(A SOCIAL SCIENTIST autonomous ensemble of institutions operating according to some internal logic alone. In other words it gives us a perspective which treats the state as primarily a social relation and it explains much of the dimensions of the state which state centric theory has been unable to provide. What those dimensions are is the purpose of this paper. I. THE HISTORICAL MOMENT When we look at the political theory of the post-colonial state as a social relation, i.e. in its relation with society, three historical moments can be discerned. The first theoretical event that can be traced is the legitimisation of the state in the immediate aftermath of independence in intellectual and in political discourse. Apart from isolated voices that queried the very notion of the kind of centrality allotted to the state—I am thinking primarily of the Gandhians in India and voices such as Shivji in Tanzania which attacked Ujaama at a time when the Dar-es-Salaam University intellectuals were hailing it as momentous—the presence of the state in practically all arenas of private and public life was accepted as logical and desirable. From the benefit of hindsight, the confidence in the state as the prime mover in social political and economic life was phenomenal, very few doubts were expressed as to either the capacity of the state; the intentions of the state or the prearranged knowledge of the state in knowing what it meant to do, or the direction in which it meant to go. Social engineering was the main plank of the political agenda. Though the state was a rule bound entity in terms of constitutional limits upon action, the model of action—the notion of the activist state—allotted to the state tremendous power to intervene in the personal and the collective lives of its people. The confidence displayed in the state was phenomenal but perhaps understandable given the historical ambience of the times. Firstly, there was far less attention paid to the existence of strains and tensions within the nationalist movement than there is today. The dominant strain of the movement came to power and this fact alone gave the post-colonial state legitimacy and acceptibility which sensitivity to the alternatives within the nationalist anti-colonial movement may not have done. Secondly, the global consensus was in favour of the interventionist state whether of the Keynesian demand management variety or of the welfare state species or of the Soviet model of a command state. It was a consensus that precluded any discussion of the limits of state power which had accompanied the emergence of the modern state in Europe and which was the product of the democratic movements against absolutist states or the desirability of postulating the need for an autonomous civil society. In the post-colonial world the need was felt more because the state was expected to reverse the colonial legacy, build nations, resist ethnic fragmentation and carry out