The Passing of Development Studies ‐ Over the Shoulder With a Backward Glance

Abstract

FOR A POLITICAL SCIENTIST THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS represented a unique historical period. There were opportunities for research in new fields requiring new techniques. Indeed, the sense of newness combined subject, technique and moral direction in a singular synthesis. Words like nationalism, growth, independence, freedom, not to speak of the staged figures who personified them, Ghandi and Nehru, Nkrumah and Zik, Touré and Keita, Sukarno and particularly Mao and Castro, gave a peopled tension to what constituted not only new frontiers of independence but also moral events as new nations and new political forms made their appearance.