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This book challenges conventional conceptions of politics which focus largely on the institutions of government and the associated struggles for power around them. It argues that politics is involved in all the activities of cooperation and conflict whereby people organize the use, production and distribution of human, natural and material resources. Found in all human groups, institutions and societies, politics everywhere influences and reflects the structures of power, social organization, culture and ideology. These central themes are illustrated by drawing on a wide range of societies

Focuses on the relation between systems of power & systems of wealth & its implications for the political economy of development. Although democracy is radical in its promotion & protection of individual political rights & civil liberties, representative democracy is described as a conservative system of power. Democracy's conservatism is evident in its inability to define, agree on, or institutionalize social & economic rights, as well as its failure to take rapid & effective steps to reduce structural inequalities in wealth which new or reborn democratic governments may have inherited. The complex structural conditions underlying democratic politics are examined in relation to nations like South Africa, Venezuela, & the Philippines to point out the structural contradiction between the conservative requirements of stable democratic survival & the pressing transformative requirements of late development. It is concluded that this economic contradiction is the basis for the difficulties that plague the combination of democracy & development. J. Lindroth