The Study of Political Change

Abstract

We began this book by looking at the first attempts of political scientists to conceptualise the changes that were taking place in what had become known in the post-war years as the Third World. We saw that early attempts to formulate theories of political modernisation and development borrowed liberally from the discipline of sociology, especially from functionalism. The two principal defects of this modernisation approach were first, that they were informed by evolutionary notions of change, being founded upon a naive faith in a smooth transition to ‘modernity’, modernity being the happy condition in which the developed nations of the 1950s and 1960s found themselves. The second principal defect was that modernisation theorists made no attempt to relate their formulations to what would now be regarded as the heart of the condition of underdevelopment, the character of Third World economies. Indeed the economic dimension was simply seen as irrelevant to the study of ‘politics’, a stance that was to a considerable degree informed by the academic division of labour between political science and economics.