Re: Modernization Theory

 Modernization theory hasn't been hegemonic since the late 60's, though. 
Dead Horse.
http://www.unc.
edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2001_07- 
09/book_hunt_modern/book_hunt_modern.html

Review by author of, "Ideology and American Foreign Policy."

Modernization Theory: Ideology or Fad?
review by Michael H. Hunt
Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in 
the Kennedy Era By Michael E. Latham. (Chapel Hill: University of North 
Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xiv, 288. $45 cloth; $18.95 paper.)

In the writing of U.S. foreign relations history, ideas are in. Prompted 
first by anthropologists interested in cultural systems and more recently 
by a post-modern preoccupation with language, historians have paid 
increasing attention to the underlying concerns shaping the outlook of 
policymakers. This focus on ideas has helped to demonstrate that policy 
develops within a constructed frame of reference. It has also helped to 
throw into the question the previously dominant realist paradigm. That 
paradigm asserts or at least assumes the existence of an objectively 
knowable international configuration of power and insists on judging 
policymakers by their success at grasping that international reality and 
responding with appropriately formulated definitions of the "national 
interest." Realist have not surprisingly resisted the notion that policy 
derives from intellectual constructs with deep domestic cultural roots.

Michael E. Latham’s treatment of modernization theory in its heyday 
attempts to dispel any remaining realist resistance. In five tight, 
carefully constructed chapters Latham makes the case for modernization as a 
potent policy ideology. He begins by defining ideology as "a conceptual 
framework that articulated a common set of assumptions about the nature of 
American society and its ability to transform a world perceived as both 
materially and culturally deficient". Specifically, modernization thinking 
posited a sharp distinction between traditional (read third world) and 
modern societies, with the United States standing as the epitome of the 
latter. It took for granted that development from traditional to modern 
proceeded along a single straight line. It confidently held that economic, 
social, and political change was interdependent within a society undergoing 
development. Finally, modernization advocates expected contact with vital 
modern societies to accelerate progress in stagnant traditional societies.

With this conceptual foundation laid, Latham goes on to show how 
modernization theory became orthodoxy within the social science community 
in the course of the 1950s as the third world emerged as a Cold War 
battleground. His chapter on the rise of what has been called the Charles 
River school of development (for the leading role of MIT and Harvard 
academics) was for this reader the most engaging in the volume. He then 
demonstrates through three cases studies the influence of both the theory 
and the theorists within the Kennedy administration during what proved the 
golden age of modernization thinking. The three test cases are familiar and 
well chosen—The Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and the strategic 
hamlet program in Vietnam. The characters promoting these policy 
initiatives turn out to be prominent academic proponents of modernization, 
notably Walt Rostow, Lucian Pye, Eugene Staley, and Lincoln Gordon. Under 
Kennedy, these and like-minded professors got not just to speak to power 
but also to put their hands on the levers.

Latham’s careful development of his argument, building especially in the 
case studies on a well developed literature, should leave little doubt 
about the importance of ideas that were taken as self-evident at the time 
but that in retrospect seem debatable if not wrong headed. It is hard to 
imagine a realist, however skeptical, not having to concede the importance 
of a peculiarly U.S. model of development in shaping Kennedy programs.

Like any valuable contribution, this book may help to settle one 
interpretive issue only to prompt fresh questions. First, does 
modernization deserve designation as an ideology in its own right? Or 
should it more properly be seen as an academic fad inspired by some more 
deeply rooted, widely held, and enduring set of ideas—what Latham calls not 
ideologies but "perceptual frameworks" such as manifest destiny and a 
missionary/imperial outlook important in earlier U.S. foreign relations? 
What in other words is the threshold test for ideology? Latham’s use of 
ideology interchangeably with "conceptual framework" within which other, 
deeper, more persistent ideas operate accentuates the question. Are 
ideologies and conceptual frameworks really the same? A landscaping plan or 
a course syllabus is also a conceptual framework, but are they thus 
ideologies? That virtually all endeavors are in some sense shaped by 
ideology does not mean that they all qualify.

