¹ The salient exploratory works are Emerson, Rupert, From Empire to Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).Google Scholar Among the pioneers, two others also stand out: Deutsch, Karl W., “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” Political Science Review, Vol. 55 (September 1961), 493–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Pye, Lucian W., Politics, Personality, and Nation Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

² Huntington, Samuel P. and Domínguez, Juan I., “Political Development,” in Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson W., eds., Handbook of Political Science, III (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 98–114.Google Scholar

³ The term decay is used in Huntington's sense, as an antonym to “order.” See Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, chap. 1. Earlier, Huntington had used “decay” as an antonym to “development”; see “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics, XVII (April 1965), 386–430.

⁴ Huntington and Domínguez (fn. 2), 3.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ A prototype (ten definitions) is in Pye, Lucian W., Aspects of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 33–45.Google Scholar

⁷ Almond, Gabriel A. and Bingham Powell, G., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 28–29Google Scholar, 190–212; Organski, A.F.K., The Stages of Political Development (New York: Knopf, 1965), 7.Google Scholar

⁸ Weber, Max, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans, and ed. by Gerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 84–86.Google Scholar

⁹ Holt, Robert T. and Turner, John E., The Political Basis of Economic Development (Princeton: van Nostrand, 1966), 57–58.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Although Binder surely was right in writing about political development that “it cannot be expected that Western scholars could wholly escape the influences of their own political cultures,” there is no evidence at all for his views that this need not “eventuate in a narrow parochialism” or that a “general theory of political development” can “emerge from a specific history.” Binder, Leonard and others, Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 67.Google Scholar

¹¹ Geertz, Clifford, Negara: The Theatre-State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 5.Google Scholar

¹² The standard work on this subject—and, surprisingly, the only history of thought centered on conceptions of social time—is Nisbet, Robert A., Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar Nisbet's work treats at considerable length, and splendidly, what I discuss very tersely in this section. His book can elucidate anything that seems obtuse here. I have drawn a great deal on his study, as anyone writing about social and political development must. But I differ from Nisbet in some respects, one of which is especially important. Nisbet holds that all Western thought is developmental. Different theoretical accounts of social change in history seem to him to be only variations on a continuing theme, already present in classic myth. I think this argument is forced and impedes understanding of the idea of development. Theories of social development, it seems to me, are more notable for their novelty than for anything they have in common with previous thought.

¹³ This, pace Nisbet, is a fundamental aspect of its novelty.

¹⁴ This much misunderstood concept is the foundation of the most profound attack on all moral and epistemological absolutes. Nevertheless, Durkheim is nothing if not a moral philosopher and believer in verities. The paradox is resolved by Durkheim himself in the preface to his first masterpiece, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1933).

¹⁵ The subject of predevelopmental conceptions of social time, plus critical analysis of them, no doubt deserves a full essay, or—as in Nisbet—most of a considerable book. In an earlier version of this essay, the part that follows was, in fact, a sizable article. I have severely reduced it, since my purpose is not to write a history of thought, but to work toward a renovated theory of political development.

¹⁶ I do not mean to say, of course, that noncontextual theorizing ceased in the 19th century. It has remained with us—during the 19th century chiefly in Utilitarianism and its derivatives (including modern Economics) and, not quite so clearly, in Idealist thought.

¹⁷ See Eliade, Mircea, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1954)Google Scholar, chaps. 2–3.

¹⁸ Nisbet (fn. 12), chap. 1.

¹⁹ The alternative to thinking in terms of cycles and trajectories is used in Gomperz, Theodor, Greek. Thinkers, I (London: John Murray, 1901), 141.Google Scholar

²⁰ I agree here with J. B. Bury, contra Nisbet, that the Greeks had no (philosophic) idea of “progress.” See The Idea of Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 19.

²¹ The City of God (New York: Random House, 1950), Book X, 14.

²² The recognized summa on the subject is Bury's Idea of Progress (fn. 20).

²³ Nisbet (fn. 12), 105.

²⁴ It should be noted that developmental theories fall into two fairly distinct subtypes. One comprises what we generally identify as social evolutionary theory. Comte, Spencer, and Morgan, among others, are members of the earlier species, not yet quite liberated from progress theory; note, for instance, Comte's vision of a “final” positive-industrial Utopia. Nisbet calls the other subtype “neo-evolutionism” (fn. 12, 223–39). It includes, roughly, Ferdinand Toennies's chef d'oeuvre of 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber. One might simply call this species mature developmental thought—less simplistic, and with the tendentious and ambiguous aspects of the earlier species cleaned up.

²⁵ For distilling the general traits of developmental thought, Nisbet's treatment of the “premises” of socio-evolutionary theories is invaluable (fn. 12, 166–88). I draw on him—though not on his vocabulary, for reasons not really necessary to spell out here.

²⁶ Ibid., 166–67.

²⁷ Eckstein, Harry, “Theoretical Approaches to Explaining Collective Political Violence,” in Gurr, Ted Robert, ed., Handbook of Political Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1980), 138–42.Google Scholar

²⁸ Huntington is an exception: he goes back all the way to the Tudors. (See fn. 3, 1968,122–39.)

²⁹ Wolff, Kurt, transi, and ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), 22.Google Scholar

³⁰ Maine, Henry Sumner Sir, Ancient Law (London: Murray, 1861).Google Scholar

³¹ Toennies, Ferdinand, Community and Society, trans, by Loomis, Charles P. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 231–32.Google Scholar

³² Durkheim (fn. 14), 70–132.

³³ Weber, Max, Economy and Society, I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 24–26Google Scholar, 215–20.

³⁴ Huntington (fn. 3), 148.

