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Growth, Development, and Political Modernization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Karl de Schweinitz JR
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In the already vast, and rapidly expanding, literature of political modernization, it is rather surprising that little use has been made of the concept of growth, while development, with all its ambiguities, has become a fixture. This perhaps reflects the selective methodological influence of economics, where development is a fairly well-defined research field concerned with problems of countries with low per capita income. What needs to be underscored, however, is that in economic usage development is intimately related to growth. In this paper I propose to discuss the distinction between growth and development in economics and then attempt to draw a similar distinction for politics, emphasizing throughout the implications of the historical sequence and timing of these processes for modernization.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , July 1970 , pp. 518 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1970

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References

1 When it has been used in the literature, political growth seems to have been less an analytical concept than a stylistic variation of political development. See, for example, Hal, Chong-Do and Schneider, Jeanne, “A Critique of Current Studies in Political Development and Modernization,” Social Research, xxxv (Spring 1968), 143Google Scholar; Mazrui, AH A., “From Social Darwinism to Current Theories of Modernization: A Tradition of Analysis,” World Politics, xxi (October 1968), 75Google Scholar; Rustow, Dankwart A., A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington 1967), 131Google Scholar.

2 Dowd, Douglas F., “Some Issues of Economic Development and of Development Economics,” Journal of Economic Issues, 1 (September 1967), 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Kindleberger, Charles P., Economic Development (New York 1965), 3Google Scholar.

4 It is a mistake to think of Japan in mid-nineteenth century as we think of the less developed economies today. Its state of economic developedness was then closer to the European level than to the present Asian level. Cf. Allen, G. C., A Short Economic History of Modern Japan (London 1962), 13–29Google Scholar; Crawcour, E. Sydney, “The Tokugawa Heritage,” in Lockwood, W. W., ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan (Princeton 1965), 17–44Google Scholar; Lockwood, W. W., The Economic Development of Japan: Growth and Structural Change, 1868–1938 (Princeton 1954), 3–37Google Scholar.

5 The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is a salutary reminder that the poor economies of the world did not view the trade policies of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as being in their interests before or after the Kennedy Round negotiations were concluded.

6 In the literature of economic development these are referred to as polarization effects—Albert Hirschman, O., The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven 1958), 187Google Scholar–90—or backwash effects—Myrdal, G., Rich Lands and Poor (New York 1957), 23–38Google Scholar.

7 It is Ragnar Nurkse who has done the most to point up the differences between the trade positions of the underdeveloped economies today and of the developed economies in the nineteenth century. See his essays collected in, Haberler, Gottfried and Stern, Robert M., eds., Equilibrium and Growth in the World Economy (Cambridge, Mass. 1961Google Scholar).

8 The distinction between growth and development has been made vivid for me by my colleagues who worked on the Northwestern University AID project in Liberia during 1961 and 1962. See Clower, Robert W., Dalton, George, Harwitz, Mitchell, Walters, A. A., Growth Without Development (Evanston 1966Google Scholar).

9 It should be clear that my understanding of input and output, constrained as it is by economic usage, differs from Professor Almond's usage as he analyzed his understanding of it in the introductory chapter of Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960), 3–64Google Scholar; my definitions are narrower than his, focusing more on government and less on society, though it also should be clear in the text that I am very much aware of the relevance of his input functions for political development.

10 On public goods see Olson, Mancur Jr., “Economics, Sociology, and the Best of all Possible Worlds,” Public Interest, No. 12 (Summer 1968), 96–118Google Scholar; Olson, , The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass. 1965), 5–52Google Scholar; Musgrave, Richard, The Theory of Public Finance (New York 1959), 8Google Scholar; Samuelson, Paul A., “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics, xxxvi (November 1954), 387CrossRefGoogle Scholar–90; Samuelson, , “Aspects of Public Expenditure Theories,” Review of Economics and Statistics, xxxvi (November 1958), 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar–38.

