Towards a Politics of Modernisation and Development

Abstract

We must begin by going back to those earliest attempts to understand the politics of the newly emerging Third World countries which form the point of theoretical departure for this book. We need to examine the concepts of political modernisation and political development, and the approaches associated with them, which dominated these attempts. But first, in order to understand why such a perspective found favour at all, it must be placed in context. The startling changes in the world that political science sought to describe coincided with changing methodological assumptions within the discipline. Above all must be stressed the extent to which these concepts and approaches did not simply evolve within the parameters of political science but were part of the attempt to make sense of the changing world scene throughout western social science, and particularly amongst sociologists and economists. Political science took up the challenge relatively late and drew much of its intellectual arsenal, including the central concept of modernisation, from its sister disciplines.