AMERICAN POLITICAL THEORY 25 Perhaps the first clear reference, explicit or otherwise, to a concept of the development of a polity occurs in the political discussions of the English utilitarians,1 although the ideological roots of their concept can perhaps be traced back to Montesquieu or Adam Ferguson. To the utilitarians there was a specific problem of policy which related to their concern about the best methods for the administration of British colonies, particularly India.2 So they constructed the rudiments of a theory of stages of development of a society (the levels of civilisation, as they termed it) and the kinds of political institutions suitable for each stage. The most developed polity was naturally one which had attained the highest level of civilisation (implicitly, England in the nineteenth century !) and its political institutions were those of representative democracy, where the governing few were kept in check by the governed many through a series of stable institutional arrangements. Societies which were lower down in the scale of civilisation could not afford to have such advanced institutions, since the governed many were incapable of operating the delicate machinery of representative government. The best possibility of development of these backward societies lay in a prolonged period of benevolent imperial rule, whereby through progressive legislation and the gradual development of advanced political institutions, the level of civilisation of these societies would be raised. The concept of political stability, on the other hand, is as old as political philosophy itself. An ordered polity has perhaps been the ultimate concern of all political theory, and starting as far back as Plato's Republic, and particularly The Laws, the question of stability has remained a fundamental issue of political philosophy as well as political science. What is distinctive about the modern discussion on this problem is the necessity of relating the concern about political stability with the reality of social change. Nowhere in the modern world is change such a vital issue as in what is variously known as the underdeveloped, or developing, or non-Western, or "third," world. Specifically, the current Western literature on political development is expressly concerned with the relations between general social, and particularly political, development and the stability of democratic institutions. How far is social change and modernisation compatible with the working of democratic institutions? If there are incompatibilities, which should gain priority? And what, in the light of these relations, is the optimal strategy for modernisation? These are the central issues with which the theory of political development is concerned. II The years following the Second World War saw dramatic changes in the political arrangement of imperialism. It was a period of profound crisis for the traditional imperialist powers, Britain and France in particular. The process of decolonisation which occurred in the next decade or so had a host of contributory causes—the emergence of a new interna-