INTRODUCTION
This book analyses and interprets political development theory from a critical Marxist perspective. Its starting point is that recently announced by Ellen Meiksins Wood:
the premise that the critique of capitalism is urgently needed, that historical materialism still provides the best foundation on which to construct it, and that the critical element in Marxism lies above all in its insistence on the historical specificity of capitalism - with the emphasis on both the specificity of its systemic logic and on its historicity (Wood 1995:2).
I argue that what political development theorists from the 1950s onwards took to be a universal theory of political development is better understood as a theory of political change in societies undergoing a process of capitalist modernization, and that the driving force behind it, constant through all its various theoretical twists and turns, was the desire to produce a doctrine which would aid the promotion of capitalist rather than socialist development. There is an intimate relationship between the 'revisionist' theory of democracy associated with Schumpeter and Dahl, and political development theory: while the former is a theory of politics in already constituted capitalist states, and a doctrine aimed at maintaining the capitalist character of the societies concerned, the latter is a theory of politics in the process of capitalist modernization, and a doctrine aimed at guaranteeing the capitalist direction of change. The central theme of the book is the emergence of a separate doctrine for political development in the wake of disillusionment with the prospects of building a universal theory, and I interpret this doctrine as a transitional programme for the installation and consolidation of capitalist regimes in the Third World.
Neither the theory of political development nor the doctrine prospered in the 1960s and 1970s. I attribute the difficulties each encountered to a combination of confusion as to the nature of the task at hand, and the global material and ideological obstacles to the ready acceptance of the ideas proposed. from the mid-1980s, however, the doctrine was revived, and went from strength to strength in the increasingly influential literature on transitions to democracy. I explain the apparent paradox of the failure of the theory and the subsequent triumph of the doctrine in terms of the changed global material and ideological circumstances of the period. The contemporary advocates of the doctrine for political development have dealt with the confusion which surrounded earlier efforts at theorization by simply declaring that there is no need for a theory of political development any more. This has freed them to promote throughout the world of social and political practices and institutions conducive to capitalism under cover of a proclaimed commitment to the universal adoption of liberal democracy. They thereby repeat the trick, central to bourgeois social theory from the start, of presenting as universal and natural what is historical, and specific to capitalism.
All students of political development owe a debt - all too little acknowledged for the most part - to Irene Gendzier's pioneering study, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (1985). Gendzier gives an incisive account of the Cold War climate and policy debate out of which 'political development' emerged, and pinpoints the close connections between political development theory, theories of mass society, and the revisionist theory of liberal democracy. In addition, she avoids the otherwise prevalent error of ascribing a sunny optimism to the earlier theorists of political development, and contrasting it with the scepticism and pessimism of later writers. As a result, she rightly discounts the claims of Huntington in particular to be considered a 'revisionist'. Nobody who has read the relevant literature with care could come to any other conclusions, and I confirm and build upon her analysis. She refers more than once, too, to a 'doctrine of political development' (Gendzier 1985:6, 124). I differ from her in locating the doctrine in the Studies in Political Development series, identifying a significant break between this series and such texts as Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963), and offering a somewhat different interpretation Pye and Verba's Political Culture and Political Development (1965). I attach more importance to institutional arguments than to issues of culture, psychology and personality, which I regard as a dead end that was quickly rejected. I also attach major significance to the 'political process' approach pioneered by Rustow and developed by Linz and Stepan. These differences are reflected in contrasting perceptions of the impasse in which political development theory found itself by the 1960s. Gendzier sees the core problem - the dilemma behind the 'impossible task' of political development theory - as being the fact that the theorists of political development feared change yet recognized that they capitalism which they wanted necessarily generated it, and found themselves without a way forward as a result. In contrast, I see the doctrine for political development as expounded primarily in the Studies in Political Development series as offering a coherent solution to the problem of managing the participatory challenges thrown up by capitalist development in a context of liberal democratic institutions. My argument is, rather, that the context of the 1950s and 1960s was not a propitious one for the promotion of the necessary disciplines and their introduction into political regimes across the Third World - and that the success of the doctrine in the 1980s and 1990s, despite the conclusive failure of every attempt to provide it with theoretical backing, was largely owed to the very different context of those times.
