The Comparative Historical Approach
The question of how to move from static comparison and the construction of typologies to a dynamic method which could account for change over time puzzled theorists of political development from the start. In part this was a question of theorizing the internal logic of the models of development devised, so that the impact upon the whole of change in one dimension or element could be assessed. It also suggested the need to link the theoretical frameworks proposed to the actual historical experience of countries which had gone through a sufficiently protracted process of development to allow meaningful analysis of change over time. These concerns prompted a comparative historical approach which came to focus on common crises arising from a shared 'development syndrome', contrasting patterns of development arising from the varying sequences in which these crises were encountered and resolved, and detailed investigation of particular historical cases. The resulting attempt to develop a 'crises and sequences' model was to be the final phase of the search for a theory of political development and, in the eyes of the main contributors, it was to end in failure. With it, as we shall see, political development theory wrote its own epitaph.
As noted in Chapter 2, a comparative historical approach focused on common crises and contrasting sequences of development began to take shape in workshops held in 1962 and 1963, and figured as a minor theme in the work of leading theorists of political development thereafter. As we saw there, the case for systematic comparison of development over time was addressed directly by Ward and Rustow in their study of Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964a). A further elaboration of the approach came in Verba's conclusion to Political Culture and Political Development (1965b), which identified five specific crises of development (national identity, integration, participation, penetration, and distribution) and examined them in historical context. By addressing his discussion to the 'impact of events upon beliefs' Verba kept himself formally within the terrain marked out by the political culture approach. But the enumeration of significant events themselves – war, revolutions, the establishment of national boundaries, the trajectory of political movements, processes of political incorporation of new social groups, the development of governmental capacity and the distribution of resources throughout society – was such that it pointed towards direct concern with the substantive processes themselves, rather than the beliefs they engendered. A third version figured briefly in comparisons of the political development of Britain, France and Germany in the conclusion to Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Almond and Powell 1966: 314–22). However, a full account of the 'crises and sequences' model did not appear until Binder, Coleman, LaPalombara, Pye, Verba and Weiner jointly published Crises and Sequences in Political Development in 1971. This initial exercise in 'collective theory building in the social sciences' then prompted the Committee on Comparative Politics to sponsor two sets of historical investigations, eventually published as the last two volumes in the Studies in Political Development series: The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), edited by Charles Tilly and Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (1978), edited by Raymond Grew. In the meantime, Almond and others published Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development, a more eclectic collection also oriented towards historical case study (Almond, Flanagan and Mundt 1973). It is to these volumes that I turn, therefore, to evaluate the comparative historical approach within orthodox political development theory, and the final stage of the search for a theory of political development.
According to Pye, the workshop sponsored by the SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the summer of 1963 led to 'the analytical observation that the strains of development involve more than just the tensions of change, for inherent within modern societies are certain fundamental and dynamic contradictions unknown to traditional societies' (Binder et al. 1971: vii, emphasis mine). These fundamental contradictions were never resolved, but persisted even in the advanced industrial societies as problem areas that 'either plague a society or regime or demand the attention of its leaders and aware citizens' (xiii). The comparative historical approach to which this perspective gave rise abandoned the attempt to find a universal framework of analysis valid for all times and all places in favour of a specific focus on modernity, and it sought to identify different paths of development to modernity and to assess their consequences. This marked a significant change of direction, as political development theory turned its attention away from universal problems of change in traditional, transitional and modern societies to a primary concern for the specific tensions and contradictions inherent in modernity itself, and the various possible paths by which modernization could be achieved. The final form taken by this approach, before it was tested to destruction in the closing volumes of the Studies in Political Development series, was the 'crises and sequences' model. This can usefully be contrasted, however, with the somewhat different version offered at an earlier stage in the third volume in the Studies in Political Development series, Ward and Rustow's Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964a). This took as its starting point the challenges of late development and 'defensive modernization' and stressed the need for elites to provide appropriate leadership, but it did not make the sterile and time-consuming mistake of narrowing the issues down to the question of whether there was a single set of crises through which every modernizing state had to pass, and if so, whether the sequence in which the crises were tackled made any difference.
Defensive Modernization, Crisis and Leadership
The conclusion to Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey took as its starting point the claim that 'whatever the uncertainties about beginning dates and particular defining qualities, there are massive differences between those stages of a particular society's history which we crudely characterize as 'traditional' and those which we somewhat hesitantly and self-consciously proclaim to be 'modern' (Ward and Rustow 1964b: 434). However, it did not go on to indulge in lengthy descriptions of polar states of tradition and modernity. In an approach which foreshadowed the later literature on transitions to democracy, it addressed instead the way leaders managed the process of political modernization. In doing so, it identified some given circumstances with which leaders had to cope - geography and geopolitics, the timing of external stimuli to change, and the nature of the traditional heritage – and a set of 'somewhat more flexible problems' on which leaders could 'exercise an appreciably greater degree of discretion and control' (465). These were the exploitability of traditional factors for purposes of modernization, problems of leadership and followership, and a total of eight 'crises' – identity, security, economic development, integration, penetration, participation, output and distribution (see Box 6.1).
As noted in Chapter 2, a comparative historical approach focused on common crises and contrasting sequences of development began to take shape in workshops held in 1962 and 1963, and figured as a minor theme in the work of leading theorists of political development thereafter. As we saw there, the case for systematic comparison of development over time was addressed directly by Ward and Rustow in their study of Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964a). A further elaboration of the approach came in Verba's conclusion to Political Culture and Political Development (1965b), which identified five specific crises of development (national identity, integration, participation, penetration, and distribution) and examined them in historical context. By addressing his discussion to the 'impact of events upon beliefs' Verba kept himself formally within the terrain marked out by the political culture approach. But the enumeration of significant events themselves – war, revolutions, the establishment of national boundaries, the trajectory of political movements, processes of political incorporation of new social groups, the development of governmental capacity and the distribution of resources throughout society – was such that it pointed towards direct concern with the substantive processes themselves, rather than the beliefs they engendered. A third version figured briefly in comparisons of the political development of Britain, France and Germany in the conclusion to Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Almond and Powell 1966: 314–22). However, a full account of the 'crises and sequences' model did not appear until Binder, Coleman, LaPalombara, Pye, Verba and Weiner jointly published Crises and Sequences in Political Development in 1971. This initial exercise in 'collective theory building in the social sciences' then prompted the Committee on Comparative Politics to sponsor two sets of historical investigations, eventually published as the last two volumes in the Studies in Political Development series: The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), edited by Charles Tilly and Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (1978), edited by Raymond Grew. In the meantime, Almond and others published Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development, a more eclectic collection also oriented towards historical case study (Almond, Flanagan and Mundt 1973). It is to these volumes that I turn, therefore, to evaluate the comparative historical approach within orthodox political development theory, and the final stage of the search for a theory of political development.
