ABSTRACT
The political science that Gordon grew into in the 1960s was full-bodied: it dealt above all with contentious politics as a means of societal transformation. If the prospects for radical change from the left had continued to look bright after the mid-1970s, he no doubt would have hung on in there. He never became conservative by instinct. But the world did become a more conservative place. Gordon’s attention shifted to more routinised forms of politics. His interest in social transformation was refocused first on the (capitalist) developmental state and then, more latterly, on civil society. He adapted, but refused to move down either of two roads on which many of his contemporaries embarked. First, he had neither political nor professional sympathy with neo-liberalism. He would tolerate colleagues dabbling on the fringes of neo-liberal political economy (for example, public choice), but would neither encourage it nor indulge in it himself. Second, he could rarely bring himself to respect or engage with the vapidities that pass for theory or grand ideas in the formal policy statements of aid and development agencies. A rapid steer in another direction, toward real politics, awaited any student indicating an interest in writing a termpaper on, for example, ‘institution building and aid’—or ‘governance’, ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’ and any of the other jargon terms into which development agencies continually tried to breathe life. Cant was not a word that Gordon often used. He preferred more earthy terms. He would approve of our using it here to describe the insincerity, hypocrisy and emptiness that characterises so much aid-speak.
