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On The Decline of Contemporary Political Development Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

This study argues that the self-described “malaise” in the study of political development theory is in part the product of the early attempt to strip judgments of value from those of fact in the interests of a more scientific comparative politics; that the resulting science has been inclined to ignore or neglect what may be the most fundamental difference between the modern and premodern worlds, namely the elimination of all religious concerns from those of politics proper (the “separation of church and state”); and that this neglect is in turn linked with the crisis in self-confidence characteristic not only of the science of comparative politics but of science or rationalism simply.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1996

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References

1 Consider, e. g., Federalist, No. 9.

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69 Consider the following statement of Karl Marx, made comparatively late in the development in question: “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism. […] The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason; so that he will revolve around himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself. […] The immediate task of philosophy… is to unmask human selfalienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law” (in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, Robert C., 2nd ed. [New York: Norton, 1978], pp. 5354Google Scholar [emphasis in the original]).

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86 Ibid., p. 6 (emphasis in the original).

87 Ibid., p. 2.

88 Ibid., p. 126.

89 Ibid., p. 5.

90 Ibid., p. 87; see also p. 370 n. 4.

91 Ibid., pp. 10 and 17 (emphasis added).

92 Ibid., p. 295.

93 Ibid., pp. 294–95.

94 Ibid., p. 293.

95 Ibid., p. 294.

96 For a comparable effort by another of the founders of political development studies, see Apter, , Rethinking Development, chaps. 1 and 10.Google ScholarCf. Smith, “Requiem or New Agenda for Third World Studies” p. 560.Google Scholar

97 Almond, and Powell, , Comparative Politics, p. 4.Google Scholar

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