According to Pye, the workshop sponsored by the SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the summer of 1963 led to 'the analytical observation that the strains of development involve more than just the tensions of change, for inherent within modern societies are certain fundamental and dynamic contradictions unknown to traditional societies' (Binder et al. 1971: vii, emphasis mine). These fundamental contradictions were never resolved, but persisted even in the advanced industrial societies as problem areas that 'either plague a society or regime or demand the attention of its leaders and aware citizens' (xiii). The comparative historical approach to which this perspective gave rise abandoned the attempt to find a universal framework of analysis valid for all times and all places in favour of a specific focus on modernity, and it sought to identify different paths of development to modernity and to assess their consequences. This marked a significant change of direction, as political development theory turned its attention away from universal problems of change in traditional, transitional and modern societies to a primary concern for the specific tensions and contradictions inherent in modernity itself, and the various possible paths by which modernization could be achieved. The final form taken by this approach, before it was tested to destruction in the closing volumes of the Studies in Political Development series, was the 'crises and sequences' model. This can usefully be contrasted, however, with the somewhat different version offered at an earlier stage in the third volume in the Studies in Political Development series, Ward and Rustow's Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964a). This took as its starting point the challenges of late development and 'defensive modernization' and stressed the need for elites to provide appropriate leadership, but it did not make the sterile and time-consuming mistake of narrowing the issues down to the question of whether there was a single set of crises through which every modernizing state had to pass, and if so, whether the sequence in which the crises were tackled made any difference.
Defensive Modernization, Crisis and Leadership
The conclusion to Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey took as its starting point the claim that 'whatever the uncertainties about beginning dates and particular defining qualities, there are massive differences between those stages of a particular society's history which we crudely characterize as 'traditional' and those which we somewhat hesitantly and self-consciously proclaim to be 'modern' (Ward and Rustow 1964b: 434). However, it did not go on to indulge in lengthy descriptions of polar states of tradition and modernity. In an approach which foreshadowed the later literature on transitions to democracy, it addressed instead the way leaders managed the process of political modernization. In doing so, it identified some given circumstances with which leaders had to cope - geography and geopolitics, the timing of external stimuli to change, and the nature of the traditional heritage – and a set of 'somewhat more flexible problems' on which leaders could 'exercise an appreciably greater degree of discretion and control' (465). These were the exploitability of traditional factors for purposes of modernization, problems of leadership and followership, and a total of eight 'crises' – identity, security, economic development, integration, penetration, participation, output and distribution (see Box 6.1).
Box 6.1 Ward and Rustow's 'ten crucial categories' for political modernization
|
(A)
(1) (2) (3) (B) (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) |
those which are set or predetermined in such a manner as to be wholly or largely beyond the control of the leaders of the modernizing society:
geopolitical problems problems of timing of external stimuli for change problems relating to the nature of a society's traditional heritage those which are amenable to some significant degree of influence or control by leaders the exploitability of traditional institutions, attitudes, and behavior patterns for modernizing purposes the crisis of identity the crisis of security problems of leadership and followership the crisis of economic development problems of popular relationship to the political process: (a) the crisis of integration (b) the crisis of penetration (c) the crisis of participation the crisis of output and distribution |
Source: Ward and Rustow 1964b: 465-6.
Ward and Rustow's study of Japan and Turkey constitutes, then, the first systematic use of the concept of 'crises of development' for the purpose of sustained comparative historical analysis. However, as noted above, the 'crises' themselves were not placed at the centre of the analysis. The point of departure in each case was a conscious decision on the part of leaders to commit themselves and their country to a process of defensive modernization. And in each case, it was possible in the first place because of the location of each country on the periphery of the main centres of Western imperialism – a location close enough to the centre of Western imperialist activity to spark off a desire to seek protection from it, but just sufficiently on the margins of it to avoid complete subordination, and allow the effort at defensive modernization to succeed (437–40). In what followed, the governing concept was leadership rather than crisis, and the key idea was that where the set of 'somewhat more flexible problems' were concerned, leadership mattered:
Leaders everywhere must work with the materials presented to them by the existing conditions of their society and people. The limits within which they can act effectively and produce significant social changes are thus very seriously conditioned by the society's heritage. Even so, however, this seems to leave an appreciable area wherein the play of leadership is important and where the factors involved are more subject to influence or control than are the aspects of geography, timing, and previous historical experiences which have just been discussed (444).
In addressing the possible comparative scope of their approach, Ward and Rustow noted some significant differences between the situation of Japan and Turkey at the time when their leaders embarked upon a conscious programme of modernization, and the circumstances of contemporary modernizing societies. These were the much greater level of constraint imposed by 'uncontrolled external forces' in the modern period, the impact of colonial status, and the availability of a range of models – including the Russian Communist model, the emerging Chinese Communist model, and the model of Japan itself. Finally, they posed the question of whether their model should be restricted to the case of late-developing societies, or whether it might apply, with amendment where necessary, to 'the main problems encountered at early stages of history by the major Western societies' (467–8).
This utilization of the concept of crisis as an aid to comparative historical analysis within a process-oriented model which centred upon leadership within constraints remained marginal to the larger effort to develop a 'crises and sequences' model. In retrospect, this may have been unfortunate. As it was, however, the last great effort of political development theory was aimed at the identification of the crises through which all modernizing states must pass, and the implications of the sequence in which those crises were faced.
Crises and Sequences in Political Development
The central chapters of Crisis and Sequences in Political Development set out the content of the 'development syndrome', unique to the process of modernization and the condition of modernity, identified five crises of development, and considered each in turn. The collection was completed by an essay on sequences and development contributed by Verba, originally drafted as an internal memorandum to the other authors. This created a number of difficulties by questioning the main theoretical outlines of the rest of the collection.
Coleman's discussion of the development syndrome, which underpinned the remaining chapters in a way that Binder's highly idiosyncratic introduction signally failed to do, was an amplification of the first version, set out in Education and Political Development. Coleman rejected historical and typological approaches based upon Western European history since the sixteenth century or upon ideas of tradition and modernity in favour of an evolutionary perspective, and described the political development process as
that open-ended increase in the capacity of political man to initiate and institutionalize new structures, and supporting cultures, to cope with or resolve problems, to absorb and adapt to continuous change, and to strive purposively and creatively for the attainment of societal goals (Coleman 1971: 73).
As outlined in Chapter 5 (pp. 120-22), it consisted of 'a continuous interaction among the processes of structural differentiation, the imperatives of equality, and the integrative, responsive and adaptive capacity of a political system' (Coleman 1971: 74), the interaction between them constituting the 'development syndrome'. Structural differentiation was defined as 'the process of progressive separation and specialization of roles, institutional spheres, and associations in societies undergoing modernization (75); equality, introduced on the grounds that 'egalitarianism pervades all aspects of modern critical life and culture and all forms of modern political ideology' (76–7), was reduced to three specific items: national citizenship, a universalistic legal order, and achievement norms; and capacity denoted the ability of the government to respond to the challenges thrown up by structural differentiation and the drive for equality:
It is a capacity not only to overcome the divisions and manage the tensions created by increased differentiation, but to respond to or contain the participatory and distributive demands generated by the imperatives of equality. It is also a capacity to innovate and to manage continuous change (78–9).