A Summary of the Contents
The political development literature is vast and varied, and connects in a number of ways to the history of its times and to other bodies of literature that are more extensive still. In addition, fundamental disagreements over the meaning or even the utility of the term 'political development' itself (reviewed in Chapter 1) make it hard to define the limits of the core literature and much of it is little known. I have therefore provided extensive expositions of the basic arguments of the key contributions to the literature as a necessary prelude to the critical analysis which follows. These outline summaries do not substitute for the originals, and are not intended to do so. They are intended to guide students unfamiliar with the literature and to identify key arguments to which the subsequent critique returns. Throughout, I have selected and discussed in detail the texts which in retrospect appear most significant. In addition, i have provided summaries or highlighted key excerpts from particular texts where appropriate, in boxes set apart from the main text. Taken together, these provide a sequence of points of reference to key themes in the literature.
The selection of texts for detailed examination and the accounts of their basic arguments are of course at the same time interpretations of the literature in general and of the texts themselves. I hope, though, that the initial summary of key arguments is full enough, and sufficiently neutral in tone, to serve as an introductory exposition. I identify in the following paragraphs the substance of each chapter, and the key texts examined in detail.
In Chapter 1, after a brief discussion of the historical context in which political development theory emerged, I address the revisionist theories of liberal democracy which appeared in the wake of mass democracy, inter-war economic depression and the rise of fascism. I concentrate attention upon Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1970; first published in 1942), Robert Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), and William Kornhauser's The Politics of Mass Society (1960). The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the way in which political development theory has been received over time.
Chapter 2 offers an account of the motivation behind the search for a theory of political development and emphasizes the intertwining from the beginning of theoretical and public policy concerns. it illustrates the tone of apprehension which pervaded it from the beginning and identifies the major texts which will be considered in detail in later chapters. It then outlines the ways in which political development theorists built upon and broke with modernization theory (emphasizing the simple but important point that modernization theory and political development theory are not identical), demonstrates that Huntington was orthodox rather than revisionist in his approach, and shows that the strand of political development theory concerned with comparative history was present in the literature from the very beginning. The major purpose of this chapter is to establish connections between different elements of the literature and as a consequence there is little in the way of detailed discussion of particular texts.
With the groundwork laid out in this way, Chapter 3 discusses Almond's early concern with functionalism and makes the argument that it played a relatively insignificant part in the emergence of political development theory proper. The emergence of a comprehensive functional framework for comparative politics (rather than for the politics of the developing world) is traced through two key texts: Gabriel Almond and James Coleman's edited collection The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960), and Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell's more systematic and elaborate Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (1966).
Chapter 4 takes up a parallel strand of the literature, in which Almond was also a key figure, concerned with the concept of political culture. Here a detailed exposition is offered of the basic arguments of two contrasting texts: Lucien Pye's Politics, Personality and Nation Building (1962), a study of Burmese politics much influenced by ideas drawn from psychology, and Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's hugely influential The Civic Culture (1963). I then give my reasons for not regarding Lucien Pye and Sidney Verba's later collection - Political Culture and Political Development (1965) - as exemplary of the political culture approach, and conclude with a detailed analysis of the critique of the approach subsequently included in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture Revisited (1980). I argue that the political culture approach, like the functional approach, was not at the heart of the political development literature.
Chapter 5 then addresses the texts which I regard as central to the political deverlopment literature, and in particular to the 'doctrine for political development'. These are the first six volumes of the Studies in Political Development series, published by Princeton University Press between 1963 and 1966: Communications and Political Development (1963), edited by Lucien Pye; Bureaucracy and Political Development (1963), edited by Jospeh LaPalombara; Education and Political Development (1965), edited by James Coleman; Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964), edited by Dankwart Rustow and Robert Ward; Political Culture and Political Development (1965), edited by Lucien Pye and Sidney Verba; and Political Parties and Political Development (1966), edited by Jospeh LaPalombara and Myron Weiner. Discussion concentrates on the doctrine for political development as revealed in these texts, and particularly on the elite model of politics most fully defined in Political Culture and Political Development. In conclusion, a detailed analysis of Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) confirms its orthodox recapitulation of already established themes.
