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."

Globalization and Postmodern Developmentalism

A third successor movement to modernization, which emerged in the 1990s, was what would come to be known as globalization. While a thorough discussion of the intellectual roots of globalization discourse goes beyond what we can discuss here, it is useful to consider the relationship between modernization theory and recent discussions about globalization. The first thing to observe is that globalization is a phenomenon, not a theory. Reduced to its most basic element, globalization is the result of what David Harvey has referred to as "time-space compression": as a result of improved transportation and communications technologies over the past two centuries, there has been a continuously accelerating reduction of the amount of time needed to move objects, ideas, and capital across space.

Driven by the possibilities for profit that result from bringing things and ideas together faster than ever before, the capitalist world economy has unleashed unimaginable possibilities for intellectual, cultural, economic, and human exchange—and at the same time destroyed older systems of power and knowledge unable to cope with the incursion of faraway things, ideas, and capital. For most of the postwar period, Marxism (under the influence of Lenin and Luxembourg) and modernization theory competed for this role of explaining the geo-historical implications of time-space compression. Globalization as a term arose in the 1990s to fill the discursive void left by the collapse of Marxism (some tried to revive modernization theory to fill this space), and globalization discourses have contrasted themselves both to modernization theory and to Marxist theories of globalization, while at the same time borrowing freely from both of these earlier discourses. In essence, theories of globalization differ from modernization theory (and Marxism) in four crucial respects:

• A changed ethical tone: Globalization discourse contains both advocates and opponents of the process.
• A changed view of the state: Whereas the state was the vehicle of modernization, globalization discourse sees the state as eroded by transnational forces and of growing irrelevance.
• A heightened emphasis on the determining role of culture: Globalization discourse makes cultural analysis grounds for both judging and explaining the globalization process.
• A denial of convergence: Globalization discourse emphasizes geography and space as key variables for analyzing globalization. As these distinctions suggest, contemporary discussions of globalization are thus bound up with the postmodern turn more generally. Let us examine each of these changes in further detail.

Modernization theorists were always cheerleaders for the process they described: reaching modernity was a good thing, and the only worry was whether all countries would make it as painlessly as possible. By contrast, globalization is a self-criticizing phenomenon. On the one hand, there are those who see globalization as an unabashed boon, and they often do so for many of the same uncritical reasons that modernization theorists celebrated modernity: advocates of globalization share with modernization theorists the idea that the human race is in the process of creating a "universal civilization." Particularly during the first world economic boom of the late 1990s, there were many who discussed globalization breathlessly as the triumph of the market and democratization, with capitalism delivering all things to all people as efficiently as possible. As Alan Ryan put it, "Where Marx envisaged a universal utopia founded on the common ownership of the means of production and exchange, globalization in this sense imagines a utopia built around a free market."

On the cultural front, likewise, some see globalization as opening new spaces for difference, diversity, hybridity, multiplicity, and localism. For advocates of the process, the solution to the problems caused by globalization is to have more globalization. On the other hand, as a hopeful vision of consumerism itself as liberation, no one has built a politically compelling ideology around globalization—even if its advocates defend it mostly as inevitable. Ironically, critics of globalization attack it for the same reasons its champions celebrate it: as the triumph of capitalism. In the eyes of many critics, who form a kind of twenty-first century New Left, globalization is a cipher for the decline of community, a disregard for the environment, and a simultaneous exacerbation of economic inequality and cultural homogenization. In sum, globalization spells the triumph of many aspects of liberal modernization (all except the welfare parts) but without the gusto and the passion. Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the protesters in Genoa and Seattle at the turn of the century used the term "globalization" to refer to a more-or-less agreed upon phenomenon, despite differing sharply on whether they considered this process salutary.

The second way that contemporary discussions of globalization differ from modernization theory is in their conception of the role of the state. If the modernizing developmental state was the third world analog to the welfare state, then globalization sees the nation-state as withering away. Modernization theorist Lucian Pye defined modernization as "the diffusion of a world culture—a world culture based on advanced technology, and the spirit of science, a rational view of life, a secular approach to social relations, a feeling for justice in public affairs, and above all else, the acceptance in the political realm of the belief that the prime units of the polity should be the nation-state." For Pye and other modernization theorists, the nation-state was the fundamental force for the diffusion of modernization, disrupting traditional societies on the way to building welfare states. But globalization theory suggests that state-led development may have been a historical anomaly of the twentieth century. Where nation-states and national economies were the subject-object of modernist development, globalization theorists posit that nation-states are declining in influence and that the causal agents of globalization are transnational extra-state organizations, especially multinational corporations, the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The heroes (or villains) are international technocrats and swashbuckling entrepreneurs who push technological innovation and engage in "creative destruction." Even advocates of globalization concede that globalization involves a surrender of power to non-elected and technocratic, rationalistic transnational institutions. Inevitably, the decline of the state necessarily means the decline of the welfare state, which is a main reason for resistance to globalization in places like the European Union.