At its core, as before, was the perception that modernization, driven by the 'imperatives of equality,' created a political and organizational challenge to which the government must respond. Its three elements were linked by a systemic logic, defined in terms with echoed the formulation offered in Education and Political Development, but recast to include the new terminology of the crises of development, with political development now described as the acquisition of
a consciously sought, and a qualitatively new and enhanced political capacity as manifested in the successful institutionalization of (1) new patterns of integration and penetration regulating and containing the tensions and conflicts produced by increased differentiation, and (2) new patterns of participation and resource distribution adequately responsive to the demands generated by the imperatives of equality. The acquisition of such a performance capacity is, in turn, a decisive factor in the resolution of the problems of identity and legitimacy (74–5: compare Coleman 1965b: 15).
Extending the brief analysis offered earlier in relation to the issue of education, Coleman now diagnosed the relations between these various elements in the politics of developing countries as dysfunctional. The process of differentiation was typically compounded or composite (in other words, marked by intensify primordial cleavages exacerbated by subsystem fragmentation) and uneven, resulting in high integrative loads (extreme pressure upon the State and governing elites). The 'pervasive spread of the egalitarian ethos' was problematic, as it created excessive demands, activated and reinforced divisive primordial ties, and heightened the revolutionary potential of disaffected groups with limited career opportunities. Coleman argued, in terms familiar from previous accounts, that demands 'tend to be thrust upon the polity in an unrestrained, intermittent, unpredictable and totalistic manner', and 'the introduction of universal suffrage and the concept of the participant citizen in unintegrated pluralist societies has the perverse effect of politicizing – thereby freezing and strengthening – existing parochialisms' (95-6). Finally he returned to a key passage in Education and Political Development (Coleman 1965f: 539) with the argument that the modernizing capacity required to overcome these problems was not just a question of bureaucratic efficiency, but also required society itself to 'absorb, deflect, or respond to the wide range of demands generated in a modernizing country and thereby minimize or obviate explicit government involvement'. In order to achieve this, it required 'a type of political culture of participation that operates to restrain, moderate, or postpone demands or in other ways reduce the decisional load upon formal administrative structures' (Coleman 1971: 99).
Despite the delay in publication of Crises and Sequences in Political Development until 1971, the 'development syndrome' which underpinned the notion of 'crises and sequences of development' reiterated, extended and generalized in its central arguments the version first published in 1965. In terms of substantive content, it identified a specifically modern crisis born of pressure for equality and expressed in an increased demand for participation: the driving forces behind it, the 'imperatives of equality' which called for increases in political and economic participation, provided the real content which linked structural differentiation on one hand and the need for increased government capacity on the other. And the perspective taken, consistent as always with the emphases of the revisionist theory of democracy, was that such pressure represented a threat to elite control which had to be neutralized and contained. While the 'five crises' approach was a reworking of ideas that had been central to the effort to build a theory of political development from the beginning, then, it focused directly on the need for the building of state capacity to withstand the pressures of mass participation. In doing so, it built much more upon the principal elements of the doctrine for political development set out in the previous chapter than the functional and cultural approaches had done. And as we shall see when we turn to the detail of the five crises themselves, it addressed directly, in a way that previous approaches had not, the specific challenges thrown up for dominant classes and governing elites in capitalist societies. Each 'crisis', in fact, reflected a different aspect of the general problem of ensuring the reproduction of capitalist society by securing the process of accumulation itself and winning legitimacy for it in the eyes of the propertyless majority who sustained it. In other words, the 'imperatives of equality' were none other than the general imperatives of capitalism. In a contrast to which I shall return below, Ward and Rustow, with their focus on defensive modernization as a response to Western imperialism, could be said to have focused on the specific form taken by capitalist modernization in countries peripheral to the capitalist core.
The Five Crises
Against the background of the 'development syndrome' set out above the joint authors of Crises and Sequences in Political Development explored five crises – of identity, legitimacy, participation, penetration and distribution – in turn. Each was anchored in a frankly elitist perspective, and reproduced the main terms of the doctrine for political development.
Identity and legitimacy were addressed by Pye in successive chapters, in relation to 'the differences between rulers and masses', and the need for mutually compatible orientations between citizens and leaders. Leaders 'must view politics from a significantly different perspective from those who remain primarily observers or only participating citizens', as 'at the heart of the problem of elite political culture and development is the question of the qualities necessary for effective political leadership in the formulation and execution of national policies' (Pye 1971a:103). There followed a familiar list of obstacles to this desired state of affairs in developing societies: 'the absence of a widely shared understanding as to what should be the generally expected limits and potentialities of political action', uncertainty and confusion over what should be the persisting role of traditional values and concepts in changing societies', 'a general tendency to over-emphasize the value of words and ideologies and to discount pragmatic considerations', and 'the prevailing widespread uncertainty about how existing roles in the political system can be effectively utilized' (106–10). Progress depended upon 'clarifying both individual and collective feelings of identity and the establishment of more effective authority that will have all the potency of acknowledged legitimacy' (110). In other words, the core issue in the crises of identity and legitimacy was the establishment of an appropriate common identity, and of elite autonomy and authority over the masses. Weiner and La Palombara similarly approached the crises of participation, penetration and distribution within the framework of elite theory. Weiner defined participation as
any voluntary action, successful or unsuccessful, organized or unorganized, episodic or continuous, employing legitimate or illegitimate methods intended to influence the choice of public policies, the administration of public affairs, or the choice of political leaders at any level of the government, local, or national (Weiner 1971:164).
The definition emphasised action (rather than attitude or feelings) which was voluntary and which assumed that the citizen had a choice in the selection of public officials. In line with the elite perspective, a participation crisis was defined as 'a conflict that occurs when the governing elite views the demands or behavior of individuals and groups seeking to participate in the political system as illegitimate' (187). It was resolved when there was 'a new agreement among governing elites, contending elites and political participants on the legitimacy of demands and the value of certain institutional procedures created to meet the demands' (194). LaPalombara, writing on penetration and distribution, commented that 'we have ... conceptualized the developmental crises as involving largely elite interactions, elite aspirations, elite initiatives, and elite responses to signals from the mass environment' (LaPalombara 1971b: 272–3). He saw a crisis as facing elites with an institutional challenge:
In the broadest sense al crises, conceived as sharp breaks with traditional processes, challenge the capability of an existing governing elite, and indeed such challenges in each of the crisis areas we discuss place a new place pressure on the elite to modify old institutions and/or to create new ones (LaPalombara 1971a: 205).
Thus excessive crisis loads in the developing countries involved 'an imbalance between demands on governing elites on the one hand and the capacity or capability of elites to respond to such demands with new or modified policies and organizations on the other' (217). Within this elite theory framework, penetration was defined as 'conformance to public policy enunciated by central government authority', or, for any political elite, 'whether they can get what they want from people over whom they seek to exercise power' (208–9). Finally, distribution concerned situations where 'the political elite take a hand to increase the material goods available to a society or redistribute such goods as may be available at any given time' (LaPalombara 1971b: 236). This involved both finding the means of producing more of the material things that are valued, and changing the bases upon which valued objects are distributed among the members of society. In other words, LaPalombara's 'distribution' crisis involved production (or output in the Ward/Rustow version) as well as distribution.
