4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST revert to its primitive role of coercion and abandon functions it had acquired in the course of 'civilisational development*. Hargopal makes out a strong case for the need of administrative sciences to get back to the study of political science and for political science to focus on apparatuses of government and not only on abstract concepts. Neera Chandhoke's paper 'Expanding the Marxian Notion of the Post-Colonial State* brings out the problems in state-centric theory which has characterised much of Marxist literature on the political. The focus on the state has led to the neglect of civil society which constitutes its location and whose political organisation the state is. Any understanding of the state that neglects civil society is incomplete, but on the other hand the recent theoretical shift to civil society without reference to the state is equally problematic. The presence of a self-conscious civil society which is conscious of the need to ground public discourse in its own space as a defence against the overpowering state is important, but the problem of resolving the crisis of civil society—that of oppression within civil society, the problems of finding an integral principle which would transcend the particularities of this domain to create an ethical base for the political society, remain. The tragedy of civil society has been that whenever such an integral principle has been found, whether in nationalism, fascism or a political party, it has resulted in the pulverisation of civil society, and where such a principle has not been found civil society exhausts itself and the state, however brutal or uncaring for the liberties and freedoms of civil society, continues to dominate. We are back in the theoretical space in which Hegel found himself but without his confidence in the universality of political institutions. NEERA CHANDHOKE