Chapter 6 turns to the strand of political development theory which concerned itself with comparative history, and in particular with the notion of 'crises' of development. As noted above, these themes were present from the beginning. However, the first effort to provide a full account of the approach did not appear until 1971 - in Crises and Sequences in Political Development, the seventh of the Studies in Political Development series. It is examined in detail here, along with the two final volumes of the series, which addressed the 'crises and sequences' approach in what turned out to be mortally critical terms. These were 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 addition, this chapter returns to Rustow and Ward's Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, which is identified as a significant early statement of comparative historical themes, and explores a comparable effort led by Almond, published outside the Studies in Political Development series as Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (1973).
With Chapter 6 the exposition and initial discussion of the political development literature of the 1960s and 1970s is complete. In Chapter 7 I consider the manner in which the literature dealt with the politics of the contemporary Third World, using its treatment of Latin America as a source of illustration. After an examination of the way in which the region as a whole was handled in Blanksten's contribution to The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960) and Scott's essay in Political Parties and Political Development (1966), I focus on the treatment of Mexico. Four discussions are examined: The Civic Culture (1963), where it came in as a late substitute for Sweden; Scott's contribution to Political Culture and Political Development (1965), Cornelius's account of the Cardenas period in Crisis, Choice and Change (1973); and the critique of The Civic Culture offered by Craig and Cornelius in The Civic Culture Revisited (1980). The material in this chapter confirms that the proponents of political development did not favour the rapid introduction of competitive democracy in the Third World.
Chapter 8 considers the connections between the political development literature and the contemporary literature on transitions to democracy. Here I identify two texts as significant precursors of the contemporary literature: Rustow's 'genetic' approach to democratization (Rustow 1970), and Juan Linz's The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration (1978). Against this background, I offer an analysis of two major contributions to the transition literature: the four-volume set edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (1986), and the regional case studies (Africa, Asia and Latin America) edited by Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Martin Seymour Lipset in Democracy in Developing Countries (1988, 1989). The chapter concludes with the argument that Huntington's The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991) simply recapitulates arguments advanced by earlier authors, as his Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) had done more than two decades earlier.
Finally, Chapter 9 reflects directly on the political development literature from a Marxist perspective. Here, I draw upon The Manifesto of the Communist Party (written by Marx and Engels and published in 1848) and on Marx's Grundrisse (written in 1857 and 1858 and unpublished in his lifetime) to suggest that the political development literature should be regarded as largely ideological in character, and to explain why it is that the doctrine for political development triumphed in the 1990s after failing so conspicuously in the 1960s.
Of the various debts I have contracted while writing this book, the largest is owed to my friends and colleagues in the '1990 Discussion group' which meets from time to time at the LSE: Chris Boyle, Simon Bromley, Greg Elliott, Luis Fernandes, Fred Halliday and Justin Rosenberg. They set an invigorating standard of rigorous scholarship and savage yet comradely criticism from which I hope to recover, and eventually to benefit. I am also indebted to the series editor, Jules Townshend, for suggesting the book in the first place, and guiding and encouraging its progress; to Georgina Waylen, who made forthright and valuable comments on the first draft; and to graduate students at the University of Manchester who also read the first draft and offered incisive suggestions: Junko Furukawa, Jasmine Gideon, Cipriano Heredia, Zulfia Karimova, Zaini Othman, Viv Randles, Gareth Api Richards and Victor Stepanenko.
This is a small contribution to a large enterprise - the restatement of a critical Marxist perspective on global politics and political economy for the twenty-first century. it is written in the sober belief that people who call themselves social scientists should endeavour to see and describe capitalism for what it is, and to place the investigation of it at the centre of their agenda - and the heady conviction that if they do, the true character of 'bourgeois social theory' as ideology, apologia and prejudice will be revealed, and the world will have a chance to become a better place.
Portions of earlier versions of this text have appeared in 'Political development theory and the dissemination of democracy', Democratization, 1(3) 1994, 353-374, and in 'Domestic and international regimes for the developing world: the doctrine for political development', in P. Gummett (ed), Globalization and Public Policy (Edweard Elgar, Cheltenham, 1966), pp. 46-63.