The third important distinction between modernization theory and globalization discourse is that the latter has a heightened emphasis on culture. Modernization theory focused on culture either as a dependent variable that would be transformed by modernization or as an "obstacle" to that transformation. Walt Rostow was typical in reducing culture to "propensities" that were exogenous to his developmental model. On a cultural level, modernization theory often assumed that diverse local cultures were giving way to a single world culture; the destruction of these cultures, insofar as it was considered at all, was justified primarily on economic and political grounds. However, de-emphasizing the state as a developmental actor has opened a space to make culture a more determining variable in the analysis of globalization. This theoretical opportunity has been seized in particular by anthropologists, who beginning in the 1980s began a desperate search for how to redefine their discipline as the last of their traditional subject matter ("indigenous peoples") disappeared under the pressure of globalization. By reinventing ethnography as the study of any local group, these scholars found a way to carry on the Boasian ethnographic tradition of assuming that culture is the primary determining variable in accounting for human difference. Continuing a tradition of protest anthropology, some globalization theorists have considered globalization’s destruction of local cultures as an unquestionably bad thing, while others have seen it as opening new cultural possibilities. Some critics even try to do both things at once, castigating capitalism for homogenizing world culture while celebrating the fecund imaginations of postcolonials for inventing new hybrid forms of cultural expression off the ruins that capitalism has made of their "traditional" cultures.

The fourth way that globalization discourse differs from modernization theory is in its emphasis on geography and on the diverse impact of modernity/globalization in different places. Edward Shils defined modernization as a "model of the West detached in some way from its geographical origins and locus." Daniel Lerner would reiterate the same point: "The modernization process... is (or should be) relatively geography free. Urbanization, industrialization, literacy, media participation and the rest work their main effects in general ways—with particular variations due to geography or culture as potentially important side effects." Globalization theorists, by contrast, have drawn from world-systems theory to argue that globalization paradoxically both annihilates distance and at the same time creates increasingly differentiated outcomes in different locales. Globalization suggests that some regions will specialize in industrial labor (such as sweatshops), while other places will specialize in services (such as software and nouvelle cuisine). However, these spaces are not delimited along the lines of nation-states, nor can they be neatly divided either into three worlds or centers, peripheries, and semiperipheries. Instead, as Frederic Jameson notes, "what used to be characterized as the Third World has entered the interstices of the First one." In other words, the interdigitated world of high rollers has nodes not just in New York and London but also in Bombay and Panama City, while the “ghetto” spans the world from the slums of Brooklyn to the vast shanties surrounding practically every tropical metropolis. Modernization theory, by contrast, stated that all countries would be sites of "High Mass Consumption" with more or less equal access to consumer goods and with similar industrial mixes. When their work has been at its best, globalization theorists have moved beyond modernization theory by examining the microgeographic patterning of developmental processes—in other words, how modern cultural elements coexist in space and time with non-, or post-, or pre-, or antimodern ones.

Implicit in this new focus on differential geographic outcomes in the globalization process is a denial of a central tenet of modernization theory, namely the convergence hypothesis. Modernist development theories (in both Marxist and liberal guises) ignored geography, since they posited eventual convergence on a single model of modernity. Even though they admitted that some groups were temporary "losers in the modernization process," modernization theorists emphasized that everyone would be delivered to the golden future of modernity. Globalization discourse underscores the fact that even though liberal capitalism won the political battle against Communism, there is no necessary happy ending because the welfare state was not the final destination of modernity.

One important faction in the critical school of globalization discourse was the efflorescence in the 1990s of what I will refer to as the postmodern school of development theory, and which included writers like Arturo Escobar, Ali Mirsepassi, Serge LaTouche, Gilbert Rist, Wolfgang Sachs, Gustavo Esteva, and Timothy Mitchell. The arrival of the postmodern school can be dated from the 1992 publication of the collective polemic The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, which, as the title suggests, pointed to a linguistic turn within development studies. Synthesizing ideas about Orientalism drawn from Edward Said, theories of power and discourse adapted from Michel Foucault, and the populist rage of the dependency theorists, scholars of the postmodern school spend their time reading and deconstructing what they refer to as development discourse. Modernization theory has been a preferred subject of attack, along with other programmatic schools of thought on development that the postmodernists grouped together under the heading "developmentalism."

