Recasting Mainstream Conceptions of Political Development

Extract

The plea of Corning and Hines to replace the concept of political development with that of political evolution addresses the conceptual obfuscation engendered by the plethora of definitions that pervade the literature on development. In a cogently argued paper they review the mainstream literature and briefly refer to alternative perspectives now wellentrenched in the mainstream of social science. They recast these perspectives through synthesis of abstract ideas and set forth the parameters in which a theory of political evolution might be utilized. Their push for interdisciplinary inquiry attempts to undermine ethnocentric and value-laden notions of political science. All these advances, however, merit critical assessment.