Paul Cammack
Manchester, June 1996
the premise that the critique of capitalism is urgently needed, that historical materialism still provides the best foundation on which to construct it, and that the critical element in Marxism lies above all in its insistence on the historical specificity of capitalism - with the emphasis on both the specificity of its systemic logic and on its historicity (Wood 1995:2).
I argue that what political development theorists from the 1950s onwards took to be a universal theory of political development is better understood as a theory of political change in societies undergoing a process of capitalist modernization, and that the driving force behind it, constant through all its various theoretical twists and turns, was the desire to produce a doctrine which would aid the promotion of capitalist rather than socialist development. There is an intimate relationship between the 'revisionist' theory of democracy associated with Schumpeter and Dahl, and political development theory: while the former is a theory of politics in already constituted capitalist states, and a doctrine aimed at maintaining the capitalist character of the societies concerned, the latter is a theory of politics in the process of capitalist modernization, and a doctrine aimed at guaranteeing the capitalist direction of change. The central theme of the book is the emergence of a separate doctrine for political development in the wake of disillusionment with the prospects of building a universal theory, and I interpret this doctrine as a transitional programme for the installation and consolidation of capitalist regimes in the Third World.
Neither the theory of political development nor the doctrine prospered in the 1960s and 1970s. I attribute the difficulties each encountered to a combination of confusion as to the nature of the task at hand, and the global material and ideological obstacles to the ready acceptance of the ideas proposed. from the mid-1980s, however, the doctrine was revived, and went from strength to strength in the increasingly influential literature on transitions to democracy. I explain the apparent paradox of the failure of the theory and the subsequent triumph of the doctrine in terms of the changed global material and ideological circumstances of the period. The contemporary advocates of the doctrine for political development have dealt with the confusion which surrounded earlier efforts at theorization by simply declaring that there is no need for a theory of political development any more. This has freed them to promote throughout the world of social and political practices and institutions conducive to capitalism under cover of a proclaimed commitment to the universal adoption of liberal democracy. They thereby repeat the trick, central to bourgeois social theory from the start, of presenting as universal and natural what is historical, and specific to capitalism.
All students of political development owe a debt - all too little acknowledged for the most part - to Irene Gendzier's pioneering study, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (1985). Gendzier gives an incisive account of the Cold War climate and policy debate out of which 'political development' emerged, and pinpoints the close connections between political development theory, theories of mass society, and the revisionist theory of liberal democracy. In addition, she avoids the otherwise prevalent error of ascribing a sunny optimism to the earlier theorists of political development, and contrasting it with the scepticism and pessimism of later writers. As a result, she rightly discounts the claims of Huntington in particular to be considered a 'revisionist'. Nobody who has read the relevant literature with care could come to any other conclusions, and I confirm and build upon her analysis. She refers more than once, too, to a 'doctrine of political development' (Gendzier 1985:6, 124). I differ from her in locating the doctrine in the Studies in Political Development series, identifying a significant break between this series and such texts as Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963), and offering a somewhat different interpretation Pye and Verba's Political Culture and Political Development (1965). I attach more importance to institutional arguments than to issues of culture, psychology and personality, which I regard as a dead end that was quickly rejected. I also attach major significance to the 'political process' approach pioneered by Rustow and developed by Linz and Stepan. These differences are reflected in contrasting perceptions of the impasse in which political development theory found itself by the 1960s. Gendzier sees the core problem - the dilemma behind the 'impossible task' of political development theory - as being the fact that the theorists of political development feared change yet recognized that they capitalism which they wanted necessarily generated it, and found themselves without a way forward as a result. In contrast, I see the doctrine for political development as expounded primarily in the Studies in Political Development series as offering a coherent solution to the problem of managing the participatory challenges thrown up by capitalist development in a context of liberal democratic institutions. My argument is, rather, that the context of the 1950s and 1960s was not a propitious one for the promotion of the necessary disciplines and their introduction into political regimes across the Third World - and that the success of the doctrine in the 1980s and 1990s, despite the conclusive failure of every attempt to provide it with theoretical backing, was largely owed to the very different context of those times.
