Successor Movements to Modernization Theory

One direction in which some scholars turned in the 1970s was away from theory altogether. Ironically, this meant returning to the unstructured empiricismthat modernization theorists in the 1950s had hoped to overcome. Luckily for the scholars wanting to go in this direction, the 1950s and 1960s not only had been an era of growth for theoretical approaches like their own,but also had witnessed the emergence of Area Studies programs. These programs, begun by the Social Science Research Council in 1943 in response to the obvious lack of knowledge about places where the United States was sending troops, resulted in the 1950s and 1960s in the establishment on scores ofAmerican university campuses of research centers defined not by a programmatic or theoretical agenda but by a focus on a particular postcolonial region such as the Middle East, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Africa. Although these regions were themselves far from homogeneous, Area Studies programs did tend to focus on particularity more than modernization theory had. From 1953 to 1966, the Ford Foundation provided $270 million to thirty-four universities for area and language studies, and had further funded theprestigious and well-endowed Foreign Area Fellowship Program. Former modernizationtheorists making this move tried to forget that during the 1950sand 1960s they had, as Immanuel Wallerstein unkindly pointed out, "relegated empirical work (especially about the past) to the position of hierarchical subordination to so-called theoretical work." By the mid-1970s, Lucian Pye was claiming that the work of the Committee on Comparative Politics had always conceived of itself as operating in partnership with Area Studies programs. Still, the return of many modernization theorists to Area Studies programs must have felt a bit like going back to the village after failing tosecure a job in the big city.

On a policy level, development programs suffered the same constriction of ambition that was taking place on a theoretical level. As the high tide ofmodernism ebbed, development agencies in the 1970s propounded muchmore modest proposals than they had a decade earlier. The World Bank’s reorientation away from grandiose infrastructure projects and toward “Basic Needs” typified this shift in emphasis. After the early 1970s, it would becomehard to find development literature that claimed to be either providing orbased on a master development blueprint. For the most part, the new mood signified the slow abandonment of activist efforts to improve the lot of the foreign poor. Problems at home were bad enough; who were we to go solvingother people’s problems? Whereas modernization theory had focused on nations and conceived of the state as a transparent instrument for nation-building, new research focused on institutions and structural matters and suggested that postcolonial states had been responsible for creating many of the developmental disasters of the 1970s. The activities of self-interested stateactors came in for much of the blame for development failures, and by the late 1970s, antistatist ideologies and approaches were flourishing in every academicdiscipline. This change in attitude among sociologists and political scientistsabout the state dovetailed with changes taking place in the debate about development economics. Although the most vocal critique of development economics had come from the left, what ended up replacing welfare- and full-employment-oriented Keynesianism (in both the rich and the poor world) were monetarist and neoclassical economic policies. By 1980 development economist Raymond Bauer’s neoclassical Dissent on Development (1971) had become mainstream development economics, and development economics itself would be dying as a separate subdiscipline. No longer were the problems of underdeveloped economies seen as structurally distinct from those of industrialized economies.

In terms of the ideological responses to the collapse of modernization theory, former modernization theorists tended to go either toward neoconservatism or toward communitarianism, depending on which of the fundamental assumptions of modernization theory they considered most flawed. Neoconservatism appealed to those who remained committed to the "values of modernity"—such as rationality, scientific authority, and orderliness—butwho now doubted that modernization was capable of delivering a "technologically based, prosperous future that would obviate ideological conflicts." As the belief in a postideological age crumbled, these intellectuals—including Seymour Martin Lipset, Lucian Pye, and Gabriel Almond—began to suspect that the process of modernization might be part of the problem rather than thesolution. Instead of believing in a happy if boring modernity, these scholarsnow tended to agree with Daniel Bell in his 1975 assessment that capitalism contained certain fundamental "cultural contradictions"—in other words, that modernism’s culture of rebellion undermined the work ethic and social stability necessary for society to run smoothly. Mark Kesselman’s acid judgment was that for neoconservatives, "order is not considered a prerequisite for achieving the highest political good but itself becomes the highest political good." If earlier they had advocated establishing welfare states in the postcolonial world, they now hoped merely to maintain social and political order. In terms of the official U.S. policy toward underdeveloped countries, according to Donal Cruise O’Brien, neoconservatism resulted in a shift "from an initial and timidly reformist phase to one of undisguised conservatism and counterrevolutionary containment." In other words, by the mid-1970s, many former liberal modernization theorists had come around to the position that Samuel Huntington had been advocating since the 1950s; ironically, people would read this new unity backward into time and conclude that Huntington and thenew conservatives had always been ideologically aligned.

Whereas neoconservatism represented a "hard" reaction for disillusioned modernization theorists, communitarianism offered a "softer" response. It is no coincidence that many of the most influential works of communitarianism, from Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1984) to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (1999), were written by former modernization theorists. If neoconservatives continued to embrace rationalism and scientific authority as key values of modernity while rejecting welfare as a viable goal of social policy, communitarians made the opposite choice. While communitarians agreed with neoconservatives that modernity’s "overemphasis on individual liberation" had led to a destruction of common moral tenets and produced an "ethical vacuum," communitarians argued that the blame for this error lay in the assumption that "rationality" was the decisive cognitive element of modernity. Exemplifying the rationale of those scholars who moved from modernization theory to communitarianism, Amitai Etzioni lamented in The New Golden Rule (1996) that "after the forces of modernity rolled back the forces of traditionalism, these forces did not come to a halt; instead in the last generation (roughly, from 1960 on), they pushed ahead relentlessly, eroding the much weakened foundations of social virtue and order while seeking to expand liberty evermore." Communitarians argued that a successful welfare-oriented modernity had to be grounded in premodern values that would ensure social solidarity across social lines. Like other former modernization theorists, Etzioni believed that "order" ought to be given a new weight, reflecting his new sense that American modernity was not the acme of freedom but instead licentious and disorderly. Promoting the same vision of social stability and increased welfare that had animated modernization theory, communitarians rejected the notion that rational technocrats using the instruments of the state could provide these goods. Instead, "communal values" had to be reemphasized so that communities themselves could supply these goods. The ideal of a community grounded in essential value consensus revealed Etzioni’s continued reliance on a Parsonian framing of the "problem of modernity."