Identity
Pye identified four fundamental forms of identity crisis, related to territory, class, ethnicity, and social change. These concerned i) the relationship of geographical space to nationalist sentiments; ii) class divisions that might preclude effective national unity; iii) conflict between ethnic or other subnational identifications and commitments to a common national identity; and iv) the psychological consequences of rapid social change and ambivalent feelings towards outsiders (Pye 1971a: 111-12). The question of whether a profound identification of the rule with their rulers and with a system of rule would develop depended on the character of elite orientations, and Pye concluded with a typology in which five types of elite culture were identified: expanding, exclusive, closed, parochial, and synthetic. The expanding elite culture (Britain, the United States, Japan and Turkey) was the ideal, in which the elite 'is prepared to share its standards and norms with the mass culture', and 'insists that all members of the policy can have a meaningful place within the system if they accept the essential spirit of the elite culture' (124–5). And exclusive elite culture (Burma, Vietnam, Pakistan), in contrast, sought to provide a common basis of national identity, but did so by excluding significant minority elements of the population. A closed elite culture (South Africa Rhodesia) upheld two separate identities in the nation, related to elite and mass culture respectively. A parochial elite culture (Ceylon, Nationalist China) was one which aggressively upheld traditional values which excluded more modernized minority elements. Finally, a synthetic culture was one constructed on the basis of institutions introduced by foreign rule (Malaysia). At the limit, as in the Belgium Congo, there was no active elite culture at all and the depth of the crisis was severe.
Legitimacy
Pye's investigation of identity in terms of elite culture and elite-mass relations led him to stress 'the crucial role of leadership in resolving identity problems and creating the basis for national unity' and 'the critical place of authority in politics' (133–4). In this context the issue of legitimacy concerned 'the proper and accepted division of authority among various political structures capable of wielding power' (Pye: 1971b: 135). While the other four crises might each give rise to issues of legitimacy, a legitimacy crisis proper was defined as 'a breakdown in the constitutional structure and performance of government that arises out of differences over the proper nature of authority for the system' (136). Such crises were particularly likely in the course of political development as people who had become aware of the existence of alternative forms of government began to question their own. There were four principal sources of crises of legitimacy in developing societies: conflicting or inadequate bases for claiming authority; excessive and uninstitutionalized competition for power; the basing of claims to authority on unacceptable readings of history or faulty predictions of future developments; and inappropriate socialization and feelings about authority among the people which were not functional for the efforts of leaders (138). The twin processes of differentiation and pressure for equality called traditional claims for authority into question, particularly in new states where 'the old forms of authority have lost their basis for effectively structuring life' (139). Here Pye followed Huntington in arguing that the most effective response was the establishment of a rational, secular state authority based upon law:
Before there can be a question of legitimacy and authority there must be the realities of power; and the sorrow of many developing countries is that they have no institutions capable of directing and managing all the tasks that must be accomplished if these countries are to achieve their goals of modernization (141).
Political competition might lead to raw power struggles when there were no stable institutions for channelling and ordering politics. The lack of authority was then followed by the breakdown of elite unity, the condition identified by Huntington as 'praetorianism'. Embattled leaders then appealed to historical precedents (as in Europe in the past) and to ideologies promising bright futures (as in the contemporary developing world), but found their authority undermined when precedents were questioned or promises were not realized. But the last and 'possibly most fundamental' cause of legitimacy crisis, distinctive to rapidly changing societies, was 'the inappropriate ways in which people in a society have been taught about the nature of authority' (144; emphasis mine). In cases where the appropriate lessons had not been learned, citizens expected their leaders to be capable of resolving all problems, and leaders expected citizens to respect their authority without question or justification. As a result, the former tended to become cynical, and the latter arbitrary in the exercise of power.
One element of the solution to crises of legitimacy, regardless of the immediate cause, was dynamic leadership. Despite the attention devoted to charismatic leadership, the key issues here were choice and decision-making (149). Leaders faced three basic dilemmas in seeking to meet the challenge of accommodating their countries to the modern world: firmness versus accommodation, preserving versus rejecting the past; and satisfaction versus sacrifice. The first concern the response to foreign pressures, the second the broader attitude towards national traditions, and the third the 'clash between the requirement that leadership respond to the desires and satisfactions of a people while at times compelling them to make sacrifices for goals unrelated to their immediate wishes' (154). Here a fund of legitimacy was required to enable the government to bridge the gap between the demand it made on society's resources and its ability to respond to social demands, arising from the fact that 'there is always the need for some additional resources to fulfil the tasks of maintaining and developing the political system as a more or less independent system' (154). Particularly in cases where non-political socialization bred feelings of cynicism and mistrust, there was a constant danger of political alienation. To be alleviated, this required satisfactory performance in the areas of participation, penetration and distribution.
Participation
Weiner ascribed pressures for increased participation to social mobilization, changes in social stratification, elite activity (whether the role of the intelligensia or intra-elite conflict), and extensions to the scope of governmental output and institutional channels for participation. The character of political participation would depend upon the precise combination of factors involved, as well as the timing of its expansion (Weiner 1971: 174-5). Its growth was examined in relation to four other kinds of changes: the development of an institutional framework for participation; the growth of central authority in relation to politically autonomous local authority; the expansion, autonomy and reach of the bureaucracy; and the growth of a sense of national identity. The prospects for appropriate and durable political institutions were improved if a sense of national identity was established before particular ethnic or other groups became politically active; if such institutions were created as a result of popular demands rather than in advance of them, and were preceded by the weakening of the landed elite by land reform and the centralization of authority in a national bureaucracy; and if that bureaucracy developed along with parties, voluntary associations and representative institutions, and became politically responsive. Within this framework, Weiner was primarily concerned with the expansion of opportunities for participation in order to admit new or hitherto excluded social classes. When he turned to the issue of sequence, he suggested that 'the order in which certain social groups began to participate in political life has had systemic consequences for the development of democracy or for the development of stable and legitimate authority' (183). Much depended upon the order in which social classes were brought into politics, the distribution of influence between them, and the constraints imposed on policy-makers by large-scale political participation.
Penetration
While Weiner was broadly concerned with relations between classes and their incorporation into politics, LaPalombara was concerned with relations between governing elites and citizens, and with the balance in economic development between production and distribution: in other words with the sharing of resources between accumulation (investment for future growth) and immediate consumption. There were two dimensions to penetration, as compliance may be coerced (as with 'the capability of the central government to achieve penetration regardless of what may be the views, desires, attitudes, or predispositions of those who are the objects of governmental policy') or voluntary (as with 'the existing or modified ability and predisposition of the objects of policy to receive information regarding policy accurately and to wish to conform to such policies voluntarily'), and the choice between strategies therefore brought issues of legitimacy into play (LaPalombara 1971a: 209). In turn, the need for the government to extend the scope of its penetration of society was intimately connected to new demands in the area of 'distribution' (or, as we have seen, production, distribution and re-distribution).
