A Defunct Concept?Ramashray Roy POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE By Daya Krishna Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1979, pp. 207, Rs. 60.00 VOLUME IV NUMBER 3 November/December 1979 This book is yet another
contribution of Professor Daya Krishna to theoretical perspectives on social
sciences. Daya Krishna takes up for treatment a much discussed and thrashed-out
issue in political science—the concept of political development.
This is a concept that has provided considerable stimulation to many social
scientists to think and write. Daya Krishna subjects this concept to a
systematic radiological test, examines in detail and with immeasurable patience
its skeletal structure, and pronounces with all seriousness and professional
severity the concept dead. It is true that the concept of political
development as propounded by the adherents of the Durksonian School rose like
a meteor in the firmament of social sciences, remained regnant for more than a
decade, and disintegrated under the weight of its own inconsistencies and the
blind ethnocentricism of its proponents more than a decade ago. However, even
so late it is good to have an official verdict and certificate to bury the·
dead.
Daya Krishna is
systematic in his postmortem. Recognizing that ‘the concept of political
development has become the central pivot around which most of the recent
thought in political science tends to organize itself’, Daya Krishna feels the
necessity of separating the questions with respect of political development
from the larger questions of development in general and from development in
other domains in particular. He then sets out to examine ‘in detail the
explications of the concept of political development and the criteria suggested
for assessing and measuring it in diverse ways’.
The
explications of the concept of political development that Daya Krishna proceeds
to evaluate refer to some of the very basic and important elements in the
conceptual baggage of political scientists writing in recent years. These
elements pertain to attributes of both individuals and social and political
system. To be precise, these elements are: Participation, differentiation,
interest articulation, interest aggregation, rule-making, rule-application,
rule-adjudication, political culture, political socialization and political
communication. Daya Krishna takes each of these elements singly and builds up a
powerful analytical searchlight that exposes and magnifies the ambiguities, the
obscurities, the inconsistencies, the logical pitfalls and the cultural and
ideological snares inherent in these elements. Space does not permit us to discuss
in detail the analytical onslaught Daya Krishna makes on the weak spots in the
conceptual delineation of the term ‘development’ and its constituent elements.
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