THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE PASSED WITH SURPRISING speed. They have certainly fulfilled the imperatives of the curse: ‘may you live in interesting times!’. Too much has happened in too many places – on the moon as well as on earth. New movements, new ideas, new cults have emerged. Populations have multiplied and so have inventions. New centres of learning have been established and old ones have been subverted, not least by an overdose of political zeal. The sciences of man have developed – more painfully than was hoped and with fewer concrete results than was (and is) desired. I think we have learned that our efforts to understand complex social and political structures (including those constituted by governments and oppositions) may themselves founder (or flounder) in complexities. Some of those complexities are endemic to the subject of our study; others are the result of our own confusion of categories or of premature conceptualization; others result from overspecialization – and others from the hazards of cross-disciplinary study. Perhaps the cardinal error has been to seek too much – and expect too much – from a narrowly ‘scientific’ approach. We all know of cases on the heads of which one or other of these caps can fit.