A Summary of the Contents
The political development literature is vast and varied, and connects in a number of ways to the history of its times and to other bodies of literature that are more extensive still. In addition, fundamental disagreements over the meaning or even the utility of the term 'political development' itself (reviewed in Chapter 1) make it hard to define the limits of the core literature and much of it is little known. I have therefore provided extensive expositions of the basic arguments of the key contributions to the literature as a necessary prelude to the critical analysis which follows. These outline summaries do not substitute for the originals, and are not intended to do so. They are intended to guide students unfamiliar with the literature and to identify key arguments to which the subsequent critique returns. Throughout, I have selected and discussed in detail the texts which in retrospect appear most significant. In addition, i have provided summaries or highlighted key excerpts from particular texts where appropriate, in boxes set apart from the main text. Taken together, these provide a sequence of points of reference to key themes in the literature.
The selection of texts for detailed examination and the accounts of their basic arguments are of course at the same time interpretations of the literature in general and of the texts themselves. I hope, though, that the initial summary of key arguments is full enough, and sufficiently neutral in tone, to serve as an introductory exposition. I identify in the following paragraphs the substance of each chapter, and the key texts examined in detail.
In Chapter 1, after a brief discussion of the historical context in which political development theory emerged, I address the revisionist theories of liberal democracy which appeared in the wake of mass democracy, inter-war economic depression and the rise of fascism. I concentrate attention upon Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1970; first published in 1942), Robert Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), and William Kornhauser's The Politics of Mass Society (1960). The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the way in which political development theory has been received over time.
Chapter 2 offers an account of the motivation behind the search for a theory of political development and emphasizes the intertwining from the beginning of theoretical and public policy concerns. it illustrates the tone of apprehension which pervaded it from the beginning and identifies the major texts which will be considered in detail in later chapters. It then outlines the ways in which political development theorists built upon and broke with modernization theory (emphasizing the simple but important point that modernization theory and political development theory are not identical), demonstrates that Huntington was orthodox rather than revisionist in his approach, and shows that the strand of political development theory concerned with comparative history was present in the literature from the very beginning. The major purpose of this chapter is to establish connections between different elements of the literature and as a consequence there is little in the way of detailed discussion of particular texts.
With the groundwork laid out in this way, Chapter 3 discusses Almond's early concern with functionalism and makes the argument that it played a relatively insignificant part in the emergence of political development theory proper. The emergence of a comprehensive functional framework for comparative politics (rather than for the politics of the developing world) is traced through two key texts: Gabriel Almond and James Coleman's edited collection The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960), and Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell's more systematic and elaborate Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (1966).
Chapter 4 takes up a parallel strand of the literature, in which Almond was also a key figure, concerned with the concept of political culture. Here a detailed exposition is offered of the basic arguments of two contrasting texts: Lucien Pye's Politics, Personality and Nation Building (1962), a study of Burmese politics much influenced by ideas drawn from psychology, and Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's hugely influential The Civic Culture (1963). I then give my reasons for not regarding Lucien Pye and Sidney Verba's later collection - Political Culture and Political Development (1965) - as exemplary of the political culture approach, and conclude with a detailed analysis of the critique of the approach subsequently included in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture Revisited (1980). I argue that the political culture approach, like the functional approach, was not at the heart of the political development literature.
Chapter 5 then addresses the texts which I regard as central to the political deverlopment literature, and in particular to the 'doctrine for political development'. These are the first six volumes of the Studies in Political Development series, published by Princeton University Press between 1963 and 1966: Communications and Political Development (1963), edited by Lucien Pye; Bureaucracy and Political Development (1963), edited by Jospeh LaPalombara; Education and Political Development (1965), edited by James Coleman; Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964), edited by Dankwart Rustow and Robert Ward; Political Culture and Political Development (1965), edited by Lucien Pye and Sidney Verba; and Political Parties and Political Development (1966), edited by Jospeh LaPalombara and Myron Weiner. Discussion concentrates on the doctrine for political development as revealed in these texts, and particularly on the elite model of politics most fully defined in Political Culture and Political Development. In conclusion, a detailed analysis of Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) confirms its orthodox recapitulation of already established themes.
