Bibliographic Essay

The line between primary and secondary sources on modernization theory is vague, as many who have written about the theory in a historical mode have themselves been development theorists, and in this sense their criticisms continue a debate about “development” that modernization theory helped to inaugurate. Initial efforts to historicize the theory emerged in the 1970s as part of the attack on modernist development practice that I detail in the last two chapters of this book.

Focused on “development” rather than “modernization” but nonetheless the first significant attempt to historicize the modernization idea, Robert Packenham’s Liberal America and the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) stands up remarkably well after thirty years. Packenham explains the postwar efforts at development in terms of “American values and ideology,” though he did not appreciate how much the American national identity he accurately depicts as underpinning postwar policymaking was itself not a timeless artifact but rather a peculiar postwar product. A turning point in the recognition of modernization theory as a distinct body of thought was Samuel Huntington’s “The Change to Change” (Comparative Politics 3:3 [1971]: 283-322), which was also a demolition of the theory, as we saw in chapter 5. Carl E. Pletsch (“The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950-75,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 [1981]: 565-590) notes that modernization theory required the invention of the concept of the Third World, and that the popularity of both the theory and the concept of three distinct worlds of development in turn supported postwar redefinitions of the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. Michael Latham’s Modernization as Ideology (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) describes the theory as an ideology in the Geertzian sense, with valuable case studies of the impact of modernization theory on Kennedy-era programs like the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam, and the Peace Corps. He interprets the theory as a reformulation of older American ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism in more inclusive terms.

Recent historians have considered the impact of modernization theory not just on American ideas and policy, but on wider global audiences. Jeffery Alexander’s Fin de Siècle Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1995) describes modernization theory less as a social scientific theory than as a symbolic system or metalanguage that that provided its audience with a sense of meaning and purpose in a chaotic, decolonizing world. Gilbert Rist’s The History of Development (New York: Zed Books, 1997) considers “development” an element of the global “religion of modernity” that seeks to obviate debate regarding economic growth as the solution to all social and political problems. James Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) argues that modernization has operated as a “mythology,” not just in the West, but also at a popular level in postcolonial countries, where it has survived even as it has declined in significance among Western intellectuals and policy-makers. Yasushi Yamanouchi et al.’s Total War and “Modernization” (Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998) examines how modernization ideas supported the Allies’ view of the causes of the Second World War and its aftermath in Japan, the United States, and Germany. More dispassionate is David Engerman, et al., eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), which shows how America’s allies and enemies alike shared an enthusiasm for modernist ideas about achieving increased production and higher standards of living. Several of the essays in this book look at the diffusion of the idea of modernization into the wider popular culture, a theme also taken up by Jonathan Nashel’s discussion of The Ugly American: “The Road to Vietnam: Modernization Theory in Fact and Fiction,” in Christian Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

The “post-development” coterie has taken a prominent role in historicizing mid-century approaches to the postcolonial world. The unifying themes of post-development are an incredulity toward the very idea of “development” or “progress,” and a methodology usually heavy on linguistic or textual analysis and light on historical context. Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary (London: Zed Books, 1992) and Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) are the most widely cited post-development texts, though James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) and Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) are more thoughtful. Much of this scholarship reflects a search for alternative bases for opposition to current modes of global organization in the wake of post-1989 disillusionment with Marxist theory. Tom Brass argues in “Old Conservatism in ‘New’ Clothes” (Journal of Peasant Studies 22:3 [1995]) that these post-Marxist celebrations of “difference,” “diversity,” and “choice” merely replay timeworn claims in the name of populism. Taking the postmodernists to task for their lack of historical sense rather than their ideological nonsense are many of the essays collected in Jonathan Crush, ed., Power of Development (London: Routledge, 1995). One convoluted effort to analyze the historical roots of development discourse can be found in M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton’s Doctrines of Development (London: Routledge, 1996). More circumspect is Michael Watts, in “A New Deal in Emotions: Theory and Practice and the Crisis of Development” (in Crush, above), who argues that modernity is a negotiated process whose origins cannot be located simply in the West. Watts, along with Frederick Cooper in “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), connect development discourse in the colonial and postcolonial worlds and welfare state norms and forms in the industrialized states. On the impact of postmodernism theory on the social sciences generally, see Pauline Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

