Relativism and Universalism in Political Development

Abstract

In the preceding pages we have argued that some of the assumptions of the corpus of theoretical knowledge that are routinely used in order to examine the complexities of political development have, by and large, distorted our understanding of them. Such assumptions have given rise to certain perspectives which have tended to view the processes of political development as either replicating or deviating from Western political experiences or, indeed, holding on, obdurately, to traditional positions of their own. What such assumptions, and the perspectives generated by them, overlooked, as we also pointed out earlier, were the certain basic ‘givens’ of situations in the non-Western world. These ‘givens’ brought to our attention the presence of the diversity of historical and cultural conditions in the non-Western world within which certain borrowed legal and political institutions had to operate. They also indicated the need to identify the different degrees of assimilation, coexistence and conflict between the values and behaviour patterns of traditional societies and those prescribed by borrowed institutions.