ABSTRACT
A very great deal of politics is concerned with the activities of a very small number of people. True of almost any form of politics, this is especially so in third world states where institutions linking the mass of the population with political action are weak or non-existent and where the fragile but powerful state, linked to indigenous social formations by contracts of convenience rather than ties of loyalty, is itself monopolised by an elite. At the most basic level, the problem facing this elite is to increase the effectiveness of the state and diminish its fragility, ideally by creating a moral sense of its value and associating other social formations with it. This objective can be pursued at two levels, both of which are particularly clearly demonstrated in the common experience of new states in the years immediately after independence. At the ideological level, dominant elites develop patterns of thought and rhetoric which, expressing their own interests, glorify and justify the organisation on which their power depends. At the level of practical politics, they seek the same end by suppressing other organisations which constitute potential challengers to it-in the process, paradoxically, often destroying the very institutions on which a more effective linkage of state to society would eventually have to depend. The two levels combine to form a characteristic process of postcolonial state consolidation.
