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Mandarins of the Future

Modernization Theory in Cold War America

Nils Gilman

Publication Year: 2004

Because it provided the dominant framework for "development" of poor, postcolonial countries, modernization theory ranks among the most important constructs of twentieth-century social science. In Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America Nils Gilman offers the first intellectual history of a movement that has had far-reaching and often unintended consequences. After a survey of the theory's origins and its role in forming America's postwar sense of global mission, Gilman offers a close analysis of the people who did the most to promote it in the United States and the academic institutions they came to dominate. He first explains how Talcott Parsons at Harvard constructed a social theory that challenged the prevailing economics-centered understanding of the modernization process, then describes the work of Edward Shils and Gabriel Almond in helping Parsonsian ideas triumph over other alternative conceptions of the development process, and finally discusses the role of Walt Rostow and his colleagues at M.I.T. in promoting modernization theory during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. By connecting modernization theory to the welfare state liberalism programs of the New Deal order, Gilman not only provides a new intellectual context for America's Third World during the Cold War, but also connects the optimism of the Great Society to the notion that American power and good intentions could stop the postcolonial world from embracing communism.

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Cover

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pp. c-vi

Contents

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pp. vii-viii

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Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-xiv

This project was conceived and researched during the Clinton years. At that time, I was struck by how much modernization theory’s relentless optimism and self-congratulation reminded me of the dominant emotional tone of Clintonian America. I considered Francis Fukuyama’s success in revivifying modernization theory a result of the theory’s comfortable fit with the...

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1 Modernization Theory and American Modernism

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pp. 1-23

On a steamy June morning in 1959, sociologist Edward Shils strode to the podium of a conference hall on the former Rockefeller estate in Dobbs Ferry, New York, to deliver the keynote address at a conference on the political problems and prospects of the “new states” in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. If the scholars and policy makers in the audience were expecting to hear about...

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2 From the European Past to the American Present

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pp. 24-71

It seems obvious that the past few hundred years have witnessed a portentous world historical change, a metamorphosis global in scale and unprecedented in scope. As modernization theorist Cyril Black commented in 1959, “[S]een in historical perspective, modernization is a transformation of the human condition no less fundamental than that which took place some eight or ten thousand...

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3 The Harvard Department of Social Relations and the Intellectual Origins of Modernization Theory

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pp. 72-112

As David Rockefeller’s International Development Advisory Board underscored in its 1951 report to the United States Senate, by the early 1950s, American policy makers and intellectuals were increasingly cognizant of the need to develop a comprehensive strategy for understanding the problems common to those areas of the world that would soon be collected under the...

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4 The Rise of Modernization Theory in Political Science: The SSRC’s Committee on Comparative Politics

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pp. 113-154

As the example of the Department of Social Relations (DSR) in the last chapter began to show, the promulgation of modernization theory flowed through specific institutional channels. These institutions constituted networks in which the lines between personal friendship, intellectual accord, and the emergence of social scientific consensus were often hard to determine....

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5 Modernization Theory as a Foreign Policy Doctrine: The MIT Center for International Studies

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pp. 155-202

Many critics of modernization theory have placed its anti-Communist politics at the center of their analysis of its meaning. They suggest that modernization theory was little more than an ideological reflex of the cold war: an outgrowth of the anti-Communist foreign policy of the United States in the chilly geopolitics of the early postwar years. One reason for this historiographic...

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6 The Collapse of Modernization Theory

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pp. 203-240

In the summer of 1960, a group of scholars gathered in Athens to discuss nothing less than the future of the earth. Led by polymathic urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis (1913-75), the Athens Center for Ekistics decided that the time had come for a comprehensive social scientific study to predict how the Industrial Revolution would inform the destiny of humanity. More than...

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7 The Postmodern Turn and the Aftermath of Modernization Theory

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pp. 241-276

In addition to the critiques from left and right, the years around 1970 also witnessed the emergence of a critique of modernization theory that I shall with some trepidation label postmodern. To understand this label, it is important to recall the ideological underpinnings of modernization theory, for these postmodern critiques were not so much directed at modernization...

Notes

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pp. 277-312

Essay on Sources

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pp. 313-319

Index

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pp. 320-329


E-ISBN-13: 9780801881596
E-ISBN-10: 0801881595
Print-ISBN-13: 9780801886331
Print-ISBN-10: 0801886333

Page Count: 344
Publication Year: 2004

Series Title: New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History
Series Editor Byline: Howard Brick, Series Editor