Politics of the developing areas/ edited by James S. Coleman and Garbrial A. Almond

This book had its beginnings several years ago in a series of informal discussions among three of the coauthors of the present volume Lucian W. Pye, Dankwart A. Rustow, and myself-then all at Prince ton University. The discussions had been stimulated by some of the work of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council which had stressed the importance of moving from an "area studies" approach to the study of foreign political systems to a genuinely comparative and analytical one. At the initiative of the two members of this trio who were members of the Committee on Comparative Politics, a series of area memoranda were commissioned with the requirement that a common framework and set of categories be used in the area political analyses.

The theoretical approach of the undertaking had its beginnings in a conference on "The Comparative Method in the Study of Politics" held in June 1955 at Princeton University under the sponsorship of the Committees on Political Behavior and Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council. Two of the papers presented to the Conference, one by Francis X. Sutton entitled "Social Theory and Com parative Politics" and one by myself entitled "Comparative Political Systems," were experiments in the application of sociological and an thropological theories and concepts in the comparison of political systems.