ABSTRACT
In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the study of comparative government has been transformed out of recognition. This discipline is old: originally, for Aristotle and Montesquieu for instance, it was concerned with the study of the behaviour of all the polities of the world; but with the development of constitutionalism in the nineteenth century, analyses came to be devoted almost exclusively to liberal countries, on the assumption that all states would progressively be liberal as constitutionalism spread. This assumption turned out to be false — or at best premature. As a result, a realistic study of comparative government needed to have a broader scope: the aim was to understand the characteristics of all governments and to discover their dynamics.