In the wake of the Cold War, there have been a number of efforts to rehabilitate modernization theory, beginning with Francis Fukuyama, whose reformulation of modernization theory in Neo-Hegelian terms remains a touchstone for contemporary policy debates: The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). See also Peter Berger, The Capitalist Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Lucian Pye, “Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism: The Vindication of Modernization Theory,” American Political Science Review 84:1 (1990): 3-19; “America as a Model for the World?” in PS: Political Science and Politics 24:4 (1991): 658-670; Edward Tiryakian, “Modernisation: Exhumetur in Pace,” International Sociology 6:2 (1991); Joel Barkan, “Resurrecting Modernization Theory and the Emergence of Civil Society in Kenya and Nigeria,” in David Apter and Carl Rosberg, eds., Political Development and the New Realism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994); Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). In “Neo-Modernization? IR and the Inner Life of Modernization Theory” (European Journal of International Relations 8:1 [2002], 103-137) David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah suggest that modernization theory can be partially salvaged by recasting the object of liberal modernization as the world rather than individual nation-states.

David Engerman argues that modernization theory emerged out of interwar American efforts to understand the prototypical backward land, Russia: “Modernization from the Other Shore: American Observers and the Costs of Soviet Economic Development,” American Historical Review 102:2 (2000): 383-416. The 1990s witnessed a recrudescence of modernization theory among former Sovietologists scrambling to understand what took place in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 1990s. For two withering critiques, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, of the post-Cold War return to modernization theory among former Sovietologists, see Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Michael Burawoy, “The End of Sovietology and the Renaissance of Modernization Theory,” Contemporary Sociology 21:6 (1993): 774-785. Homegrown Eastern European critics of post-Soviet applications of modernization theory include Boris Kagarlitsky, The Mirage of Modernization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995) and Ilana Shapiro, “Beyond Modernization: Conflict Resolution in Central and Eastern Europe,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v. 552 (1997): 14-27.

Of all the figures covered in this dissertation, only Talcott Parsons has a significant literature dedicated to his work, though most of it has taken place within the sociology profession rather than among historians (whom, one suspects, have long been repelled by his notoriously crookbacked prose). The connections between Parsons’s work and modernization theory have been more acknowledged than explained, and the influence of his work outside his own discipline has yet to receive systematic attention. Uta Gerhardt’s intellectual biography Talcott Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) promises to fill some of these historiographical gaps. My own interpretation of Parsons’s work relies on the work of his student Jeffrey Alexander, cited earlier, as well as Roland Robertson and Bryan Turner’s edited volume of essays, Talcott Parsons (London: Sage Publications, 1991). The transformation of Parsons’s social engineering ambitions in the 1930s to a conservative domestic ideology is explained in Howard Brick, “The Reformist Dimension of Talcott Parsons’s Early Social Theory,” in Thomas Haskell and Richard Teichgraeber, eds., The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Brick dates Parsons’s attempt to counter the rising might of economics to the late 1930s in “Talcott Parsons’s ‘Shift Away from Economics,’ 1937–1946,” Journal of American History 87:2 (2000): 490-514. Despite its formidable presence at the United States’s most storied educational institution, the Department of Social Relations (DSR) as an institution has been little studied. A useful narrative that tracks the formation but not the dissolution of the DSR is Patrick Schmidt, “Towards a History of the Department of Social Relations Harvard University 1946-72” (B.A. honors thesis, Harvard University, 1978). No other systematic historical account of the DSR exists, though various alumni have written memoirs recounting their own involvement in the department.