The poster child for the postmodern school has been anthropologist Arturo Escobar, whose widely read Encountering Development (1995) purports to describe the "discursive construction" of the third world. According to Escobar, "the" discourse of development has taken place both in the literature on development and through development agencies in the postcolonial world. This "hegemonic" discourse has "essentialized" the third world through a "dominant paradigm" that has "privileged" economic narratives. Behind the humanitarian rhetoric, the real point of developmentalism has been to erode "poor people’s ability to define and take care of their own lives." Instead of conceiving of development as a “cultural process,” developmentalism reduces people and societies to "abstract concepts" and "statistical figures." Development economics, in particular, has historically "occupied the discursive space in such a manner that it precluded the possibility of other discourses." What other discourses? "A view of social change as a project that could be conceived of not only in economic terms but as a whole life project." According to Escobar, development discourse is geared not toward improving the lives of the postcolonial poor but toward extending the power of the developmentalists (i.e., the modernist development authorities). "In the Third World, modernity is not ‘an unfinished project of Enlightenment,'" Escobar explains. "Development is the last and failed attempt to complete the Enlightenment in Asia, Africa, and Latin America." The postmodernists believe that modernism in unredeemable. Not only does modernism essentialize (always in a diminishing way) (post)colonial others, but indeed, according to Ali Mirsepassi, "all of the 'liberal,' 'enlightened,' and 'progressive' triumphs in Western modernity have had their interdependent counterpart in utterly illiberal, violently totalizing, and destructive assaults upon other people." Postmodern skeptics decry the very notion of development as a powerknowledge regime for extending the scope of capitalism, as well as the World Bank and the IMF, institutions with classically modernist hopes for universalism. In the hands of Escobar, there is no sense that modernity itself is a fragmented experience, while for Mirsepassi, the emancipatory side of modernity is inseparable from its dimension of domination. Hostility to the Enlightenment and modernity (whether in liberal or Marxist form) is the unifying theme of the postmodern school of development.

In contrast to the monolithic views of modernists, Escobar claims to know what is happening in "real villages"; there, on the ground, "they have developed a hybrid model of sorts, ruled neither by the logic of modern farming nor by traditional practices." Escobar detects a third world that is "manifold and multiple" and "increasingly illegible to any known idiom of modernity." It turns out that contemporary Columbians (apparently the only postcolonials that Escobar has spent significant time with) have already erased all the modernist binaries of high and low, urban and rural, and so on. Always in a descriptive rather than prescriptive voice, Escobar claims that contemporary postcolonials, rather than succumbing to the modernist myth of economic growth, are embracing "a hybrid modernity characterized by continuous attempts at renovation, by a multiplicity of groups taking charge of the multitemporal heterogeneity peculiar to each sector and country." Their efforts at continuous cultural reconfiguration of modern and traditional elements resist efforts of development agencies to essentialize them.

In the postmodern analysis, postcolonial cultural play becomes the only authentic form of resistance (yay!) to the hegemonic discourse (boo!) of economic development agencies. The problem with all of this is not so much its analytical content—though in the case of Escobar, this too is often sloppy. The main problem is that postmodern discourse is guilty of the very thing for which it castigates developmentalism: it is not geared at improving the lives of the postcolonial poor. As Jonathan Crush points out, "To assert, like Esteva, that 'development stinks' is all very well, but it is not that helpful if we have no idea about how the odour will be erased." Beyond cheering the supposed cultural habits of contemporary postcolonials, the postdevelopment school has no program. Indeed, Escobar calls on intellectuals to "resist the desire to formulate alternatives at an abstract macro level" and denies that alternatives can come from "intellectual or academic circles." Having thrown out the social modernist baby with the developmental bathwater, these postmodernists find themselves incapable of imagining a plausible alternative on a policy level either to the modernist discourses of the 1950s and 1960s or to contemporary neoliberal discourses.

