ABSTRACT
As the previous chapter demonstrated, there has been considerable debate among comparativists concerning the adoption of an appropriate approach to the discipline. In many ways this debate has come to resemble the “dialogue of the deaf” of a decade earlier between modernisationists and dependency theorists.1 Each of these approaches have in their own way shed great light on previously unexplored angles, and each has deepened and enriched the level of analysis by its critique of the one before. But, as previously demonstrated, arguments over which line of inquiry best provides a method of comparison continues to rage in books, in university lecture halls, and in scholarly journals. As some of the quotations presented in the last chapter indicate, at times the debate has lost sight of the issues at hand and has degenerated into oneupmanship and name-calling. Successive generations of scholars appear to have learned little from the ones before. State-centred analyses of the earlier days drew attention to the importance of political institutions and their forms, but their insights and contributions were largely neglected by the behaviouralists. The behaviouralists pointed to the significance of social forms, only to be overlooked by neo-statists.
