The recent unrest in our society has made us once more aware of the intimate connections between economic and political ideologies and the development of sciences. This statement does not imply that I intend to address myself to the well-documented preferences of most governments for defense-related rather than socially significant spending, or to the political frustrations and problematic decisions that modern scientists have to face. Rather, I will deal with the general economic and cultural conditions of societies that provide a necessary basis for the growth of sciences. This dependence can be persuasively documented for developmental psychology, which exploits two traditions that are identifiable by certain philosophical, educational, economical, social, and political orientations. For the sake of convenience, these are labeled the "capitalistic" and "mercantilistic" traditions. The first has been dominant in the Anglo-American world, while the second has prevailed in continental Europe. I will discuss these traditions in the first two parts of this chapter, and in the third, attempt to synthesize these two trends in what might be called a relational or dialectical interpretation of developmental processes as well as suggest "what we must do" * in developmental psychology.