The most detailed narrative of the Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP)’s history is Fred Riggs, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Political Development,’” in The Handbook of Political Behavior (New York: Plenum Press, 1981). Riggs focuses on the rise of the term “political development” after 1960 and separates it from the concept of “modernization,” which he dismisses as an altogether different idea (though he does not rigorously distinguish the two). Paul Cammack in Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World (London: Leicester University Press, 1997) claims that the CCP aimed above all to block postcolonial democratic advances, and in his polemical haste continues the unfortunate habit of conflating the views of Samuel Huntington with liberals like Gabriel Almond or Lucian Pye. For a revealing look at Huntington’s personal ideology, see John Gretton, “The Double-Barreled Character of Professor Huntington,” Times Educational Supplement (June 29, 1973): 10. Quite a bit more discussion of the CCP is likely now that its papers have been made available by the Rockefeller Foundation archives in Tarrytown, New York. (The Rockefeller Foundation should be commended for rescuing the papers of the Social Science Research Council, which had been literally moldering in a Manhattan warehouse. Marvelously organized, the papers should prove a rich source for intellectual historians of the twentieth-century United States.)

The first retrospective look at MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) came from George Rosen, Western Economists and Eastern Societies (Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), which gave especial attention to the Center’s activities and travails in India. CIS veteran Donald Blackmer’s institutional history of the Center’s early years, The MIT Center for International Studies: The Founding Years, 1951-1969 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), gives Max Millikan his proper due as the spiritual leader of the Center, while downplaying the role and influence of Walt Rostow. On Project Troy and its relationship to the foundation of the CIS (and many other things), see Allan Needell’s Science, Cold War and the American State (London: Routledge, 2000). Quite a bit has been written on Walt Rostow, but the best character profile remains David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972). Kimber Charles Pearce’s analysis of Rostow’s rhetorical skills shows why he became the leading popularizer of modernization theory: Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001). Two recent dissertations deal with the role of modernization ideas in Rostow’s Vietnam policies: Mark Haefele, “Walt Rostow, Modernization, and Vietnam: Stages of Theoretical Growth” (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2001) and David Armstrong, “The True Believer: Walt Whitman Rostow and the Path to Vietnam,” (Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin, 2001).

There is a growing literature on the connections between the academy and the darker sides of the American cold war apparatus. For a crisp overview of the development of the American propaganda machine, see Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Ron Robin’s The Making of the Cold War Enemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) considers modernization theory part of the behavioralist movement, unaware of ideology and disinclined to think about power. He takes the Project Camelot scandal to be a cause rather than an effect of the changing mood about quantifying social science in the late 1960s. Ellen Herman dissects how modernization theorists such as Gabriel Almond, Harold Lasswell and Daniel Lerner contributed to the short-lived Psychological Strategy Board (“The Career of Cold War Psychology,” Radical History Review 63 [1995]: 52-85). Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University (New York: New Press, 1997) allows a number of prominent senior scholars to reflect on how the university’s place in American society changed during the Cold War. In the same ideological vein but less autobiographical in method are the essays in Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire (New York: New Press, 1998), which argue that postwar social science evolved to help justify the peculiar form American Cold War internationalism. Mark Solovey argues that social scientists adopted the natural science model in order to mask their ideological agenda: “The Politics of Intellectual Identity and American Social Science” (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996). On the postwar changes to the American university system more generally, see Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, ed., American Academic Culture in Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), especially Charles Lindblom’s essay, “Political Science in the 1940s and 1950s.”
This book’s original blueprint included a fourth case study, on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Comparative Study of New Nations, set up in 1959 by Edward Shils, Clifford Geertz, David Apter, and Lloyd Fallers. This institution, while somewhat more heterodox than the three discussed in this book, belongs alongside them as a key player in the story of modernization theory. Unfortunately, the Committee’s papers have not yet been made public by the University of Chicago archives, nor have Edward Shils’s personal papers, which at Shils’s request are off limits until 2045. Including the New Nations group would have had several benefits. First, it would have further underlined the importance of Edward Shils in the intellectual history of modernization theory. Second, it would have provided a context to discuss Apter’s work. Third, it would have provided a forum for discussing the quasi-modernizationist work being done at the University of Chicago by Robert Redfield, Bert Hoselitz, inter alios. Finally, it would have provided a place to discuss the early work of Clifford Geertz. On the influence of modernization theory on Geertz, see Nils Gilman, “Involution and Modernization: The Case of Clifford Geertz,” in Economic Development: An Anthropological Approach, edited by Jeffrey Cohen and Norbert Dannhaeuser (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2002). For Geertz’s own account of the Committee’s history, as well as his student experience as a member of the DSR and CIS, see Clifford Geertz, After the Fact (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 5. Like the other modernization theory institutions, the New Nations Committee dissolved amid disillusion in the early 1970s.