Chapter 6 turns to the strand of political development theory which concerned itself with comparative history, and in particular with the notion of 'crises' of development. As noted above, these themes were present from the beginning. However, the first effort to provide a full account of the approach did not appear until 1971 - in Crises and Sequences in Political Development, the seventh of the Studies in Political Development series. It is examined in detail here, along with the two final volumes of the series, which addressed the 'crises and sequences' approach in what turned out to be mortally critical terms. These were 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 addition, this chapter returns to Rustow and Ward's Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, which is identified as a significant early statement of comparative historical themes, and explores a comparable effort led by Almond, published outside the Studies in Political Development series as Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (1973).
With Chapter 6 the exposition and initial discussion of the political development literature of the 1960s and 1970s is complete. In Chapter 7 I consider the manner in which the literature dealt with the politics of the contemporary Third World, using its treatment of Latin America as a source of illustration. After an examination of the way in which the region as a whole was handled in Blanksten's contribution to The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960) and Scott's essay in Political Parties and Political Development (1966), I focus on the treatment of Mexico. Four discussions are examined: The Civic Culture (1963), where it came in as a late substitute for Sweden; Scott's contribution to Political Culture and Political Development (1965), Cornelius's account of the Cardenas period in Crisis, Choice and Change (1973); and the critique of The Civic Culture offered by Craig and Cornelius in The Civic Culture Revisited (1980). The material in this chapter confirms that the proponents of political development did not favour the rapid introduction of competitive democracy in the Third World.
Chapter 8 considers the connections between the political development literature and the contemporary literature on transitions to democracy. Here I identify two texts as significant precursors of the contemporary literature: Rustow's 'genetic' approach to democratization (Rustow 1970), and Juan Linz's The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration (1978). Against this background, I offer an analysis of two major contributions to the transition literature: the four-volume set edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (1986), and the regional case studies (Africa, Asia and Latin America) edited by Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Martin Seymour Lipset in Democracy in Developing Countries (1988, 1989). The chapter concludes with the argument that Huntington's The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991) simply recapitulates arguments advanced by earlier authors, as his Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) had done more than two decades earlier.
Finally, Chapter 9 reflects directly on the political development literature from a Marxist perspective. Here, I draw upon The Manifesto of the Communist Party (written by Marx and Engels and published in 1848) and on Marx's Grundrisse (written in 1857 and 1858 and unpublished in his lifetime) to suggest that the political development literature should be regarded as largely ideological in character, and to explain why it is that the doctrine for political development triumphed in the 1990s after failing so conspicuously in the 1960s.
Of the various debts I have contracted while writing this book, the largest is owed to my friends and colleagues in the '1990 Discussion group' which meets from time to time at the LSE: Chris Boyle, Simon Bromley, Greg Elliott, Luis Fernandes, Fred Halliday and Justin Rosenberg. They set an invigorating standard of rigorous scholarship and savage yet comradely criticism from which I hope to recover, and eventually to benefit. I am also indebted to the series editor, Jules Townshend, for suggesting the book in the first place, and guiding and encouraging its progress; to Georgina Waylen, who made forthright and valuable comments on the first draft; and to graduate students at the University of Manchester who also read the first draft and offered incisive suggestions: Junko Furukawa, Jasmine Gideon, Cipriano Heredia, Zulfia Karimova, Zaini Othman, Viv Randles, Gareth Api Richards and Victor Stepanenko.
This is a small contribution to a large enterprise - the restatement of a critical Marxist perspective on global politics and political economy for the twenty-first century. it is written in the sober belief that people who call themselves social scientists should endeavour to see and describe capitalism for what it is, and to place the investigation of it at the centre of their agenda - and the heady conviction that if they do, the true character of 'bourgeois social theory' as ideology, apologia and prejudice will be revealed, and the world will have a chance to become a better place.
Portions of earlier versions of this text have appeared in 'Political development theory and the dissemination of democracy', Democratization, 1(3) 1994, 353-374, and in 'Domestic and international regimes for the developing world: the doctrine for political development', in P. Gummett (ed), Globalization and Public Policy (Edweard Elgar, Cheltenham, 1966), pp. 46-63.
Paul Cammack
Manchester, June 1996