Distribution
LaPalombara conceptualized the shift from tradition to modernity as involving the transition from a system of distribution based upon low levels of technology and constant levels of production to one based upon higher levels of technology and increasing levels of production. This shift required changes in the mentality and behaviour of elites and masses alike, and massive investment in education. It also required resistance to overwhelming pressures from the domestic and international environments, particularly in avoiding mistaken strategies of development (in particular, LaPalombara questioned the rationality of the pursuit of industrialization at the expense of agriculture), and in ensuring that resources went into investment for expansion in the longer term rather than into immediate consumption. In this context, developing countries faced pressures far greater than the advanced countries had in their time, as a consequence of the attraction of models of industrial development elsewhere, the consensus that the state and the public sector should play a leading role in development, and the appeal of socialism.
The integration and further development of the 'five crises' model was hampered by the fact that having identified their five crises, their authors were unable to discern either the logic behind them or the connections between them. There were several loose ends, as a result, in the 'crises and sequences' model. The ambiguity in Pye's brief exposition as to whether the crises were better seen as once-and-for-all events (without which the idea of sequences made little sense), or as continuing problem areas remained unresolved. In addition, Coleman's account of the development syndrome initially identified six key problem areas, including integration alongside the five to which reference was made in the rest of the book; and only four of them – integration, penetration, participation and distribution – were fully worked into his threefold conceptualization of political development. Finally, fundamental doubts regarding the validity of the crisis and sequences model overall were raised by Verba, in his concluding chapter to the collection. Verba commented that 'the relationship between the notions of equality, capacity and differentiation of the one hand and the five crises of development on the other is not completely clear' (Verba 1971: 291, ft. 7). Stating that he preferred the term 'problem area' to crisis, he commented that while the five problem areas identified seemed to be important in relation to government capacity to make decisions, 'I can find no clear logical structure among them nor any warrant for considering the list exhaustive' (299). In a view of this assessment, it is essential to treat the first exposition of the 'crises and sequences' model as somewhat tentative, and to turn to the assessments provided by Tilly and Grew for a final verdict. Before doing so, however, we may examine briefly the intervening volume produced by Almond, Flanagan and Mundt.
Crisis, Choice and Change
In the period in which Tilly and Grew were wrestling with the 'crises and sequences' model, similar themes were addressed by Almond, Flanagan and Mundt and other collaborators in a collection of comparative essays entitled Crisis, Choice and Change (1973). This volume proposed an 'eclectic' model which combined the comparative historical approach with a number of other perspectives. It offered seven historical case studies (two on Britain, and one each on France, Germany, India, Japan and Mexico) along with two introductory theoretical chapters, a lengthy theoretical conclusion, and three technical appendices. It was described by one editor as the product of intensive interaction between 'area specialists who met almost weekly for over two years in an effort to generate a common theoretical and methodological approach' (Flanagan 1973: 44). The ultimate goal of the enterprise – as it had been from the beginning – was the development of standardized quantitative indexes, the application of statistical techniques, and the development of sophisticated mathematical models, but it was still a distant one (45). At the outset, Almond recalled early efforts to build structural-functional theories, and the subsequent emergence of 'a more historical, longitudinal thrust' leading to 'system development theory'. Identifying the common environmental challenges of state-building, nation-building, participation and welfare, he offered the following summary:
This system development theory took the form of the assertion that the relationships in contemporary political systems between central and local political organs, the homogeneity and heterogeneity of the political culture, the structure of the party and interest-group systems, the characteristics of the bureaucracy, and the kinds of public policies produced by these political systems, could be explained in part by the particular ways in which these common environmental challenges had affected the political system historically – the order in which they were experienced, their magnitude and intensity, their separate or simultaneous incidence, and the ways in which elite groups in these political systems responded to these challenges (Almond 1973: 4).
These approaches and related debates, according to Almond, raised fundamental problems of 'causality, choice and determinacy in political development' (4). System-functional theories and theories of social mobilization based upon aggregate statistics were over-deterministic, and did not provide causal explanations. These weaknesses could be remedied by incorporating insights from two further bodies of theory:
The first, coming from economic theory and from psychological learning theory, uses rational-choice models and assumptions in explaining the structural and developmental patterns of political systems; and the second, stemming from many sources including personality theory and historical insight, stresses the unusual quality of individual political leaders or the cultural patterns of political elites and groups (14).
In view of the partial merits of these various approaches, Almond proposed to draw in an eclectic manner on system-functional theory, social mobilization theory, rational choice (game and coalition) theory and leadership (decision-making, cultural and elite) theory to produce the 'system development' approach. Insights from these theories were to be applied to selected historical episodes, with the goal being 'to develop and try out a framework of explanation that would enable us to compare and contrast the causes and consequences of different kinds of historical sequences' (23). Almond and his collaborators sought to identify crises and the mismatch they induced between political demands and output from the government, then to account for the process of coalition-building and political choices by which change came about. Coalition formation could be examined through a mode of rational-choice analysis which identified preferred and possible winning coalitions, but there remained a role within the process for personality and leadership variables to affect the outcome. As explained in the concluding chapter, the method was to identify and order logically possible coalitions within given structural constraints, while the leadership variable was handled impressionistically and treated as a residual (Almond and Mundt 1973: 620-1). The end product, considered further in the following chapter, was a form of analysis in which structural variables formed part but not the whole of explanations: 'Although the macro-variables of class structure give us a part of the explanation, it would seem that the micro-variables of coalition options and human choices had considerable independent causal value' (642–3).
The contributors to Crisis, Choice and Change had concerns similar to those shared by the architects of the 'five crises' approach. But in contrast to the proponents of the 'five crises' approach they focused on specific historical processes of change, and sought to address them by bringing a number of different perspectives to bear within a single coherent analytical narrative. It is worth noting that they shared the emphasis placed by Ward and Rustow and by Pye on leadership, and with Ward and Rustow on choices within structural constraints. At the same time, their range of case studies reflected the fact that they shared with the proponents of the 'five crises' approach a focus on the general problem of modernization rather than on the specific case of late-developing countries which attracted the attention of Ward and Rustow.
Historical Investigations
While Almond and his collaborators were occupied with their eclectic model, the efforts of the Committee on Comparative Politics to further their understanding of political development moved into a final phase with the commissioning of two volumes of historical studies: The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975a), edited by Charles Tilly, and Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (1978a), edited by Raymond Grew. As the titles suggest, the two volumes had an almost exclusively European focus, the exception being a single brief essay on the United States in the second. These were to be the final volumes in the Studies in Political Development series, and the brief forewords which Pye contributed to each gave evidence of both the significance attached to the shift to historical studies of developed countries, and the unsatisfactory nature of the outcome. His foreword to Tilly collection identified the project as 'the most generously endowed enterprise in the history of the Committee on Comparative Politics', and described both the 'return to Europe' and the 'attempt to collaborate with historians' as new departures for the series. On the outcome of the project he reported that
One of the purposes of the study ... was to discover the extent to which a review of state–building in Europe could usefully inform contemporary efforts at advancing both the practice and the theories of political development. It is, therefore, noteworthy that in many ways the authors highlight the fact that the circumstances of state-building in Europe were quite different from the situation which pertains today in the new states and thus great care must be exercised in generalizing from the past to the present (Tilly 1975a: x).