Although I have spent a lot of time in this blog showing how modernization theorists constructed their own national identity through the discourse of modernization, the idea that this is the only way that either the United States or modernity might define itself is merely wrong. (For most of this nation’s history, Americans defined themselves mainly in contrast to Europe, not to any other part of the world—and it may yet happen again.) Likewise, the conception that modernity must abject a (post)colonial other is an assertion rather than an argument. Celebrating "alternative ways of experiencing and knowing" is sweet, but it fails to answer what thinkers as different as Kant and Lenin have emphasized is the most fundamental question, namely "What is to be done?" This self-regarding refusal to advocate actionable programs for confronting postcolonial disempowerment represents not just an intellectual failure, but outright moral cowardice.

There is an almost neurotic quality to the way in which these scholars eternally return to attacking modernism. One suspects that what this school really represents is historionomic sour grapes: these writers are the intellectual offspring of the dependency theorists who considered socialism or Communism to be modernity’s highest ambition, and the failure of that project has thus condemned all modernism in their eyes. On an intellectual level, the inability of these postmodernists to articulate any viable policy alternative to modernism consigns them to permanent parasitism vis-à-vis modernist development discourse—and irrelevance from the point of view of policy makers. All postmodernists can do is celebrate "multiplicity," "destabilize dominant modes of knowing," and tear down the shibboleths of modernist developmentalism.

While pretending to iconoclastic radicalism, this amounts to conservatism: postmodernism undermines the national solidarities that have grounded North Atlantic welfare states from the late nineteenth century on, but proposes no alternative form of cosmopolitan or transnational solidarity in its place. It is corrosive, cynical, and decadent in a precise Nietzschean sense. Though modernism failed in many respects, refusing to think about how the aims of modernism might be realized in nondominating ways is an easy luxury for comfortable professors.

Modernization Theory in the 1990s and Beyond

As a formal theory, modernization had been discredited in nearly all quarters by the late 1970s. If there is one way in which the postmodern school of development helps us, however, it is in reminding us how much modernist ideas about development are still (inescapably?) with us. As Craig Calhoun put it, after the 1960s, modernization theory lingered on, “its intellectual status deeply suspect but its theories . . . more critiqued than replaced.” Even as the main development debates turned toward structural adjustment and neoclassical economic analysis, and oppositional discourses focused on gender, ethnic, environmental, and linguistic concerns, most Americans’ preconscious ideas about the differences between rich and poor countries did not change. In the collective view of most Americans (including intellectuals), poor countries and their peoples remained irrational, corrupt, inefficient, excessively fecund, technologically inadequate, incompetent, disease-ridden, superstitious, mired in age-old ways of doing things, and so on—always in implicit contrast to the happy success of our own country. As Björn Hettne commented, the idea of a radical distinction between modern and traditional societies, equated with “us” and “them,” continued to inform the popular image of developing countries, regardless of the theoretical incoherence or political associations of this sort of thinking.7Furthermore, the postmodern prejudice against big narratives meant that no master narrative emerged (at least until the 1990s, with globalization theories) that could replace modernization theory’s explanation for what was going on in the third world. Many intellectuals—to say nothing of less scholarly sorts—refused to accept the Marxian counternarrative but remained uncomfortable living in a world without a “big picture.” As a result, modernization theory survived as the unstated, undefended, but nevertheless omnipresent vision of historical change, even as the content of the category “modernity” slowly evolved.

Given the dogged durability of the central images of tradition versus modernity, it is not surprising that sooner or later, modernization theory would come in for a more explicit rehabilitation. Predictably, the collapse of Communism provided the initial occasion for the rehabilitation of modernization theory. Some felt that the American victory in the cold war had “vindicated” modernization theory, as Lucian Pye among others claimed. (Modernization theory would experience a boom in particular among bewildered former Sovietologists groping for a theoretical framework to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union—even though others pointed out that modernization theory did little to explain the dynamics of that collapse.) Although the timing may have been miscalculated, and the correlation between economic and political growth not quite as tight as first supposed, the so-called third wave of democratization seemed to many to confirm that “in the long run,” all good things do in fact go together. Furthermore, as Raymond Lee pointed out, the disintegration of Eastern European Communist regimes left “the First World as the only model of modernity to be emulated.” The person who would do most to try to put these self-congratulatory feelings on a firm pedestal of theory would be American philosopher Francis Fukuyama.