³⁵ Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Free Press, 1958), esp. chap. II and pp. 85–89.Google Scholar

³⁶ Durkheim (fn. 14), 275–80.

³⁷ Wolff (fn. 29), 145–69.

³⁸ Nisbet (fn. 12), 162.

³⁹ Durkheim (fn. 14), 256ff.

⁴⁰ Spencer, Herbert, Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative (New York: Appleton, 1891), 60.Google Scholar

⁴¹ This is said pace Condorcet. It seems to me that in the Sketch the notion of stages is simply a literary convenience.

⁴² I consider Clifford Geertz to be its outstanding present practitioner. See The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973)—especially 3–30 (on “thick description”) and 412–53 (on the social meaning of Balinese cockfights).

⁴³ Comte, Auguste, The Positive Philosophy, II (London: George Bell, 1896), 229.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1947), 3.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Beer, Samuel H., British Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York: Knopf, 1962), 22–31.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Keir, D. L., The Constitutional History of Modern Britain (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1938), 292–320.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ See, for instance, Mair, Lucy, Primitive Government (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1962)Google Scholar, Part I—especially the chapter on “Minimal Government” (61–77).

⁴⁸ See Gerth and Mills (fn. 8), 82.

⁴⁹ Sharkansky, Ira, Whither the State? (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1979)Google Scholar, throughout.

⁵⁰ See, for example, Templeton, Kenneth S. Jr, ed., The Politicization of Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979).Google Scholar

⁵¹ For a catalogue of such notions, see Eckstein, Harry, “Authority Patterns: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 67 (December 1973), 1142.Google Scholar

⁵² These are Apter's terms; see Apter, David E., The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 24ff.Google Scholar

⁵³ I do not use the term entirely as does Edelman, Murray in The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).Google Scholar Edelman considers political symbolism to be an aspect of political practices that “condenses” them (and thus evokes emotions) or provides simple “references” to complex facts (his example is accident statistics). At times, Edelman comes close to what I mean by symbolic politics; see, for instance, 16–17. This is not to say that his use of the notion is wrong. It is different—mainly, much more diffuse.

⁵⁴ Schapera, I., Government and Politics in Tribal Societies (London: Watts, 1956).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Ibid., chap. 4. Varying “powers” are associated with chiefliness (102ff.). I will refer to the most common below. But simply being “chiefly” is clearly the heart of the matter.

⁵⁶ Mair, Primitive Government (fn. 47), and African Kingdoms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

⁵⁷ Ibid.: Primitive Government, 63, 69; African Kingdoms, 107–8.

⁵⁸ Lowie, R. H., “Political Organization among American Aborigines,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 78 (February 1948), 1–17.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Dating poses difficulties here, but a sensible point in time for looking at the Anglo-Saxon polity surely is circa 900 A.D. A sense of an English society had crystallized out of the diverse identities of Teutonic tribal invaders and become personified in a single chief, Edward of Wessex. Beowulf remains the best primary source for understanding Anglo-Saxon life. See also Jolliffe, J.E.A., Constitutional History of Medieval England (New York: Norton, 1967)Google Scholar, Parts I and II; SirStenton, Frank, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943)Google Scholar; Whitelock, Dorothy, The Beginning of English Society (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1952).Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Fn. 11.

⁶¹ Ibid., 127, 135.

⁶² Ibid., 13. (Geertz's book appeared some months after I wrote the first draft of this paper for the NSF Conference on Economic and Political Development, Wayzata, Minnesota, October 1980.)

⁶³ E.g., Ibid., 24.

⁶⁴ See Mair (fn. 56) : Primitive Government, 65, 66, 76; African Kingdoms, 39. Geertz (fn. 11) considers the link to the supernatural order the very basis of Negara: see pp. 17–19, 104–5.

⁶⁵ Schapera (fn. 54), 211ff.

⁶⁶ Geertz (fn. 11), 24.

⁶⁷ See, for example, Biebuyck, Daniel, Hero and Chief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Traili, H. D., ed., Social England, I (New York: Putnam, 1894), 134.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ See Beer, Samuel H. and Ulam, Adam, eds., Patterns of Government, 2d ed. (New York: Random House, 1962)Google Scholar, chap. 10.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 235.

⁷¹ Petit-Dutaillis, Ch., The Feudal Monarchy in England and France (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1948), 128.Google Scholar

⁷² Ibid., 138.

⁷³ Keir (fn. 46), 98.

⁷⁴ Black, J. B., The Reign of Elizabeth: 1558–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 217.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ The great work on the Georgian polity is SirNamier, Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1957)Google Scholar; the standard history is Steven Watson, J., The Reign of George III: 1750–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960)Google Scholar; and the best concise political perspective on the period is provided by Beer, Samuel H., British Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York: Knopf, 1965).Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Keir (fn. 46), 312–16.

⁷⁷ Namier (fn. 75), 76.

⁷⁸ Tilly, Charles, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978).Google Scholar

⁷⁹ I use “system” here in the manner of general and political systems theorists; the latter seem to me pertinent only—or anyway, chiefly—to “modern” polities. See, for instance, Miller, James G., “Living Systems: Basic Concepts,” Behavioral Science, X (July 1965), 193–237CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Easton, David, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965).Google Scholar

⁸⁰ The elevation of the leader in totalitarian polities can certainly be regarded as a reaction against the fathomless sobriety of typical modern political systems. It is, of course, more satanic than sacred. And surely the “system” uses the leader, perhaps more than vice versa.

⁸¹ Nisbet (fn. 12), 189–208.

⁸² Or, in language that used to be familiar in political science, turning political “base values” into other “scope values.” See Lasswell, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 83–92.Google Scholar