ABSTRACT
Change is a problem for social science. Sociologists, for instance, have regularly bemoaned their lack of knowledge concerning social change. Political scientists neglected change because they focused their primary attention on states where change did not seem to be much of a problem. Political change tended to be ignored because comparative politics tended to be ignored. This theory of modernization, as it emerged in the 1950s, contrasted sharply with the theories of historical evolution and social change which prevailed in Western thought during the 1920s and 1930s. They focused more on the direction of change, from “this” to “that,” than on the scope, timing, methods, and rate of change. The rejoinder is that, to be sure, politics is change, but politics is also ideas, values, institutions, groups, power, structures, conflict, communication, influence, interaction, law, and organization. Politics can be studied, and has been studied, in terms of each of these concepts.