11 My definition of political goods is thus more restricted than Professor Pennock's, which makes them synonymous with those political goals whose fulfillment makes the polity essential: security, welfare, justice, liberty. Pennock, J. Roland, “Political Development, Political Systems, and Political Goods,” World Politics, xvii (April 1966), 415CrossRefGoogle Scholar–34. In being more restricted, the definition suggests an approach to the formidable task of measuring political activity. See my “On Measuring Political Performance”, Comparative Political Studies, II (January 1970), 503Google Scholar–11.

12 I do not want to give the impression that economic growth is a process devoid of coercion. The historical evidence on this point is all too clear. See my “Economic Growth, Coercion, and Freedom,” World Politics, ix (January 1957), 166Google Scholar–92 and “Accelerated Investment as a Force in Economic Development,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXXIII (August 1959), 499–502Google Scholar.

13 John D. Montgomery has recently made the same observation, but perhaps more judiciously. “Nearly everyone would concede that economic growth, however measured, is good; wealth has its problems, but most people consider it desirable. Yet even if changes in the capacities of government to use power could be measured, not everyone would agree that this form of growth is inherently desirable.” “The Quest for Political Development,” Comparative Politics, 1 (January 1969), 289.

14 This statement does not lend itself readily to historical refutation. The territory and people controlled by Ashoka in the Maurya dynasty of ancient India, for example, were apparently greater than the territory and people controlled by his grandfather Chandragupta. But it would be a bold man indeed who could claim access to convincing evidence about the authoritative services provided by the state in the two regimes. It is difficult enough to get a quantitative sense of these issues in the contemporary world, with all of its commitment to the technology of quantification, let alone the quantification of social experience in a pre-modern world that kept few records and had only the most rudimentary empirical sense. The statement therefore must rest on its a priori plausibility.

15 Max Weber's ideal-type political orders—the traditional, the charismatic, and the rational-legal—are, of course, models for effecting this kind of conversion. In the light of the history of the twentiedi century, especially the emergence of Communist states, we might well add a fourth ideal type—the secular-ideological.

16 Denis Goulet has put this somewhat differently. “However it be defined, development is a normative experience: it involves, for those who propose it as for those to whom it is proposed, central value choices about the meaning of life. Development is always experienced as good or bad, usually as both, but never as neutral.” Denis A. Goulet, “Development for What?” Comparative Political Studies, 1 (July 1968), 301. Those who argue that development is desirable tend to have a model of development in mind that satisfies the ethical values to which they adhere.

17 Rustow, Dankwart A., A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington 1967Google Scholar). The problem of timing in political development seems to be an issue that is particularly intriguing to scholars in the Japanese field. See Scalapino, Robert A., Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan: the Failure of the First Attempt (Berkeley 1953), 397Google Scholar–98; Scalapino, , “Ideology and Modernization: The Japanese Case,” in Apter, David E., ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York 1964), 93–127Google Scholar; Ward, Robert E., ed., Political Development in Modern Japan (Princeton 1968), 577Google Scholar–92; Ward, Robert E. and Rustow, Dankwart A., eds., Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton 1964), 440CrossRefGoogle Scholar–41.

18 Huntington, Samuel P., “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics, xvii (April 1965), 386–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huntington, , Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven 1968Google Scholar).

19 Arrow, Kenneth J., “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare,” Journal of Political Economy, LVIII (August 1950), 328CrossRefGoogle Scholar–46; Arrow, , Social Choice and Individual Values (New York 1951Google Scholar). See, also, Riker, William H., “Voting and the Summation of Preferences: An Interpretive Bibliographical Review of Selected Developments during the Last Decade,” American Political Science Review, LV (December 1961), 900Google Scholar–11.

