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Toward Further Modernization of the Study of New Nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Manfred Halpern
Manfred Halpern
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Where are we now in the study of new nations? Three books that are the product of nineteen experienced minds should help to establish our present position. Nation-Building grew out of a panel discussion at the 1962 meeting of the American Political Science Association organized by Karl W. Deutsch. Old Societies and New States reflects the work of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago. New Nations represents the thinking of that British school of social anthropologists who, beginning with Radcliffe-Brown, have been especially interested in problems of process, authority, change, and conflict in society.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , October 1964 , pp. 157 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1964

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References

1 Halpern, Manfred, “Middle Eastern Studies: A Review of the State of the Field with a Few Examples”, World Politics, xv (October 1962), 108–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Kling, Merle, “Area Studies and Comparative Politics—The Latin American Experience”, paper prepared for the Annual Convention of the American Political Science Association, New York, September 4–7, 1963.Google Scholar

3 This is the principal political theme of a document which had more impact than most in the course of its transmutation from policy recommendations to the U.S. executive, draft for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and finally text for thousands of students and citizens—The Emerging Nations: Their Growth and United States Policy, ed. by Millikan, Max F. and Blackmer, Donald L. M. (Boston 1961).Google Scholar Yet if, “[i]n short, the task is no less than to alter, usually quite radically, the outlook, skills and resources of the majority of the population” (p. 52), then interests must first be transformed before there is hope of aggregating them on any basis other than the accustomed distribution of benefits. There is also inadequate recognition in this book that economic development will be destabilizing (by altering values, demands, and power relations), needs to be destabilizing (in order to exchange old habits and institutions for the new that alone can make investments productive and secure), and that the crucial historical payoff of economic development lies not merely in satisfying effective economic demands, but in providing means for overcoming the social, political, and economic imbalances created by the revolution of modernization.

4 This is why I am baffled by a statement at the very beginning of Hagen's, Everett E. far-ranging and courageous enterprise toward synthesis, On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Began (Homewood, Ill., 1962)Google Scholar. He writes: “The study of culture and of primitive societies by anthropologists, of the social structure of societies by sociologists, and of personality formation by psychologists have been largely separate disciplines. They have reached a point at which they should be brought together.” But then he adds a footnote: “I do not mention political science. The newer school of political science integrates the three social sciences in the study of some aspects of social behavior, but it should not be listed as a fourth discipline” (p. 3 and note 1). I recognize that not only political scientists but Presidents have given aid and comfort to the holders of dais view. In Hagen's book, the political innovator gets little attention. Yet why should social scientists be less aware of the power of politics or political innovation than, say, Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen or President Gamal abd al-Nasser?

5 I have developed some of these perspectives at greater length in “Notes on the Revolution of Modernization in National and International Society”, to be published in the NOMOS Yearbook on Revolution, as part of a series sponsored by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

6 In the essay cited in the preceding note, I have tried to define “transformation” more abstractly and to discriminate among types of transformation. Here it may, one hopes, be sufficient to illustrate the meaning of transformation by example. Modernization demands of all systems of society the capacity which the scientific community already possesses: the ability to persist continuously in the enterprise of responding to the challenge of new questions, new facts, and inadequate solutions by developing, maintaining, modifying, and disintegrating systems of theory. That such scientific revolutions, even under the best of circumstances, tend to be discontinuous, conflictridden, and marked by considerable intervals of concentration on refining and enlarging existing systems, helps to make scientific transformations particularly characteristic examples of the revolution of modernization. See Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago 1962).Google Scholar

7 For a well-argued plea for the reexamination of traditional societies for their relationship to contemporary political alternatives, see Willner, Ann Ruth, “The Underdeveloped Study of Political Development”, World Politics, xvi (April 1964), 480–82.Google Scholar

8 Since different concerns do require different typologies, I have outlined portions of a typology of transitional and modernizing political systems in the NOMOS essay referred to in note 5.

9 One of the broadest, yet most succinctly stated, sets of indices for modernization may be found in Ward's, Robert E.“Political Modernization and Political Culture in Japan”, World Politics, xv (July 1963), 570–71.Google Scholar Among the most penetrating criticisms of current indices of modernization are the essay by Palombara, Joseph La in the book edited by him, Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton 1963), 35–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Riggs, Fred W., “The Theory of Developing Polities”, World Politics, xvi (October 1963), 147–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar