The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and The Passing of Traditional Society

Notes

NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958). The title page credited authorship as “By Daniel Lerner, with the collaboration of Lucille Pevsner.” It is unclear what contribution Pevsner made to the book. None of the documents I consulted and none of the people I interviewed could provide much insight on this point. Marguerite Kramer, one of Lerner’s MIT doctoral advisees during this time period, recalled that Pevsner may have done the crucial work of organizing the final draft of the book before it went to the publisher. Kramer did not believe Pevsner wrote any portion of the book. (Interview with author, February 23, 2005, Palo Alto, California.) Hereafter, authorship of Passing of Traditional Society is credited to Daniel Lerner. 2. Other scholars had earlier discussed the idea of modernization, but not in the context of a theory of comprehensive societal change. For example, Marion Levy in The Family Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 350–365, equated modernization to industrialization and contrasted the modern with the traditional. He also identified “bad communication,” along with poverty, ignorance, and disease, as one of the barriers to industrialization. Economists published other early and significant work on modernization, including Walt W. Rostow, The Process of Economic Growth (New York: Norton, 1952); Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Both were students of Russian economic history and formulated suggestions for the modernization of the postcolonial world from Russian experiences with economic development. 3. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 23, 26, 25, 23, 26–27, 26. 4. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 53, 72, 73, 47, 45; emphasis original. 5. Charles M. Wolfson, “Modernizing the Mideast,” CBSNews.com, December 13, 2002, available at www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/13/opinion/diplomatic/ (accessed August 1, 2003). This story was a follow-up to a news item about a speech that Colin Powell delivered at the Heritage Foundation on December 12. The CBSNews.com story reporting the Powell speech was headlined “Modernizing Arab Society,” available at www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/12/world/main532877.shtml?source=search_story (accessed August 1, 2003). 6. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 76–85. 7. Ibid., 47. 8. Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick, Theories of Development (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 35–40. 9. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 47–65. 10. Everett M. Rogers and Lynne Svenning, Modernization among Peasants: The Impact of Communication (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 19–41. 11. Emil Lengyel, untitled review of Passing of Traditional Society, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 321 (Jan. 1959): 162. 12. Morroe Berger, untitled review of Passing of Traditional Society, Public Opinion Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1958): 427. 13. John Badeau, untitled review of Passing of Traditional Society, American Political Science Review 53, no. 4 (1959): 1135. 14. Myron Weiner, “Daniel Lerner,” PS 14, no. 1 (1981): 132. 15. Marsha Pripstein Posusney, “Enduring Authoritarianism: Middle East Lessons for Comparative Theory,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004): 127–138; Mark Levy and Indrajit Banerjee, “Urban Entrepreneurs, ICTs, and Emerging Theories: A New Direction for Development Communication,” Asian Journal of Communication 18, no. 4 (2008): 306. 16. P . M. Mahar, untitled review of Passing of Traditional Society, American Journal of Sociology 65, no. 1 (1959): 110. 17. Elie A. Salem, untitled review of Passing of Traditional Society, Political Science Quarterly 74, no. 1 (1959): 129. 18. John Gulick, untitled review of Passing of Traditional Society, American Anthropologist 61, no. 1 (1959): 136. 19. Edward Banfield, “American Foreign Aid Doctrines,” in Why Foreign Aid: Two Messages by President Kennedy and Essays, ed. Robert A. Gordon (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1959), 16, 13. On Huntington, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 228–231. Also see Samuel Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (1965): 391–393, where he questioned the very categories of development and modernization and also the ability of modernization to bring about political and economic stability in the postcolonial world even after infusions of Western technical aid. 20. Inayatullah, “Toward a Non-Western Model of Development,” in Communication and Change in the Developing Countries, ed. Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1967), 100. 21. Ali Mazrui, “From Social Darwinism to Current Theories of Modernization,” World...