The first work to attempt to place modernization theory within the wider intellectual milieu of the 1950s was Irene Gendzier’s Managing Political Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), which connected modernization theory with other intellectual movements of the 1950s such as the elitist theory of democracy, anti-populism, and the end of ideology debate. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995) recounts the emergence of a “conservative liberalism” in the 1940s, in which holding the line on New Deal programs replaced the desire to advance the reformist agenda. A similar perspective on the dominant ideology of the 1950s appears in Richard Pells’s intellectual history, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1985). For an overview of the end of ideology debate, see Job L. Dittberner, The End of Ideology and American Social Thought (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979). Robert Collins (“David Potter’s People of Plenty and the Recycling of Consensus History,” Reviews in American History 16:2 [1988]: 321-335) and Daniel Rodgers (“Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79:1 [1992]: 11-38) provide helpful contextualizations of consensus history. On the Cold War role of USIA and the Chamber of Commerce, see Robert Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). For a survey of 1960s intellectual history, see Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998).

Other works that place development and modernization theory in historical context include: Gabriel Almond, “The Development of Political Development,” in Understanding Political Development, ed. Samuel Huntington and Myron Weiner (Boston, Little Brown and Co., 1987); Hans Arndt, Economic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Paul A. Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World (London: Leicester University Press, 1997); Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University (New York: New Press, 1997); Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development (New York: Routledge, 1996); Jonathan Crush, ed., Power of Development (London: Routledge, 1995); Nick Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State,” Journal of American History 89 (2002); Nick Cullather, “Development Doctrine and Modernization Theory,” in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, ed. Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns, and Frederick Logevall (3 vols, New York, 2002); Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World System and the Limits of Modernity,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); John Eatwell, Murrary Milgate, Peter Newman, The New Palgrave: Economic Development (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987); David Ekbladh, “A Workshop for the World: Modernization as a Tool in U.S. Foreign Relations in Asia, 1914-1974” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002); David Engerman, “Modernization from the Other Shore: American Observers and the Cost of Soviet Economic Development,” American Historical Review 105:2 (2000); Björn Hettne, Three Worlds of Development (London: Longman Scientific and Technical, 1995); Raymond Grew, “Modernization and Its Discontents,” American Behavioral Scientist 21:2 (1977); Dwight Hoover, “The Long Ordeal of Modernization Theory,” Prospects 11:4 (1986); Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991); Colin Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); John K. Lodewijks, “Rostow, Developing Economies, and National Security Policy,” in Economics and National Security: A History of Their Interaction, ed. C. D. Goodwin (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Ali A. Mazrui, “From Social Darwinism to Current Theories of Modernization,” World Politics 21:1 (1968); Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Vincent L. Rafael, “Regionalism, Area Studies, and the Accidents of Agency,” American Historical Review 104:4 (1999); Fred Riggs, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Political Development,’” in The Handbook of Political Behavior, ed. Samuel Long (New York: Plenum Press, 1981); Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); George Rosen, Western Economists and Eastern Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Catherine V. Scott, Gender and Development (Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 1995); Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money, Politics, and the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: The New Press, 1998); Simon Sretzer, “The Idea of Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility: A Critical Intellectual History,” Population and Development Review 19:4 (1993); Paul Streeten, “Development Ideas in Historical Perspective,” in Albert O. Hirschman et al., Toward a New Strategy of Economic Development (New York: Pergamon Press, 1979); Immanuel Wallerstein, “Modernization: Requiescat in Pace,” in Lewis A. Coser and Otto N. Larsen, eds., The Uses of Controversy in Sociology (New York: The Free Press, 1976).
