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MODERNIZATION'S DOPPELGÄNGER

Review products

DanielImmerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)
JeremyAdelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2015

PETER MANDLER
PETER MANDLER*
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Modernization theory has rightly become a central topic of twentieth-century US intellectual history. Not only does it represent a key movement in modern economics, but modernization theory's purposeful interdisciplinarity ropes in psychology, sociology and political science (at least), and makes it stand as one of the main pillars of the new interdiscipline of behavioral science that was so influential in the postwar Western academy. As an equally purposeful policy science, modernization theory also played an important role in a raft of postwar political initiatives—in the Cold War, in international economic development, in the organization of science, in counterinsurgency and the Vietnam War. This unusually fruitful (albeit often unusually destructive) intermeshing of ideas and politics has been neatly exemplified in the person of Walt Rostow, “America's Rasputin,” who parlayed a politically unpromising track record as an economic historian into a role as one of the principal strategists of the Vietnam War. Opinion differs as to how determinative modernization theory's ideas were; Bruce Kuklick has suggested of most social science in this period that it “served to legitimate but not to energize politics,” or, as a participant put it more trenchantly in 1949, “The administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination.” Still, most intellectual historians would be happy (though not necessarily proud) to think that their key concepts provided even support for the major political enterprises of their day.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 819 - 829
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Beginning with an extraordinary cluster of books published almost simultaneously: Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar; Engerman, David C., Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar; Engerman, David C., Gilman, Nils, Haefele, Mark H. and Latham, Michael E. (eds.), Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst MA, 2003)Google Scholar; and, leading the pack chronologically, Latham, Michael E., Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000)Google Scholar.

2 Milne, David, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York, 2008)Google Scholar.

3 Kuklick, Bruce, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, 2006), 15 Google Scholar; Leighton, Alexander H., Human Relations in a Changing World: Observations on the Use of the Social Sciences (New York, 1949), 127–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 A fine recent example is Tilley, Helen, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago, 2011), esp. chap. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War (Cambridge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is particularly original in combining modernization theory, communist developmentalism, and “Third World” responses.

6 Predictably, a decade after the cluster of modernization-theory books, we have now seen a cluster of neoliberalism books, of similarly high quality: e.g. Burgin, Angus, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Daniel Stedman, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, 2012)Google Scholar; Mirowski, Philip, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London, 2013)Google Scholar; and, for a broader interpretation of late twentieth-century history which puts neoliberalism at the centre, Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011)Google Scholar.

7 Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 13–14.

8 Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 59–66; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 113–14; “First Conference on Social Science Problems of Point Four,” SSRC, Washington, 2 Dec. 1950, 3, Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress, E125.

9 See, e.g., ahead of the curve, Engerman, David C., Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar, on liberal Sovietologists’ application of modernization theory to the understanding of communist systems; Cullather, Nick, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar, on a variety of modernization approaches to agricultural production; some of the contributors to Solovey, Mark and Cravens, Hamilton (eds.), Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and to Isaac, Joel and Bell, Duncan (eds.), Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar; and I would put my own book into this camp, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (London, 2013).

10 Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 13; and cf. 35, where he says something rather different, that it is “the political ambidexterity” of communitarianism that has “largely erased it from our historical memory,” about which more below.

11 The reference here is to Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age (London, 1965)Google Scholar, very much a product of modernization theory (and overseen by the modernization guru Edward Shils), though also critical of it and unremittingly anti-nostalgic.

12 See, e.g., Buck, Peter, “Adjusting to Military Life: The Social Sciences Go to War, 1941–1950,” in Smith, Merritt Roe (ed.), Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 203–52Google Scholar; and Williams, Robin M. Jr, “The American Soldier: An Assessment, Several Wars Later,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 53 (1989), 155–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, among many studies.

13 Cf., for example, Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 30–4, with the discussion of The American Soldier in Robin, Ron, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military–Intellectual Complex (Princeton, 2001), 19–25 Google Scholar.

14 Quoted by Milne, America's Rasputin, 87–8.

15 Wilcox, Clifford, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology (Lanham, MD, 2004), 2–3, 43–60, 77, 92–9, 122–9Google Scholar, distinguishes between his more “positivist” and “moralist” phases.

16 This fudge was also adopted by Margaret Mead, who deliberately chose to focus on the Manus people of the South Pacific for precisely the same reason, though she was no more a fan of a global monoculture than Redfield: Mandler, Return from the Natives, 257, 278–80. It is not the same stance as that adopted by Manning Nash, for example, in Machine Age Maya: The Industrialization of a Guatemalan Community (Chicago, 1958), which was confessedly pro-modernization and argued almost for the intrinsic compability of modernization and community integrity.

17 He was, however, aligned in Latin America with the cause of land reform, which Cullather places alongside community development as viable agrarian strategies before the late 1950s when modernization priorities (“yields, resources, and revenues”) won out. Cullather, The Hungry World, 106.

18 These qualities merit the high praise lavished upon the book by reviewers, but I cannot agree with those who describe the book as well written, littered as it is with malapropisms, typos and abuse of English: confusion of poring with pouring, people's with peoples’ (repeatedly: apostrophes a weakness throughout), clairvoyance with clarity, internship with internment, wallowing with (I imagine) languishing, absconding with stealing, diminished with minimized, grizzly with grisly, reign with rein, borne with born, intension with intention, detraction with distraction, foregone with foreordained, and defrocking with debunking; inventions such as “cheek to jowl,” “curriculum vita” (and “vitae” as a singular), “setting his heights” (for “sights”), “loggerhead,” “straightlaced,” “University of Indiana” and “Frances Fukuyama”; and correspondences to mean letters and “minuscule” spelled “miniscule” (to mention only some errors and none of the many infelicities).