90 SOCIAL SCIENTIST academics and the policy planning establishment in the post-colonial world accepted the research and the recommendations there as the gospel truth. Thus the focus on modernization and political development which came to us in waves from the American Universities and visiting academics. Modernization and political and economic development became the locus of both theory and practice. The high point came when Samuel P Huntington in a critique of the modernization perspective pointed out that the exploding aspirations of the people of 4ie Third World* constituted an overload on fragile institutions. Social mobilization, he suggested should keep apace with the level of institutionalization or the consequence would be a breakdown of the system. It was a conservative stance since it emphasized the need to keep social consciousness in line with the kind of institutions available, it implied a lowering of participation if states had to function ably—a roll back stance as it were, since in a major part of the post colonial world it meant that the participation sparked off by the anti-colonial struggle was to be deliberately neutralized. (Ironically enough about five years later the Trilateral Commission on the Crisis of Governability of which Huntington was one of the authors pointed out to the same malaise in the advanced capitalist world, governments there, it suggested, were burdened by an overload on the system). It laid the basis for an acceptance of authoritarian regimes and the attempts to control social consciousness, a case where political analysis becomes a recipe for the ruling classes. Analysis can never be innocent of practical politics, it results in sometimes uncomfortable consequences for the analyst. The most important development in the charting out of agendas was the taking out of the state from political analysis and its substitution by a plethora of terms such as systems etc. Political Science, declared the magistrates of mainstream social science, was to be emancipated of its normative concerns and made value free since values clutter up the methodological and cognitive field. I still remember the utter confusion my generation was cast into when as post-graduate students and subsequently young teachers we were told authoritatively by those who were responsible for syllabi that we had to dispense with the value oriented and normative concerns of classical political theory and engage with new and often mechanistic vocabularies if we wanted to be in line with trendy political science. The state was not to be touched as a conceptual object and this I may remark was at a time when the Indian state was indulging in the most brutal and unmediated encounters with the Naxalite movement protesting against the kind of state that had evolved since the heady days of post-independence. Hegemonies are unfortunately for the hegemonizer consistently subverted, the really exciting work in political science came to be carried out outside the ambit of the mainstream American Social Science Research establishment in the Miliband-Poulantzas debate.