society does not. And while societies may well be more than the aggregate of their parts, in itself this does not constitute an argument that societies are organisms.
JH 

 
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See
OAU
.

 
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See
OAS
.

 
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Traditional concept used by
Montesquieu
in his account of the influence of climate and physical geography on political structures (‘power should always be despotic in Asia’: The Spirit of the Laws). The idea was echoed in
Marx's
account of the
Asiatic mode of production
and revived by K. Wittfogel in his
Oriental Despotism
(1957). According to Wittfogel, oriental societies depended on massive irrigation which had to be centrally planned. He called the outcome ‘hydraulic society’. Students of
comparative government
now think that such generalizations are too broad to be useful.

 
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From Orient and Oriental as descriptions of the East, etymologically from ‘[the sun] rising’. Brought into recent political vocabulary through
Orientalism
, a study of historical literature and art in Europe by Edward Said . Said argues that imperialist Europe constructed the Orient as the ‘other’ in order that it might define itself. Orientalism thus becomes an ideology that allows the West to centre itself in relation to the East, to create its own myth that legitimized its occupation of countries that were labelled Oriental. This was done, according to Said, by creating a consensus about the ‘other’, the Oriental nations, that encompassed not only the Western world but also the élites of the those nations. Western education, literature, and art became dominant because of the economic and political dominance of the imperialist countries. Power, or the lack thereof, therefore, lies at the heart of the Orientalist discourse and allows the creation of the consensus that is critical to the maintenance of dominance. Said emphasizes that Orientalist discourses are not a thing of the past, and that they imbue the political vocabulary that we use today in our understandings of the nations of the Third World.
SR 

 
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