In his celebrated essay The End of History, Fukuyama claimed that, though unacknowledged, modernization theory had continued to define the historionomic horizon for most American social scientists. Through the 1990s, Fukuyama’s major intellectual project was to resurrect modernization theory by placing it on a firmer philosophical grounding. He was explicit in stating his debt to modernization theory and its technological determinism: because technology “guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies . . . all countries undergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another.” Fukuyama claimed that only bashfulness prevented American intellectuals from admitting that modernization theory formed their basic philosophy of history. “It is striking,” he has written, “that in all the rich literature on democracy and the democratic transitions published in recent years . . . it is difficult to find a single social scientist who will any longer admit to being a ‘modernization theorist.’ I find this odd because most observers of political development actually do believe in some version of modernization theory.” The time had come to discard the shame about modernization theory, for there was good empirical evidence, in Fukuyama’s view, that modernization “is a coherent process than produces a certain uniformity of economic and political institutions across different regions and cultures,” and that furthermore, this was a good and desirable thing. Like Lucian Pye, Fukuyama felt that the history of the past thirty years had vindicated Seymour Martin Lipset’s arguments about the correlation between democratic stability and rising per capita incomes.

Fukuyama sought to rehabilitate modernization theory by taking its historio-philosophical core, the convergence hypothesis, and grounding it in a Hegelian theory of history. “History” in Fukuyama’s terms, consisted of the history of an ideological battle between conflicting visions of civilization and social order. Fukuyama’s outré Hegelian claim was that the United States was standing at “the end of history,” a fact that permitted American intellectuals (i.e., himself) to apprehend the meaning of the historical process, namely that “liberalism in the classical sense” was the historical calling of mankind. Rehabilitating modernization theory did not mean a return to the “simpleminded and overly deterministic formulation . . . that posited that all societies would, in effect, end up like suburban America in the 1950s.” On the contrary, standing at the end of history in 1989, we knew that the ideological outcome of the historical process was neoliberalism. Everyone in the world that mattered could agree, according to Fukuyama, that liberal democracy and unfettered capitalism had become accepted as the only viable, legitimate ways of organizing human societies. The reason for this universal embrace of liberalism and capitalism, he said, invoking Hegel, is that these systems are better suited than any others for allowing individuals to achieve the mutual social “recognition” that is the existential aim of human life. (Although he did not argue it explicitly, Fukuyama apparently felt that the welfare state did not give as much scope for “recognition” as unfettered neoliberalism.) Although Fukuyama admitted that there remained some who would resist liberalism and capitalism on ideological grounds, he dismissed them as resentful and ultimately irrelevant losers in the modernization process. Eventually these losers would realize, Fukuyama claimed, that the historical game is up and would recognize that the way of “the West” was the only way. If Talcott Parsons was the Marx of modernization theory and Rostow its Engels, then Fukuyama is its Lukacs.

Before we turn to discussing how the ideals of modernization theory have changed from the 1950s to the 1990s, let us examine one last intellectual figure, the inimitable Samuel Huntington, who through the 1990s has continued to do battle against the liberal (and now neoliberal) program of modernization theory. During the 1990s, both Huntington and Fukuyama made widely read big claims about the state of geopolitics, and the divisions between the two can be traced to their differing takes on modernization theory. Both Fukuyama and Huntington saw cultural difference as the distinguishing feature of contemporary societies, but they disagreed about how cultural difference operated on the historical stage. Following modernization theory, Fukuyama argued that economic pressures tended to push societies, insofar as they want to be economically successful, toward a convergence on a high-trust model of “modern” social organization in which the state was best left out. By contrast, Huntington argued that contemporary history was leading toward a clash of incommensurable and irreconcilable “civilizations,” the latter term being defined in a Toynbean fashion. Huntington separated the cultural characteristics of the West from the techno-scientifically driven process of human domination over nature. Late developers could adopt the technical advances first generated in the West without emulating the cultural particularities of the West. In Huntington’s opinion, there was no reason to assume that material-economic convergence would lead to or even encourage cultural convergence. Because economic convergence did not necessarily lead to cultural convergence, Huntington rejected the notion that modernization was either inevitable or a good thing. There was no basis, Huntington claimed, for saying that any one of these civilizations was “universal” in the sense either of moral superiority or of having history on its side. Huntington instead seemed content to argue that simply because one of these civilizations was “ours,” we ought to fight like hell for it. Whereas Fukuyama adopted the neoliberal orthodoxy about getting the state out of social and economic affairs, Huntington continued to defend the conservative, militarist state as a requirement for keeping society in top fighting shape. Both Fukuyama and Huntington rejected multiculturalism and postmodernism—Fukuyama from a cosmopolitan-universalist perspective, Huntington from an authoritarian centralizing perspective.

