The State-Society Relationship in Peripheral Countries: Critical Notes on the Dominant Paradigms

Conceptualizing the state-society relationship in order to explain its byproduct underdevelopment in all peripheral countries presupposes agreement on the definition of underdevelopment. Such agreement is possible only by making the concept less abstract. Dominant paradigms which have conceptualized the state-society relationship and attempted to explain underdevelopment have not generally been successful because of their failure to make operational the concept of underdevelopment and the corollary of their excessive reliance on “regional or local differences.”