Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism, and Empire-Building in the New States

The concrete lessons of recent history have helped us to appreciate the paramount importance of the political preconditions of social and economic development in the new states. The basic problem of political stability must be solved before all others—or everything else may be in vain. For this reason, some of the scholarly attention that used to be focused on social and economic development has shifted to political organization and has given prominence to terms such as “nation-building,” “political culture,” and “democratization.”