Modernization Theory, Old and New

As the case of Fukuyama suggests, the 1990s witnessed the emergence of a new school of modernization, based on a philosophy of history spelling convergence on a universal, singular model of modernity. The idea of technologically driven historical convergence on single, interconnected, ideologically unified global modernity (curiously similar to the contemporary United States) has returned to popularity among American social scientists, policy makers, and pundits, providing theoretical credentials for a new agreement on U.S. development policy known in some circles as “the Washington Consensus.” Just as coeval ideas about the American national identity and mission grounded modernization theory in the 1950s, so, too, did contemporary conceptions of America’s national identity and international mission encourage its return. As during the 1950s, the apparent economic success of the United States in the 1990s, in contrast to the stagnation or decline of other countries (Southeast Asia, Japan, the former Soviet Union), provided the emotional underpinning to these ideas. As during the 1950s, technology (this time information technology) appeared as the driving force of history, possessed of an immanent logic beyond human control, making technocratic prescriptions seemingly value neutral and above politics. As during the 1950s, a global ideological challenge (this time from politicized Islam) galvanized efforts to market the virtues of modern civilization. Again, for a certain set of Americans, the definition of modernism came to resemble an idealized vision of the contemporary United States. And just as in the 1950s, bringing about organizational parallelism between rich and poor countries was the aim for post–cold war modernization theorists. The functional, epistemological aspect of the new modernization theory was nearly identical to the one in the 1950s, and with Fukuyama’s Hegelian rereading of modernization theory, it was now on firmer historionomic footing.

Although the function and cognitive operation of this new modernization theory is remarkably similar to postwar modernization theory, the substantive content of “modernity” at the core of the new theory has changed considerably. Among post–Gulf War I neoliberals (who sometimes, confusingly, call themselves neoconservatives), the definition of “modernity” has focused on the economic dimensions of American modernity. Reflecting the changes in the American economy from the 1950s to the 1990s, the old bottle “modernity” has been refilled with neoliberal wine. In the 1950s and 1960s, modernity signified New Deal ideals of collective action to achieve financial aid and social uplift. It signified the achievement of welfare states everywhere in the world that would more or less look the same. The postwar modernization theorists argued that modernizing states would impose a steeply progressive income tax, endorse social leveling, promote high-quality public education, sponsor industrial research, and intervene regularly to direct the economy. By contrast, neoliberals see not welfare guarantees but raw economic productivity as the United States’ grandest achievement, often arguing that it was the basis for the American victory in the cold war and the cause of the United States’ emergence as the unique global hyperpower. That productivity, they continue is the result of deregulation, which has allowed corporations and nations to realize their full economic potential. The current vision of modernity promoted by the neoliberal elite jettisons the old postwar idea of a state-led (if not state-owned) economy in which union and corporate leaders collaborate to set policy and production goals. Instead, it is unfettered “turbocapitalism” that is the essence of the new economic modernism.

Because of the changed content of the category “modernity,” there are crucial differences between what the new and the old versions of modernization theory have to say about change in the postcolonial world. Whereas the old version of modernization theory considered the state the vehicle for realizing modernity, the modernization theory promoted by Fukuyama and other neoliberals suggests that free markets lead to modernity. In economics, “structural adjustment” and trade liberalization policies dictated by the IMF have replaced the focus on state-directed heavy industrial production. In both cases the perceived economic engine in the United States—the state in the 1950s and the market in the post–Gulf War period—are assumed to be panaceas to underdevelopment. The World Bank justifies the evisceration of postcolonial state power by suggesting that the proper role for the state in the economy is to “steer not row.” In both the old and the new versions of modernization theory, the supposed agent of the growth process instead becomes the end in itself: development under the old modernization theory was equated with the penetration of the state into the social order, whereas development under the new theory has become synonymous with the penetration of market forces into an economy; “getting the institutions right” is the mantra of the new orthodoxy.

As John Brohman has argued, however, the differences between Keynesian-based modernization theory and its neoliberal successors belie important continuities. Both share a disregard for indigenous knowledge and popular participation; both favor universal rules of economic development, developed originally to confront the domestic problems of the rich nations; and both elevate Western values and history to a normative position. In politics, the new modernization theory is, of course, no longer motivated by the Soviet threat, but like old-school political development theory, it retains the notion of a transnationally comparable “transition” process, this time from “authoritarian” to “democratic” rather than from “traditional” to “modern.” Neoliberal modernization theory has found particular favor among the drafters of “transition programs” in Eastern and Central Europe, despite producing mixed results.

