Abstract
The existing state of the study of political development, with various approaches running largely parallel to each other — rarely intersecting, despite the common goal of understanding how human beings grow in their political capacity to make those who govern them responsive and, possibly, accountable — deserves to be given a fresh look. The corpus of its theoretical knowledge, in the near absence of the basic scholarly scrutiny and criticism, appears to be jumbled up with rival, untested and undiscarded cognitive maps wanting to chart and explain the same terrain. Sometimes its conceptual frameworks, designed to explain the phenomenon, are themselves mistaken for the social and political reality. And sometimes some of its concepts and approaches are mindlessly cross-fertilised with those of other disciplines, without adequate scrutiny of the gains which the added perspectives claim to introduce.
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Notes
See in this connection Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) pp. 32–4. Within the field of political development, probably the only major theoretical controversy was on the correlations between the social and economic factors and stable democracies.
See, for a summary of the controversy, Lee Siegelman, Modernization and the Political System: A Critique of Preliminary Empirical Analysis, (Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1971).
Stephen Toulmin, ‘New Directions in Philosophy of Science’, Encounter, Jan 1971, p. 54.
See also, in this connection, Stephen Toulmin, ‘The Problem of Conceptual Change’ Human Understanding, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) pp. 41–130.
See in this connection A. H. Somjee, ‘Pluralist—Behavioralist Paradigm’, Political Studies, Dec 1971, for a brief discussion of ‘systemocentricity’.
Gabriel Almond, Political Development, Essays in Heuristic Theory, (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1970) p. 4.
Gabriel Almond, The Politics of the Developing Areas, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).
See in this connection Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952).
See also A. H. Somjee, ‘Three Electoral Generations’, Democratic Process in a Developing Society, (London: Macmillan, 1979).
Edward Shils, ‘The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States’, World Politics, 12 (Apr 1960).
Howard W. Wriggins, The Ruler’s Imperative, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
For the role of communication in social mobilisation and political development, see Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958)
Karl W. Deutsch’s seminal work Nationalism and Social Communication, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), and his paper ‘The Development of Communication Theory in Political Science’, History of Political Economy, 7, no. 4. (1975).
J. P. Nettl, Political Mobilization: A Sociological Analysis of Methods and Concepts, (New York: Basic Books, 1967) p. 21.
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© 1982 A. H. Somjee
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Somjee, A.H. (1982). Rethinking and Reformulation of the Problem of Political Development. In: Political Capacity in Developing Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16718-0_4
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