In conclusion Pye made a brave show of concealing the disappointment prompted by the knowledge that the Committee had spent a fortune (not least in funding 'a delightful a few days' at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio) to have cold water poured upon its ideas. He praised the contributors for having 'impressively demonstrated the complexity of their subjects', noted that 'scholars will no doubt differ in their interpretations of the matters dealt with this book, as have the members of the Committee', and offered the pious assurance that 'it is hoped that the ensuing dialogue will advance knowledge, which has been the sole purpose of the Committee (x-xi).
Three years later, he introduced what was announced as the ninth and final volume of Studies in Political Development, and was once again obliged to put a brave face on what had proved an uneasy collaboration. He noted that for reasons which seemed good at the time the collaborators in the project had discounted the problems associated with the 'inherent tension between the historian's sensitivity to the unique' and 'the commitment of political science theorists to seek universal patterns that can only be found at a level of obstruction at which the particular is no longer sovereign' (Grew 1978a: v). He kept his own counsel as to whether that initial leap of faith had proved a wise one, but acknowledged that the assembled historians had rejected the theoretical framework offered to them in favour of 'good judgement', and opined that the reader would 'find in this book new insights as well as the pleasure of agreeing or disagreeing with more authorities about the history of more countries that in any other recent work on European and American societies'. And in a conclusion which again combined faint praise with a remarkably unenthusiastic show of support for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he declared the Committee to be 'pleased that its theoretical concepts were in no case automatically and unthinkingly applied, but that they challenged the authors and led to new creative formulations about the histories of countries we all thought we knew the best', and congratulated the authors for 'exhibiting both competence within their specializations and good judgement in combining of facts and concepts' (vii). The series that Pye opened with a bang 13 years earlier, proposing to apply new concepts to novel situations, contribute to the development of a theory for comparative politics, and facilitate the quest of leaders in the new states for democratic development (Pye and Verba 1965: ix) ended with a whimper.
The tone of Pye's prefatory comments in each case, evidence in itself that all was not well with this final phase of the political development project, was simply explained by the response reported by Tilly and Grew to the agenda placed before them. Tilly declared that he had decided not to ask his collaborators to write 'commentaries on some particular set of theories concerning political change' as it would risk 'fixing the inquiry on invalid schemes, on problems of terminology, on issues which missed the substance of the phenomena we were trying to understand'. As a result, 'each participant received the invitation to write about his subject as best he knew how, so long as the treatment was synthetic and comparative' (Tilly 1975b: 6-7). Grew announced the study as an experiment in the application of some of the ideas of the SSRC's Committee on Comparative Politics, but noted that the categories had not always been used in the ways the committee intended, and that the underlying theory had been treated as a very loose framework indeed: his collaborators 'recognized that they were not dealing with anything so grand an integrated social scientific theory, tightly woven with prescribed regularities and predicted causes'; the crisis were 'really five categories of crucial social and political relationships that invite discussion of who shares in what way in what aspects of politics at any given time'; and therefore the authors had written for the most part 'as if the Committee's aim had merely been to provide a framework for comparative analysis of European political history' (Grew 1978b: 8-9).
These positions entailed an explicit rejection of many of the ideas addressed in Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Binder et al. 1971) and the broader literature Tilly rejected approaches which 'caricatured the Western experience by assuming a fairly continuous rationalization of government, broadening of political participation, pacification of the masses, and so on (Tilly 1975b: 4), and argued that nothing could be more detrimental to an understanding of the history of state-making than 'the old liberal conception of European history as the gradual creation and extension of liberal rights' (37), as the builders of states had for a long time 'worked to stamp out or absorb existing rights, not to extend them'. In sum, he concluded that the relevant processes of political change, 'changes in stateness, patterns of mobilization, acquisitions and losses of political rights – do not fit together in any single pattern we could confidently call "political development" (38).
Grew noted in that 'the interpretations of development in this volume tend quite consistently to view it has less purposeful, its changes less marked, its stabilities less certain than as usual in the literature on development' (Grew 1978b: 34, ft. 41). He reported that the contributing historians were sceptical of the Committee's idea that political change had a direction towards greater equality, capacity and differentiation; they had made little use of these categories, and 'ha[d] not found the empirical measures of them we want to imagined' (9); they found the direction of historical development further obscured by the fact that while similar challenges might evoke different responses, different challenges might just as well be met by similar responses; they lamented the lack of a category of crises of sovereignty; and they found the specified crises threw little light on the connections between politics on the one hand, and its environment on the other, in terms of geography, economic and military competition, the effects of foreign influences, the role of ideas, social structure, economic organization and culture. Further to this, the concept of political crisis itself caused the greatest difficulty. Whether it was seen as any serious threat to the functioning of a political regime, as an important and in some way irreversible change in the way politics worked, or, (considering the set of five crises), as a typology of the problems governments faced, serious problems arose. The first provided no means of telling when an apparent crisis was critical to the process of development; the second overlooked the possibility that critical changes in a political system could sometimes use old institutions without altering them; and the third, replacing the idea of crisis with that of problem area, 'weaken[ed] the model of development in favor of a set of categories descriptive of what governments do' (12). Even if all three definitions were used as seemed appropriate, there was no way of distinguishing major crises from minor ones. In a wry comment on the overall project, Grew concluded that 'the quantitative indicators we do not have in forms that facilitate comparison will provide analytical power only when combined with theories not yet elaborated' (12). As they consequence of all these difficulties, he reported that 'the concept of "crises" being "resolved" has faded: one is merely looking at problems that at a given time are (or seem) more pressing' (14).
Once the idea of a passing crisis was replaced with the alternative idea of a recurring problem or a permanent problem area, it was impossible to speak of a sequence. Tilly reported of his team of historians that 'none of us thinks the European experience will repeat itself as a set of events or sequences' (Tilly 1975b: 17), and called for an approach based upon generalizations about recurrent relationships. If attention was to be directed to European history in such an effort, he suggested, it should focus on the degree of conflict surrounding the accumulation of state power, the characteristic coalitions between state leaders and social classes, the record of resistance to 'the extraction of scarce resources from a reluctant population' (24), and the 'powerful reciprocal relationship between the expansion of capitalism and the growth of state power' (30). Grew similarly asked whether there was for each nation a particular sequence of the five crises which could be said to describe its political development, and responded that 'the answer of the ten essays that follow is unanimous: there is not' (Grew 1978b: 28). He suggested that the 'development syndrome' should be recast in terms of relationships between the five crises themselves, and that the analysis should be 'more firmly extended to include the relationship between a particular syndrome and class structure, the economy, political ideologies, and bureaucratic, corporate, and military institutions' (34). Each editor, in sum, rejected the crisis model as proposed and the underlying vision of the process of political development, and called instead for an examination of the relationships between the 'crises' and other major aspects of the societies in question.
