ABSTRACT
The unsettled question of the place of political bias in social analysis has been a major source of irritation since Marx, in The German Ideology, implanted the problem of ideological variables and Spencer, in The Study of Sociology, attempted the first full-scale resolution. The employment of functionalism by liberal and conservative ideologies constitutes a proof of the intrinsically political nature of the functionalist canons no less than its uses by extreme political doctrines. The crux of the matter is not simply that functionalism does nothing to prevent the penetration of the sharpest sort of political opposition within its domain, but that this is so for reasons beyond the control of the functionalist method. From an analytical as well as from a historical point of view, functionalism has not prevented sociologists from splitting up into competing political camps, not even among those who claim functional doctrine as a protective covering.