Second, how important is ideology relative to other forces that commonly 
influence policy decisions such as domestic politics and the personality of 
leaders. Latham prudently makes no sweeping claims for the preeminence of 
the ideas that he examines. Indeed, he is quick to concede that 
modernization was but one influence at work shaping Kennedy's policy. The 
problem is that this interpretive pluralism yields an somewhat mushy 
interpretation. To test the importance of modernization ideas, Latham could 
have asked if policy would have been substantially different without them. 
Did modernization merely reinforce trends in Kennedy's policies, or did it 
in some sense alter those trends? Absent modernization thinking, would 
Washington still have thrown money at a Latin America seemingly imperiled 
by the Castro revolution and currents of anti-Americanism? Would relocation 
of Vietnamese peasants have gone ahead under U.S. auspices just as they had 
under the French and Ngo Dinh Diem, even if there had been no modernizers 
around to offer a rationale for isolating insurgent fish from their popular 
sea?

Finally, were the modernizers entirely misguided in their preoccupation 
with gauging the global influence of the U.S. model? Latham’s treatment 
suggests that these Cold War intellectuals were lost in a fog of 
ethnocentrism and nationalism. To be sure, the author makes a convincing 
case for a good deal of both. But there may be something more at work in 
the modernization idea—that in fact the United States had by the 1950s and 
1960s established itself in a rare if not unprecedented position of global 
significance. The United States was certainly an active, unrivaled cultural 
as well as economic and political force throughout much of the world. It 
was also taken by other peoples as the first modern nation whose path of 
development had something to teach whether taken for good or ill. The 
current preoccupation with globalism may be, like the modernization 
concerns of an earlier day, a fad whose simplistic response to a changing 
world will seem several decades hence charmingly naïve. But proponents of 
modernization theory may have been wrestling, perhaps not altogether 
successfully, with a phenomenon that continues to fascinate and baffle—a 
multifaceted hegemony that the United States has managed to establish 
around the world.

Latham, an assistant professor at Fordham University, will perhaps in 
future work return to some of these questions. In the meantime, he deserves 
congratulations on a fine first book that makes a clear and compelling 
argument on a topic of considerable importance.

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 10:53:40 -0500, Shelton Gunaratne <gunarat@mnstate.edu> 
wrote:

> Modernization Theory arose from the work of Walt Rostow, Daniel Lerner, 
> David McClelland, Wilbur Schramm, Everett Rogers, and others. Its core 
> assumptions are found in Parsons's functionalist theory. Many call it the 
> dominant paradigm.
>
> Dependency theory and the World-Systems Theory were instrumental in 
> discrediting the top-down Modernization Theory, which smacked of 
> "imperialistic" thinking.
>
> The complexity sciences, particularly Prigogine' theory of dissipative 
> structures, make a mockery of the presumptions of the Modernization 
> Theory: linearity and rversibility of time. It's a West-centric theory, 
> whose usefulness is quite doubtful.
>
>
>
> > ===== Original Message From "Alan Spector" <spectors@netnitco.net> =====
> > I have a student doing an independent study course on modernization.
> Basically, what I need is the titles of two or three books on 
> modernization theory that explains it in simple terms. The student is not 
> a sociology major and does not have a strong background in sociological 
> theory. This is meant
> > to be a basic, introductory course, and readability is an especially
> important aspect of these books.  So, if anyone can give me a few ideas, 
> that would be helpful. Feel free to e-mail me privately.\
> > thanks,
> >
> > Alan Spector
> >
> > spectors@netnitco.net
> Shelton Gunaratne, professor
> Mass Communications Department
> Minnesota State University Moorhead
> 1104 Seventh Ave. S.
> Moorhead, MN 56563
>
> Tel. (218) 236-4035
> Fax  (218) 236-2168


--
Michael Pugliese

http://centre.telemanage.ca/quotes.nsf/quotes/10c5c725e1cd24e58525687b00673a0f

Brainwashing - A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psycho-politics which 
is the Dianetics version published in 1955.
Psycho-politics is a solemn charge. With it you can erase our enemies as 
insects. You (psychologists) can change their (leaders) loyalties by 
psychopolitics. Given a short time with a psycho-politician you can alter 
forever the loyalty of a soldier in our hands or a statesman or a leader in 
his own country, or you can destroy his mind.

Use the courts, use the judges, use the Constitution of the country, use 
its medical societies and its laws to further our ends... By psycho- 
politics create chaos. Leave a nation leaderless. Kill our enemies. And 
bring to Earth, through Communism, the greatest peace man has ever known. 
Thank you."