As if this combined assault were not enough, Tilly's conclusion to the 1975 volume launched a savage critical onslaught on the whole body of 'political development' literature, whether produced under the auspices of the Committee on Comparative Politics or not, pointed to major omissions in its approach which placed it beyond repair, and committed the bold heresy of arguing that 'dependency theory' was closer to the facts as discovered through the analysis of state-making in Europe. He began with a bleak assessment of progress to date:
Theorists of political development have not reached consensus on any single criterion: efficiency, strength, representative institutions, or anything else. Nor have political analysts created anything remotely resembling a standard accounting scheme – although many an individual has proposed one general vocabulary or another. We should hardly be surprised, then, at the absence of generally accepted theories or well-verified empirical generalizations (Tilly 1975c: 604).
He then dismissed 'sequence and stage' theories, including the 'five crises' model (treated here as a 'six crises' model, within 'integration' still included), remarking that he and his collaborators had made no attempt to match the crises with his historical data, and had rejected the historical comparisons involved in view of their unanimity on 'the immense conflict, uncertainty and failure that attended the building of national states everywhere in Europe – including England (610). Citing Verba's general assessment 'neither the crises, nor the sequences, nor the connections among them, have been reliably identified', he added tersely, I concur' (611), and rejected 'developmental' and 'functional' approaches wholesale in favour of historical theories which 'account for the characteristics of any particular government through its individual relationship to some historical transformation affecting the world as a whole' (624). He then condemned political development theory for moving away from the individual state as a basic unit of analysis while remaining vague as to what replaced it, and neglecting major world-historical processes of change.
The central charge levelled by Tilly at the political development literature was that its concentration on the individual unit, whether nation, political system, society or state, had drawn attention away from the international structures of power within which development took place. He argued that the literature provided 'impressively little discussion of the way the structure of world markets, the operation of economic imperialism, and the characteristics of the international state system affect the patterns of political change within countries in different parts of the world' (620). This led him to suggest that 'something specific about the analysis of political development appear[ed] to have blocked the effective introduction of the proper international variables into existing developmental models'; this 'something', he felt, was 'the implicit policy aims of the models', the possibility that 'the incentive to offer guidelines for the present and the future has encouraged the analysts to concentrate on the single national states and on the decisions within the reach of its managers' (620). Hence, perhaps, its neglect of national and international structures of power, along with 'the view from below', and 'the paths to alternatives the managers do not desire' (621).
Tilly's critique identified the ideological project at the heart of the political development literature, pinpointing the tension between the search for a 'theory of political development' on the one hand, and the aspiration to produce a 'doctrine for political development' on the other. It crossed a boundary which the political development theorists had been determined to police at all costs, and committed the ultimate heresy of proposing that important lessons could be learned from the literature on dependency and exploitation (Box 6.1).
Box 6.2 Lessons from the literature of dependency and exploitation
What, then, do we have to learn from the literature of dependency and exploitation? First, the recognition of the nature of the international structure of power, and the relations of particular countries to that structure, account for a major part of the form, change, and variation of the national economic lives of poor countries; there is no obvious reason why that should be less true of political life. Second, the hypotheses of close (but imperfect) interdependence between the international structures of economic and political power, the changes of both being important determinants of the process called state-making. Third, the argument that the class structure of a particular state depends to a large degree on the relations of each major class to the international organization of production of (sic) distribution, and strongly affects the form of government within the state. Fourth, the more specific historical hypothesis of the interdependence of a state system forming and growing up in Europe, spreading from there under the promotion and coercion of the European states, eventually encompassing the entire world: according to dependency theory, the process began with the combinations of territory and population open, opportunities for territorial expansion available, multiple political forms feasible, and so on, but it ended with a closed situation: great restraints on the territory, population, governmental form, external relations and development policies of the new member states.
Source: Tilly 1975c: 630-1.
What, then, do we have to learn from the literature of dependency and exploitation? First, the recognition of the nature of the international structure of power, and the relations of particular countries to that structure, account for a major part of the form, change, and variation of the national economic lives of poor countries; there is no obvious reason why that should be less true of political life. Second, the hypotheses of close (but imperfect) interdependence between the international structures of economic and political power, the changes of both being important determinants of the process called state-making. Third, the argument that the class structure of a particular state depends to a large degree on the relations of each major class to the international organization of production of (sic) distribution, and strongly affects the form of government within the state. Fourth, the more specific historical hypothesis of the interdependence of a state system forming and growing up in Europe, spreading from there under the promotion and coercion of the European states, eventually encompassing the entire world: according to dependency theory, the process began with the combinations of territory and population open, opportunities for territorial expansion available, multiple political forms feasible, and so on, but it ended with a closed situation: great restraints on the territory, population, governmental form, external relations and development policies of the new member states.
Source: Tilly 1975c: 630-1.
Overall, then, the upshot of the two-stage attempt to develop a crises and sequences model of political development in the 1970s was to generate a call for a comprehensive research agenda running from basic social structures and processes through to policy-making: exactly the agenda which the theorists of political development had announced two decades earlier. The original protagonists of political development theory had ended back where they started; and to add insult to injury, they found the historians to whom they had turned for support urging them to turn their attention to national and international structures of power, and to explore the issues of capitalism, imperialism, conflict and class raised by the theorists of dependency and exploitation.
Conclusion
The attempt to bring comparative history to the centre of the stage proved disastrous for the protagonists of political development theory. Having relinquished control themselves, they found that the historians upon whom they had called were determined to write their own scripts, and highlight some glaring deficiencies in the manner in which the theory had previously addressed the historical record. The resulting production revealed them with such clarity that political development theory never recovered from the experience.
This was doubly ironic, first because there was in fact virtually no 'history' in Crises and Sequences in Political Development in the first place, and secondly because it was left to the historians to point out that none was actually required. The 'crises and sequences' model of political development, as spelled out by Coleman, LaPalombara, Pye and Weiner, was no more than the doctrine for political development organized under five new headings. Pye analysed identity and legitimacy in terms of the qualities needed for effective political leadership in the formulation and execution of national policies, and the need for elites to enjoy sufficient authority to win acceptance for the postponement of the gratification of immediate demands in favour of the investment of resources in the national interest; Weiner saw participation crises as occurring when the demands or behaviour of individuals and groups seeking to participate in the political system appeared illegitimate to elites, and saw them as resolved when agreement was restored among elite and masses on the demands which were legitimate and the institutional procedures through which they would be processed; and LaPalombara saw penetration as the ability of elites to get what they wanted from citizens, and returned with the issue of distribution to Pye's emphasis on the need to strike an appropriate balance between investment and consumption. In terms of content, the 'crises and sequences' model was embedded in the familiar framework of explicit elite theory, and produced variations on the theme of the need for providing strong elite leadership and making it acceptable to the masses.
