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Max Weber may be the father of comparison in public administration, but Fred W. Riggs is its most distinguished contemporary practitioner. Forty years before Benjamin Barber published Jihad v. McWorld or Thomas Friedman published The Lexus and The Olive Tree, Fred Riggs compared modern and premodern countries and discovered that no words were adequate to describe what he found. So he simply invented the needed words. In the Riggsian lexicon, traditional or premodern states are "agraria," modern states are "industria," and states that com- bine elements of both are "pris- matic societies." Using these categories, Riggs brilliantly de- scribed premodern, postcolonial developing countries, and com- pared them to modern counties. In doing so he, like Weber, kept a particularly keen eye on bureau- cracies. Riggs's descriptions of prismatic societies are powerfully useful in our present circumstances and could serve to inform both policy makers and scholars.
The life and work of Fred Riggs are verification of the claim that comparison is the beginning of knowledge, for he seems to have been destined to compare. He was born in China in 1917, the son of an American agricultural engineer who was there initially to advise the Chinese on experimental farming and later to serve as a faculty member in the first department of agricultural engineering in China, at the University of Nanking. With the exception of one year in the United States, Fred's primary education was in China. He learned an early lesson in development administration when it became clear to his father that most American agricultural techniques were irrelevant to the Chinese situation. Indeed, his father changed from advising the Chinese to learning ancient agricultural techniques from them.
China was in chaos during this period. Although...