Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
FOR A POLITICAL SCIENTIST THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS represented a unique historical period. There were opportunities for research in new fields requiring new techniques. Indeed, the sense of newness combined subject, technique and moral direction in a singular synthesis. Words like nationalism, growth, independence, freedom, not to speak of the staged figures who personified them, Ghandi and Nehru, Nkrumah and Zik, Touré and Keita, Sukarno and particularly Mao and Castro, gave a peopled tension to what constituted not only new frontiers of independence but also moral events as new nations and new political forms made their appearance.
1 See Seers, Dudley, ‘The Birth, Life, and Death of Development Economics’ in Development and Change, Vol. 10, No. 4, 10 1979, pp. 707–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 See for examples, Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971, and Gabriel Almond et al., Crisis, Choice, and Change, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1973.
3 See Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973.
4 One thinks of important figues like François Perroux in Paris, or bodies like the Overseas Development Institute in London.