Rights and Political Change

The study of political change has fascinated commentators from Plato and Confucius in the ancient world to modern scholars such as Marx and Max Weber. In the post-World War II era, and especially in the decade of the 1960s when radical protest movements arose worldwide in tandem with terrorism and urban rioting, there was a marked upsurge in the popularity of this subject. ¹ As would be expected, criticisms of theories of change have kept pace, charging irreconcilability among theoretical formulations, subjectivity, ambiguity, and self-contradiction. ² Yet recent scholarship has made significant advances. Descriptive theorists such as Sorokin and Brinton were followed by thinkers such as Davies, Gurr, Johnson, and Smelser, who emphasized structural-functional and frustration-aggression theories. More recent analysts like Eisenstadt and Skocpol have developed theories that stress interest-group conflicts which exceed the conflict-mediation capabilities of political institutions. ³