Guided as it was by Coleman's analysis of the interaction between differentiation, capacity and equality (from an evolutionary rather than an historical perspective), the volume was not an exercise in comparative history, but an analysis of the logic of capitalist modernity from the perspective of ruling elites, as indeed was the 'doctrine for political development' itself. Coleman sought to identify the means by which governments in the modern world could 'respond to or contain the participatory and distributive demands generating by the imperatives of equality'. His identification of the pressure for equality and the need for governments to develop particular capacities to meet it as the defining problematic of modernity was reflected in the specific content attached to each of the five 'crises' – the centralization of authority over a given territory, the recognition of that authority as legitimate by citizens, the incorporation of the peasantry and the working class into politics under elite control, the extension of the authority of the state into new areas in order to secure appropriate behaviour from citizens, and the organization of production and distribution systems in such a way as to obtain the appropriate balance between satisfactory economic development in the longer term, and the immediate satisfaction of the wants of citizens. Although these could all be examined as historical processes, the authors of Crises and Sequences in Political Development thought from the start that they reflected permanent requirements of modern states, or characteristic challenges of modernity. The confusion this provoked over the issues of 'crises' versus 'problem areas' and over the validity of the idea of sequences was noted by Verba his initial memorandum to the joint authors but never resolved, and it was a ruthlessly exposed in the final volumes of the series of Studies in Political Development.
The root cause of the problem, identified by the protagonists in the exercise as much as by their critics, then, was a profound confusion over what it was that they were trying to do, and what was required in order to do it. The primary object of the exercise appears to have been to specify the internal logic of modernity. This appeared to its authors to require an investigation into its historical origins, which in turn called for an attempt to interpret specific trajectories of national historical change. But the attempt to specify the internal logic of modernity in terms of relationships between interlinked elements, laid out in somewhat abstract form in Coleman's development syndrome, was not carried through in the treatment of the five crises, which were discussed one after another as separate items. Secondly, the failure to provide provide an account of the historical origins of modernity made it impossible to trace a link between the internal logic of modernity on the one hand, and specific trajectories of national historical change on the other. As a consequence, the theorists of political development persistently sought to draw too direct a connection between the two, somehow expecting that the enumeration of a set of crises which appeared arbitrary even to them would itself identify historical sequences of change from which lessons for the developing world could be drawn directly. Hence the fatal conjunction (present from very early on) of attempts to link the specification of 'syndromes' of modernity (à la Coleman) to specific historical sequences in which crises were encountered and resolved.
All this embarrassment could have been avoided. In the absence in fact of any serious examination of the historical origins of modernity – an absence painfully highlighted by Tilly in particular – the theorists of political development would have been better advised, and more consistent, if they had examined the relationships between their 'crises', understood as persistent 'problem areas' in modern society, as part of a deeper analysis of interconnections within modern society itself. As we have seen, Grew and Tilly both pointed this out. Indeed, once the theorists of political development had decided, as Pye reported that they had by 1963, that modern societies were marked by 'certain fundamental and dynamic contradictions unknown to traditional societies' (Binder et al. 1971: 7) which were never resolved, it should have occurred to them that the central issue was not necessarily one of accounting for change over time, but rather one of identifying those contradictions and their sources in modern society. At first sight it is puzzling that they did not.
However, the extended critique offered by Tilly in the conclusion to The Formation of National States in Western Europe suggests a solution to the puzzle. If the primary motivation of political development theorists was to intervene in the policy-making arena on behalf of the managers of developing states, theory was only required to play a supporting role, and the form it should take was dictated by the nature of the proposed policy agenda. The constant objective of 'political development theory' was to justify preferred policy options, not to illuminate either the historical origins of modernity, or its internal logic. Indeed, if they had done either they would very quickly have required, as Tilly had no difficulty in pointing out, to examine directly such historical and social realities as capitalism, imperialism, class, conflict, and national and international power. Instead, the theorists of political development adopted an ideology supportive of the most powerful interests at the centre of those realities, encapsulated in the doctrine for political development, and made successive attempts to devise 'theories' to support it, of which the foray into comparative history was the last. The two final volumes of the Studies in Political Development series exposed this strategy, and brought the enterprise to a halt.
It is now clear why Pye could must only faint praise for them, and why Almond, an initial collaborator, did not eventually figure as a co-author of Tilly's concluding chapter to The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Tilly's comment that '(as will no doubt be obvious to a careful reader) Professor Almond bears no responsibility for the way the essay finally came out' (Tilly 1975c: 601) was a reminder, if it were needed, that the progenitors of political development theory had lost control of their progeny. In its final phase, spread out over a decade from the late 1960s on, political development theory had turned away from the developing world altogether, in an extended exploration of the history and logic of the political systems of Europe and the United States. Subsequent developments would confirm that greater significance attached to the pragmatic 'doctrine for political development' than to any theory which might be advanced in its support, for while the effort to theorize political development was abandoned, the doctrine for political development lived on, and came to enjoy its greatest dominance precisely as the attempt to produce an accompanying theory evaporated without trace.
I have argued, then, that the architects of the 'five crises' approach were fundamentally confused about what it was that they were doing. Their efforts would have made more sense if they had recognized that they were dealing with interconnected facets of 'modernity', and explored the connections between them, leaving abstract historical speculation aside. They would have made more sense still if they had grasped the simple fact that the logic of modernity for which they were grasping was in fact the logic of capitalism. As Tilly shrewdly observed, however, to have done so would have entirely undermined the broader project to which they were committed. Beyond this, however, there was another fundamental problem: their persistent assumption that it was appropriate to derive their crisis model from the experience (however stylized or crudely interpreted) of the core capitalist countries. They lacked a sense of the uneven history and unequal dynamics of the developing world system shaped by imperialism and capitalism, and as a result they had no means of theorizing the particular case of the 'developing countries' which were supposededly their primary concern. As we saw, Tilly pointed this out with devastating consequences.
We may return at this point to the framework proposed in 1964 by Ward and Rustow, which as we saw above, took as its starting-point the world-historical process of imperialist expansion, and sought to theorize the response of 'defensive modernization' among late-developing countries. It did so, as we saw, from the perspective of leaders bent upon asserting national sovereignty and catching up on their competitors, and it failed as comprehensively as did the 'five crises' model to explore the material roots of tension between leaders and followers, but at least it proposed, from within the logic of the doctrine for political development, an approach that was capable of capturing the specific circumstances of particular late-developing countries at a particular historical conjuncture. It showed a clear awareness, at the same time, that in different places at different times, the same logic might not apply. This degree of awareness remained an exception, as did the explicit focus on developing rather than developed countries. In the mainstream literature, the developing countries disappeared entirely from view, as the concentration on Europe and the United States in the final volumes of the Studies in Political Development series demonstrates. In the following chapter, therefore, I examine this strange disappearance of the 'developing' world from the political development literature, as a prelude to tracing the triumphant emergence of the doctrine for political development out of the ruins of the theory.