Originally published in 1969 by the University of California Press.
Published 1998 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
New material this edition copyright 1998 by Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 97-13293
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ilchman, Warren Frederick.
The political economy of change / Warren F. Ilchman and Norman Thomas Uphoff ; with a new introduction by the authors,
p. cm.
Originally published in 1969 by the University of California Press.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56000-961-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. States, NewPolitics and government. 2. Developing countriesEconomic policy. I. Uphoff, Norman Thomas. II. Title.
JF60.I5 1997
320.1dc21
97-13293
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-961-0 (pbk)
When a young colonel, Yakubu Gowon, was installed as Nigerias head of state in 1966, he faced a formidable set of challengespolitical, economic, military, social, diplomatic, culturaland possessed a meager stock of resources, having very limited infrastructure at his disposal. In The Political Economy of Change, we examined how Gowon and others could best pursue those basic goals which political actors everywhere seek to achieve, albeit in different ways and with different emphases: (a) coping with and inducing social and economic change; (b) acquiring and/or remaining in authority in the present and in the future; and (c) building political and administrative infrastructure to support these first two objectives. To assess alternative strategies for pursuing these objectives, we introduced a mode of analysis which joined political, economic and social factors within a common framework. This analysis we called the new political economy.
In considering the status of political science at the time, we asked whether it had much of utility to say to real-world decision makers such as Colonel (later General) Gowon. We concluded it did not. If writing this book today, we would start by suggesting that readers consider the situation of Nelson Mandela and ask what practical advice he might be given by political scientists. This leader of a new regime in South Africa faces the same kinds of challenges and dilemmas that confronted Gowon. We believe that political science is presently hardly better prepared to offer useful guidance for practitioners of politics than it was 30 years ago. Indeed, the discipline has moved increasingly toward mathematical and deductive approaches to analyzing politics that are ever more distant from real-world needs. Though some advances have been made in perspective and methods, the most prestigious modes of analysis and prediction, those which predominate in disciplinary journals remain essentialist in their assumptions and reductionist in their methodologies, abstracting from rather than addressing the existential realities of political life.
As it turned out, Yakubu Gowon did not fare badly as a neophyte ruler of Nigeria. Within a year of his accession, that fractious state plunged into civil war, but the secessionist cause failed within three years, followed by a post-war reconciliation quicker and more complete than after any civil war in memory (Uphoff 1972). How much of this success was due to Gowons own good judgment and how much to certain advisors may never be known, but then seeking good advisors and advice is itself a matter of judgment. Gowon remained Nigerian head of state for five years after the civil war ended, but he was ousted by a fairly decorous military coup in 1975. His family was out of the country when the blow was delivered, and he went off to England to study political science at the University of Warwick.
We suspect, though this is only conjecture, that by then Gowon could have taught more useful political science than he could learn in his studies, given the orientation of the discipline. Like other social sciences, political science has retained, in the name of scientific rigor, a posture of detachment and objectivity that limits we think both its theoretical advancement and its practical utility. Its ontological assumption of a social universe that is essentially mechanistic and deterministic is continually belied by the course of events.
We appreciate the objectives and canons of the scientific enterprise as it has evolved over the past two centuries and seek to contribute to this enterprise ourselves as social scientists. But we doubt that the state of knowledge can be fruitfully advanced only by the kinds of positivist theories and methodologies that still predominate within the social science disciplines. Rigor has been so construed that it is inversely related to relevance. The new political economy proposed to reverse this preoccupation, seeking to bring rigor to relevance rather than vice versa.
This was not the tenor of the times when our book appeared, however. In their influential work, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry, Przeworski and Teune (1970) discussed four criteria by which good social science theory should be judged: accuracy of predictions, generality of predictions, parsimony of explanations, and specificity of explanations, so as to identify actual causal mechanisms. Przeworski and Teune delineated an inverse relationship between the first and second and between the third and fourth of these criteria, that is, satisfying one criterion means that expectations for the other will be met less well. Under such conditions, achieving generality is purchased at the cost of accuracy, and the desire for parsimony makes explicating particular cases a moot concern. Arguing that the goal for social science should be theories as simple and universal as Einsteins equation e = mc2, Przeworski and Teune endorsed generality and parsimony as the operative objectives of social scientists theorizing.
But such criteria have little meaning for real-world decision makers. While they must be gamblers of sorts, continually taking risks and never knowing with certainty what outcomes their choices will bring, they want to know how best to achieve particular objectives in this situation under given conditions. They do not have the luxury of dealing with abstract or general situations. More complex explanations would be acceptable if these assuredly increased the chances of making correct assessments and effective choices. So while the desire for simple answers and solutions is certainly strong among most political actors, still stronger is their desire for success, or for avoiding failure.
