In recent years, the main meeting ground of the various branches of learning which in some uncertain way make up the social sciences has been the study of the so-called Third World: the forming nations and tottering states of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this enigmatical setting, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, economics, psychology, as well as that oldest of our disciplines, soothsaying, have found themselves in the unfamiliar position of dealing severally with essentially the same body of data.

Radcliffe-Brown used to define social anthropology as ‘comparative sociology’, yet the school of thought that he engendered has not been much prone to comparison. Indeed, in their revulsion from the ‘comparative method’ of their evolutionist predecessors anthropologists of that tendency have largely avoided formal comparison and left to the “non-comparative” sociologists the duty of comparing. The definition nevertheless still has a certain validity if one recognises that an implied comparison lies behind every ethnographic description and that the anthropologist's comparative range–that is, the range of phenomena regarded as belonging to the class under consideration and therefore relevant to a potential comparison–is wider than the sociologist's, since it includes “other cultures” (i) and traditionally primitive ones, while sociology commonly, if not always, confines itself to civilised society and operates within the framework of the values of its national culture. Social anthropology's claim to be comparative rests upon its awareness of cultural differences and its recognition of their importance in determining the forms which social institutions can take.

Il nous est impossible, dans le cadre de cette étude, d'entreprendre un traité de la structure de la vie quotidienne. Nous voudrions seulement mettre l'accent sur quelques thèmes qui seront utilisés dans des analyses ultérieures.

Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. ‘New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains.’ Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent ‘transitional’ societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in as far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm. It is almost as if its success as a norm of legitimacy were inversely related to its success in concrete implementation.

En principe, il n'y a pas de frontières entre la science politique, la sociologie et l'anthropologie; en réalité, les recherches sur le terrain utilisant simultanément les trois disciplines sont rares. En principe, les groupes sociaux n'ont pas d'existence substantielle; en réalité, les chercheurs finissent toujours par oublier qu'ils n'ont d'existence que relationnelle. L'étude de la politique locale dans l'Algérie rurale est un excellent exercice pour désapprendre ces manies universitaires: les conserver condamnerait à manquer l'essentiel.

All societies are constantly in a process of transition, but when we speak of “transitional societies” we mean thereby those in which the transitional process is particularly intense, entailing the substitution for pre-existing forms of social organisation of forms more adapted to modern, industrial society. The process of transition is relentless and cannot be turned on and off at the will of governmental authorities. In countries where there is no established governing elite the process continues nonetheless (witness Algeria 1954–1962). In other countries so-called modernising elites have managed to get a sometimes-slippery grasp on the social transformations occurring within their borders (Turkey under Attaturk and Egypt under Nasser). In yet other countries, Morocco being one of them, internally-divided political elites, while more or less aware of the immense implications of the transitional process, are incapable of resolving upon or implementing a concerted plan of action for dealing with its problems. In the following pages an attempt will be made to analyse the nature of the Moroccan political elite, and the factors that have driven it to the outer edge of the process of transformation of Moroccan society, a process in which the elite is but a marginal participant, a process over which there is but nominal control.