Book Reviews : Britain and South-East Asia. By SAUL ROSE. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962. Pp. 208. $5.00.)

• DOI: 10.1177/106591296401700131
• Author: Dean E. McHenry
• Date: 01 March 1964
• Published date: 01 March 1964
• Subject Matter: Articles

154
There is at present therefore only the foundation and not yet the structure of a mod-
ern, close-knit nation.
The study is not altogether perfect, notably in its asymmetry. Perhaps willy-
nilly, the author seems to accept a premise of Burmese public life by himself ignoring
systematic analysis of ordinary members of the ordinary, usually apathetic, public
in the city and the people in the countryside where resides a majority of what may in
time become a national public. The writer, like the elitists he has so skillfully probed,
has not really established receptive communication with ordinary people. How their
demands and frustrations compare and contrast with their leaders’ remains largely
unexplored. So Pye’s present study, as does his earlier and likewise deep analysis of
Guerrilla Communism in Malaya, lacks the breadth of research that has given us
insight into the psychology of ordinary people in the Middle East, in Daniel Lerner’s
Passing of Traditional Society. There is a tendency to depreciate analysis of eco-
nomic needs. And the writing at times lacks polish.
The book nevertheless is such a substantive advance over what he and others
have done that it is now possible to lay empirical foundations for general theory of
political development. While rigorously avoiding comparisons, the communication
of what is happening in the minds of Burmese leaders is so clear as to invite compara-
tive analysis. Is the urban district headman in Rangoon altogether unlike the pre-
cinct boss, like Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, who helps introduce Irish immigrants
in American society and politics? Is the authoritarianism and charisma in Burma,
so largely explicable by parent-child relationships, not comparable to the same phe-
nomena
in imperial and Nazi Germany? Such comparative studies, made systemati-
cally and not superficially, remain to be done. But such a sophisticated and systema-
tic analysis as this one of Pye’s makes such bold yet careful progress into the...