ABSTRACT
In recent years, the eight pernicious postulates have lost some of their hold. All the pernicious postulates assume sharp separation between the worlds of order and disorder. The most explicitly political application of that assumption separates illegitimate and legitimate forces from each other. Illegitimate conflict, coercion, and expropriation, in this mystification, include riot, rebellion, assault, protection rackets, robbery, and fraud; they result from processes of change and disorder. The worst version of the belief in social change as a coherent general phenomenon, from the viewpoint of practical effects, is its implicit version, the version built into standard methods without requiring any reflection of their users. Stage theories of economic growth or of political modernization had many attractions. Models of economic or political development normally specified the stages through which every developing society had to pass, explained the movement of societies from stage to stage, and sorted the world's contemporary states into the postulated stages.
