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Political Modernization: America vs. Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington
Affiliation:
International Affairs at Harvard
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Political modernization involves, let us assume, three things. First, it involves the rationalization of authority: the replacement of a large number of traditional, religious, familial, and ethnic political authorities by a single, secular, national political authority. This change implies that government is the product of man, not of nature or of God, and that a well-ordered society must have a determinate human source of final authority, obedience to whose positive law takes precedence over other obligations. Rationalization of authority means assertion of the external sovereignty of the nation-state against transnational influences and of the internal sovereignty of the national government against local and regional powers. It means national integration and the centralization or accumulation of power in recognized national law-making institutions. Secondly, political modernization involves the differentiation of new political functions and the development of specialized structures to perform those functions. Areas of peculiar competence—legal, military, administrative, scientific—become separated from the political realm, and autonomous, specialized, but subordinate, organs arise to discharge those tasks. Administrative hierarchies become more elaborate, more complex, more disciplined. Office and power are distributed more by achievement and less by ascription. Thirdly, political modernization involves increased participation in politics by social groups throughout society and the development of new political institutions—such as political parties and interest associations—to organize this participation. Broadened participation in politics may increase control of the people by the government, as in totalitarian states, or it may increase control of the government by the people, as in some democratic ones. But in all modern states the citizens become directly involved in and affected by governmental affairs. Rationalized authority, differentiated structure, and mass participation thus distinguish modern polities from antecedent polities.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , April 1966 , pp. 378 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1966

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References

1 For the sake of clarity, let me make clear the geographical scope I give these terms. With appropriate apologies to Latin Americans and Canadians, I feel compelled by the demands of brevity to use the term “America” to refer to the thirteen colonies that subsequently became the United States of America. By “Europe” I mean Great Britain and the Continent. By “the Continent” I refer to France, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and the Holv Roman Empire.

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36 Horwill, 169–70.

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75 Palmer, passim, but esp. 323–407. Of the Belgian revolution of 1787 against Joseph II, Palmer writes (p. 347), “The issue was clear. It was between social change and constitutional liberty. Reform would come at the cost of arbitrary government overriding the articulate will and historic institutions of the country. Or liberty would be preserved at the cost of perpetuating archaic systems of privilege, property, special rights, class structure, ecclesiastical participation in the state. It was a revolution against the innovations of a modernizing government—in a sense, a revolution against the Enlightenment. It was not in this respect untypical of the time.”

Compare this with Apter's, David conclusion that in contemporary Africa “the degree of autocracy which emerges after independence is in virtual proportion to the degree of antagonism the government shows to tradition” (The Political Kingdom in Uganda [Princeton 1961], 476).Google Scholar

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