Neoliberals assume that with the demolition of trade barriers and the encouragement of further global economic integration, economic benefits will accrue to all in the world economy—though they are conspicuously silent on how to ensure that these benefits get fairly distributed. Avoiding this question, they have instead quietly resurrected Lipset’s hypothesis that economic liberalization “in the long run” leads to democratization. Leaving aside the issue of when the long run will arrive, or whether there is any tangible reason to believe that this linkage exists, it is certain that the 1990s ended with more global poor than it began with, and that even where democratization has proceeded, the vitiation of state power in the face of globalization in many postcolonial countries has made democratization a Pyrrhic victory. In sum, the neoliberal school takes on many of the worst assumptions of 1950s modernization theory— that what is good for the rich countries will be equally good for the poor, that modernization has the force of history behind it, that democratic accountability is unnecessary if scientifically trained elites (whether technocrats or entrepreneurs) run things, and that democracy is an inevitable epiphenomenon of economic liberalization.

So are the postmodernists right? In the face of this neoliberal vision of modernity, do we need to retreat into the purely critical stance? Must we lash ourselves to the mast of discursive theory to avoid the sirens of modernity? Were Horkheimer and Adorno right that modernity, as the highest realization of the Enlightenment, is inevitably fraught by a dialectic of domination? Or, to cite another angle of resistance to modernity, are conservatives everywhere right to decry modernity for its destruction of national sovereignty? What about Islamic radicals bent on imposing their own moral system on everyone they can get their hands on? What about unionized workers in rich regions who wish to preserve their protected markets and welfare benefits? Are all these diverse groups right to decry globalization and modernity as anathema?

The answer is no. The postmodernists and others may be right to decry the neoliberal vision of modernization, especially its naïve and often brutal ways of promoting modernity. But they are wrong to decry modernity tout court. It is the way the postwar generation and its neoliberal successors have executed their modernist dreams—not the content of the dreams themselves—that must be rejected. What we need is more modernity, not less; we need to realize the emancipatory promise of the Enlightenment, not scoff at modernity as either a moribund project or some sort of infernal machine that destroys identity, transcendence, locality, and meaning, giving nothing in return. Post- and antimodernists argue that fascism and Communism stand as indictments of the modernist project; and they are right to the extent that renewing a faith in modernity will require that we unflinchingly face the many earlier failures of modernist projects so as not to recapitulate them (as, for example, the Chinese are doing with the Three Gorges Dam). We must not allow these failures of modernity to drive us into the cultural despair of postmodernism.

The main reason to reject postmodern hopelessness is that, in addition to the neoliberal version of modernization theory, there exists a more hopeful moment in the contemporary geopolitical discourse of modernity. This moment appeals not to the rationalizing and economizing aspects of the Enlightenment tradition, but instead to its emancipatory and ethical dimensions. It calls for human rights, whether Michael Ignatieff’s modest form of respect for democracy, political expression, and the right to self-determination, or Amartya Sen’s more ambitious definition of human rights as the right to economic development. These scholars consider modernity’s most salutary feature to be not its economic productivity but its commitment to common, universal, inalienable rights. This human rights moment in the contemporary discourse on geopolitical modernity aims to build a moral order based on a transnational consensus against victimization, but without glorifying or sentimentalizing victimization. Interestingly, neoliberals often claim a natural association between their ideology and that of the more modest wing of the human rights movement: they claim that neoliberal economic institutions, by providing growth, will inevitably bring about democratization and greater respect for human rights. And while it would be a mistake to assume, as the neoliberals too often do, that a natural or necessary connection exists between neoliberal economics and the advancement of human rights, the possibility of finding a synthesis between the neoliberal modernizers and the human rights modernizers does exist. This synthesis turns on global, transnational institutions and a new transnational cosmopolitanism. The emphasis on democracy and human rights, when combined with international economic institutions, provides the material and moral foundation for building welfare institutions on a global, transnational scale. Only the building of such institutions would realize the emancipatory dimension of the modernist project, without which modernity is scarcely defensible.

The neoliberals are right about one thing: it is a world economy, and retreat into autarky is the commercial equivalent of Luddism. In a globalized world economy, therefore, institutions must be built on a global level. One of the central failings of modernization theory was that its emphasis on building nation-states meant that little effort went into promoting the transnational solidarities necessary to sustain global institutions. Each country’s modernization was a one-off affair, although foreign aid could be used to push these countries in the right direction. In the last thirty years, not only have few transnational solidarities been built (the European Union being a possible exception), but postmodern ideologies have eroded cross-class solidarities within nations, while globalization has eroded the power of states. Even more sadly, few voices in the ongoing globalization debate speak of the transnational solidarity that must go with efforts to build welfare policy on that scale. On the one hand, neoliberal advocates of globalization want no system of international taxation and redistribution to impede the individual pursuit of wealth. On the other hand, critics of globalization wish to slow or revise the process of globalization altogether. These two blocs collude in preventing the creation of welfare institutions on a global level. If they do not reject this vision explicitly, both at least believe that meliorism should be executed on a local scale, whether through entrepreneurialism, giving to the church or mosque, or protecting a local tract of old growth forest.