20 Professor Kautsky suggests that here I have perhaps revealed an American ideological bias in favor of stability and opposed to conflict, i.e., the one is a “good” and the other a “bad,” and that I have implicitly equated stability with development. Suppose that conflict between political parties leads to a transformation of the political elite in revolution, which in turn leads to the creation of new structures and functional capacity in the polity. Is that not political development? The answer is yes. Professor Kautsky has hinted at a problem for which I do not pretend to have a solution, namely, the terminal points in time-series comparisons. Growth and development are processes that occur through time and we may perceive them by viewing a system at two different points in time. Our perception dien may vary tremendously depending upon our choice of terminal dates. This, of course, is a familiar problem in economics; seasonal variations in income and employment data, for example, may distort our picture of annual economic performance unless they are somehow adjusted or taken into account. A similar problem arises in the making of political comparisons. It surely affects our sense of growth and development whether we compare the French polity in 1788 and 1792 or in 1788 and 1888. No doubt historians and political scientists use some kind of averaging method when diey examine historical processes. This, I suppose, is manifest in the staging or periodizing of history-the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Tokugawa Japan, Elizabethan England, and so on. While clearly this is necessary if we are to comprehend the opaque history of human behavior, it nonetheless is true that the use of time analytically in the literature of modernization is loose, vague, and highly subjective. So conflict may or may not generate political development, depending upon the vantage point from which it is viewed.

21 For optimal resource allocation in a competitive economy the actions of producers and consumers must be independent of one another, i.e., there can be no external effects of market transactions on parties unrepresented in them. Logically there are two types of externalities—economies where third parties are affected positively and dis-economies where they are affected negatively. Needless to say, in an increasingly interdependent, urban, and industrial environment, the external diseconomies of individual market behavior are running rampant, as all To m Lehrer fans know. Hence the critical demand for the output of more public goods or what in this essay we are calling political goods.

22 de Schweinitz, Karl Jr., “Growth, Development, and Political Monuments,” in Muzafer, and Sherif, Carolyn W., eds., Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences (Chicago 1969), 209Google Scholar–24.

23 “This ‘heroic’ ethic takes three major forms-the military, the religious, and the sporting. The heroic ethic ‘theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die’ is so fundamental to the operation of the military that attempts to apply an economic ethic to it in the form of cost-benefit analysis or programmed budgeting, or even strategic science as practiced by Herman Kahn, T. C. Schelling, or even Robert McNamara, are deeply threatening to the morale and die legitimacy of the whole military stystem.” Boulding, Kenneth E., “Economics as a Moral Science,” American Economic Review, LIX (March 1969), 9Google Scholar.

24 As in so many other matters, Japan is a notable exception to the pattern of Western imperialistic domination, partly because the rewards for domination did not seem so glittering to the West as did those in China and South and Southeast Asia, but partly, also, because of the highly developed sense of Japanese community and cultural uniqueness that motivated the political elite to do whatever was necessary to retain their independence in the face of Western technical and military superiority.

28 Cf. de Schweinitz, Karl Jr., Interdisciplinary Relationships; Johnson, Harry G., “The Ideology of Economic Policy in the New States,” in Johnson, Harry G., ed., Economic Nationalism in Old and New States (Chicago 1967), 124Google Scholar–41.

26 Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960), 28Google Scholar.

27 Wolin, Sheldin and Schaar, John, “Berkeley: the Battle of People's Park,” New York Review of Books, xii, June 19, 1969, 31Google Scholar.

28 I do not like the phrase “political degeneration” any more than Samuel Huntington's “political decay,” for they both imply a stronger value judgment than I think appropriate for the phenomenon being described. On the other hand, “negative political development” seems awkward.

29 Needier, Martin C., “Political Development and Socioeconomic Development: The Case of Latin America,” American Political Science Review, LXII (September 1968), 889CrossRefGoogle Scholar–97. Needier also includes as another dimension of political development the extent of participation in terms of equality.

30 Cf. Almond, Gabriel A., “Political Development,” Comparative Political Studies, 1 (January 1968), 464Google Scholar.