It is no accident that the study of comparative politics, and especially thestudy of political development, has been dominated by scholars from themetropolitan countries, or by those trained in metropolitan universities.This interest in the politics of the subordinate world has resulted in aseries of case studies, which we have assumed have added substantially toour knowledge about these hitherto neglected areas. However, untilfairly recently, little attention has been paid to the underlying assumptionsand ideologies of these metropolitan scholars, and the distortions, consciousand unconscious, introduced into scholarship on these areas underthe guise of scientific and value-free methodologies.