For the modernization theorists “the modern” represented a total social vision that encompassed scientific norms of rational inquiry, as well as an underarticulated yet omnipresent formalist aesthetic of straight lines, clarity, and transparency. Frank Ninkovich’s observes in Modernity and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) that the modernization theorists participated in the conceptual revolution of modernity just as fully as avant-garde artists, writers, and musicians did. Jürgen Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) argues that “good” modernization requires equal emphasis on both the instrumental and emancipatory democratic-egalitarian dimensions Enlightenment reason. More ambivalent about modernity is Zygmunt Bauman, who (ironically) defines modernism as a quest to overcome ambivalence: Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). This definition helps to explain the modernization theorists’ “rage for order.” Daniel Singal (“Toward a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39:1 [1987]: 7-26) notes how historians have tended to erect a wall between economic, social and technical modernization and cultural modernism. This unfortunate habit forecloses interesting questions about the interconnections between modernity and modernization, such as the ones explored by Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Dealing mainly with the prewar period, Emily Rosenberg’s work has pioneered the notion of “liberal” modernist development as elite-guided welfarism: Spreading the American Dream (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) and Financial Missionaries to the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Paul Rabinow’s French Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) argues that the real target of the civilizing mission was the French themselves, and the colonies were used as laboratories for developing effective civilizing techniques for use back at home. Likewise, the modernization theorists’ object of study was always already not just the Third World but also the United States itself.

As what comes “after” modernism has come into clearer light, the contours of modernism have become more intelligible. Writing in 1979, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) was among the first to use the words “postmodern” to describe the outcome of the early 1970s crisis of the welfare state, the lowering of free barriers, the breakdown of American economic hegemony, and the decline of the socialist alternative—all of which were redefining global relationships between states, markets, and civil society. David Harvey expands Lyotard’s insights into a muscular Neo-Marxist theory of globalization in The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1990). Anthony Woodiwiss develops the idea of “social modernism” as a way of characterizing pro-New Deal postwar intellectual culture in Postmodernity USA (London: Sage Publications, 1993). Harvey’s interpretation of modernism also influences James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), which describes much of twentieth century development practice as a series of “authoritarian high modernist” attempts to impose linear order on mainly peasant societies. Georges Canguilhem’s brilliant work of medical history, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), provides an inspired way to understand the way efforts to define pathology (for example, Communism) always rest on unstable definitions of normativity.

The global macroeconomic underpinnings of the world historical break in the early 1970s is explained with reference to Eastern Europe in Charles Maier’s Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), which together suggest that the crisis of modernity in the early 1970s affected not just the liberal-democratic modernity of the West but also Soviet modernism. Both forms of modernity found themselves challenged by global economic stagnation and rising commodity prices (which, not coincidentally, made the 1970s the golden age of the Third World). The way that the liberal and communist forms of modernism responded to this crisis in large measure determined their futures: the United States jettisoned the full employment part of the Fordist compromise in favor of radical technical transformation of the economy—i.e., the decimation of the manufacturing sector of the American economy—while the Soviet Union and its satellites attempted to stay their ossified modernist course, setting the stage for their catastrophic collapse in the late 1980s. The locus classicus for understanding the cultural reverberations of that radical technical transformation of the American economy remains Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).