ABSTRACT
Statesmen in underdeveloped countries must be concerned both with accumulating political capital and creating infrastructure. W hile short term pressures may dictate the priority of working capital, long-term occupancy of authority roles-or indeed maintenance of roles that in the long run will be worth occupying-impels statesmen to consider the fixed capital of politics as well. For this reason, we will now turn to a discussion of political and administrative infrastructure. The idea of infrastructure applied to politics is not new. W hen political and social scientists began to think about the state as an organization for the achievement of various ends, it was natural for them to identify certain processes as indispensable to political production. Shils, Eisenstadt, Almond, and others have drawn the analogy between political and social and economic overhead capital in order to differentiate types of institutions and processes. Their argument was that some institutions and processes facilitate politics while others are the stuff of politics. W e might note that while the most ambitious project
1 Young (1964:579).