The way to promote a safer and more just world is not by retreating from globalization but by promoting more democratic forms of global governance. Between the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, financial institutions are the most elaborated of current transnational organizations, but these need to have their mandate both expanded and reformed so that social justice becomes an explicit goal. Debt forgiveness, international standards for financial institutions, and obligation sharing during financial catastrophes can be promoted by augmenting the power of the WTO and the IMF in ways that will let them investigate and enforce international transactions in much the same way that OECD countries regulate banking within their own borders today. International organizations are relatively well developed to fight criminal activity, though the legal infrastructure needs to be backed not just by national courts but by an International Criminal Court. To legitimate these and other new organizations will require the creation of global representative institutions, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations, but perhaps with an altogether new institutional foundation. True international leadership will entail the creation of multilateral governing bodies that can help move us beyond the dangers inherent in the perception that globalization is really a code word for a hyperpower that sets and enforces all the rules in its own favor.

Such transnational global institutions constitute the only way forward toward realizing the “good intentions” of postwar modernization theory, namely toward building social democracy on a global scale. To achieve this long-term goal will require recasting on a global level the kinds of national solidarities that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe, Japan, and some European immigrant societies. Such a cosmopolitan sense of identity must, in the words of Cora Bell, see “the individual as a citizen of ‘the universal city’—that is, of a single worldwide community of humankind, all of whose members are deemed to be entitled to equal rights independent of what their existing national governments are prepared to allow them.” There is nothing natural about such cosmopolitan solidarity—it must be imagined and evangelized. But what may give us hope is the knowledge that such solidarities have been built before, in nation-states that before were often as divided among themselves as global communities are today. Furthermore, these national histories show that nations and national solidarities have most often followed the building of successful state institutions, not the other way around. Building transnational institutions and governance thus can be conceived as a step toward, rather than the result of, transnational solidarities and a transnational civil society. The success in building such a dynamic in the European Union (in a region that was the most violent in the world in the first half of the twentieth century) provides a model for moving forward in this direction. Transnational civil institutions such as Amnesty International, the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Greenpeace can be enlisted to support the creation of more formal rules-based activity across state boundaries. The real challenge of globalization is how to build institutions that can be democratically inclusive and responsive on a planet in which there are seven billion voices to be heard, with a hundred thousand more arriving daily.

One way that Fukuyama moves beyond anterior “end of ideology” arguments is that he defends liberalism as an ideology and seeks to uncover its social and cultural underpinnings. Fukuyama realizes that if modern civilization is about nothing more soulful than letting some people have an opportunity to get rich, then it is difficult to defend it from the attacks of Zapatistas, to say nothing of the likes of Osama bin Laden. Some vision of a global welfare state remains the best defense of the Enlightenment as a global ideal. Recasting modernization around the aim of building transnational, welfare-providing institutions provides a much more compelling justification for the radical changes being wrought on the world than the banal encomiums to “efficiency” offered by The Economist, and a more realistic program than the neoimperialism being promoted by the regnant American foreign policy regime. The aim must be to actualize the best parts of 1950s modernization theory—its vision of a healthier, wealthier, more equal, and more democratic world. It is these benefits that the postcolonial poor want more than anything else, postmodern nonsense about cultural play and resistance notwithstanding. They want the Great Powers to live up to the positive side of the modernist promises that were made in the 1950s; equalitarian inclusion in global decision making on ecological, political, and economic policy; and an opportunity for economic improvement and access to a greater share of the world’s riches. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a speech on February 12, 2000, called on the rich nations not to use populist protestors against the WTO as an excuse for not fulfilling the promises of development. Calling for a “Global New Deal” that would spread goods, jobs, and capital among all countries, Mr. Annan asked, “Can we not attempt on a global level what any successful industrialized country does to help its most disadvantaged or underdeveloped regions catch up?” The promise of a global Fair Deal enunciated by President Truman in his Point Four address remains the standard against which the achievements of justice on a global scale must be measured.

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).