ABSTRACT
The study of new nations began to take its present form in a particularly fortunate intellectual climate, at a time when new patterns of social science thought in anthropology and sociology were beginning to have an effect on political studies. This impact, stemming largely from World War II, generated antagonisms within the field of political science; yet it also allowed considerable analytical experimentation, particularly in those cultural and regional areas where little previous work had been done.1 Although political science orthodoxy reigned supreme in the comparative political analyses of Western Europe and American government, even here a previous generation had already attempted to employ institutional variables in analysis, as exemplified by institutionalists like Sir Ernest Barker, Harold Laski, Carl Friedrich, and Herman Finer.2 Hence a tradition existed on which to build. However, it required a shift in research emphasis-to the comparative analysis of new nations-to allow sufficient scope for those who wanted to use different approaches and apply new concepts to the "fundamentals" of politics. Preoccupied with such matters, the "first round" studies did not compare but rather emphasized internal ingredients of novel systems. They sought to delineate the characteristics of authority in political systems, particularly in the context of change from a colonial-traditional to an autonomous-modern one, and to devise new field methods and research concepts needed for understanding the many levels of the process. S These monographic studies made possible comparative work in a "second round". The study of new nations stimulated comparisons not only between each other but also between new and
older ones. Analysts compared industrial societies (Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia), the less industrialized, older modernizing nations in Latin America, and the newer nations in Asia and Africa. All these studies viewed societies in a new context-modernization and development. 4
The problem focus and the concern with analytical methods evolved simultaneously. Indeed, the evolution of the comparative study of new nations took the following forms:
(1) Throughout Asia and Africa, comparative analysts focused on nationalism as a rising moral force against colonialism. A parallel was drawn between nineteenth-century working-class claims for rights of political participation and twentieth-century claims of colonial peoples for self-government. Nationalism was the ideology for dependent societies, just as some form of socialism tended to be the ideology for nineteenth-century trade-union demands with democratic institutions seen as the likely answer. In the broadest sense, this parallel was the silent major premise of most analytical work on new nations. Colonialism was thus studied in the context of democratic reform, constitutional devolution of powers, emerging interest groups, and increasingly well-organized nationalist organizations operating in a scene of struggle that created a moral centre.
