ABSTRACT
At the first conference I attended in Eastern Europe on democratisation, a distinguished Hungarian sociologist, Elémer Hankis, introduced me to the audience as ‘that well-known transitologist . . .’. I felt just like Monsieur Jourdan in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme – enormously pleased to learn that I had been speaking prose all along without knowing it! Here I was, a supposedly renowned expert in a scientific discipline whose very existence I ignored. The neo-and, perhaps, pseudo-science of transitology was expected to explain and, hopefully, guide the way from an autocratic to a democratic regime. Its founder and patron saint, if it has to have one, should be Niccoló Machiavelli. For the ‘wily Florentine’ was the first great political theorist, not only to treat political outcomes as the artefactual and contingent product of human action, but also to recognise the specific problematics and dynamics of regime change. He, of course, was preoccupied with change in the inverse direction – from republican to ‘princely’ regimes – but his basic insights remain all too valid.1
