ABSTRACT
From the days of kings and peasants, myths have played a powerful role in defining the relationship between nation states and their citizens. They always capture part of the complex realities of state-society relations. At the end of World War II, the dominant myths of state-society relations exaggerated the positive potential of the state as a developmental actor. In the Third World, national liberation movements were convinced that once the reins of state power were wrested from the old colonial powers, newly independent states would become powerful agents of development. The United States is perhaps the society most thoroughly penetrated by market relations. There has been a burst of interest in the concept of “social capital” that extends from the halls of the World Bank to small communities in the rural United States to activists in the Third World. Irrigation systems are a great example of the potential gains from state-society synergy.
