Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons

3. Four More Pernicious Postulates

3 FOUR MORE PERNICIOUS POSTULATES Differentiation Is a Progressive Master Process No doubt the marked successes of evolutionary models in natural history encouraged nineteenth-century social theorists to adopt differentiation as a master principle of social change. The specialization of work, the subdivision of governments, the extension of commodity markets, and the proliferation of associations all seemed to exemplify rampant differentiation. The invention of the simple, undifferentiated , "primitive" society as a model of the small, poor populations Europeans encountered in the course of their mercantile and colonial expansion articulated neatly with the same scheme. All societies fell on the same continuum from simple to complex, differentiation drove societies toward greater and greater complexity, and complexity created strength, wealth, and suppleness. The fittest-the most differentiated -survived. To be sure, differentiation always had rivals. Auguste Comte placed the advance of knowledge at the base of long-term social change; 44 FOUR MORE PERNICIOUS POSTULATES mankind progressed from Theological to Metaphysical to Positive society through the accumulation of sure, disciplined, and comprehensive scientific understanding. Karl Marx saw changes in the organization of production, broadly defined, beneath the carapace of politics and culture . Nevertheless, within the disciplines of the social sciences, two nineteenth-century hypotheses hardened into twentieth-century dogmas : first, that increasing differentiation was the dominant, nearly inexorable logic of large-scale change; second, that over the long run differentiation leads to advancement. After World War II, theories of "modernization" and "development " epitomized the social-scientific concern with differentiation as the fundamental large-scale social process. All such theories took the world's rich and powerful countries to be more differentiated than other countries, considered that differentiation to constitute a significant part of their advantage over other countries, and held out the creation of new, specialized structures as a major means by which poorer and less powerful countries could come to share the comforts of the rich and powerful. These theories connected closely with an improving program, a program of deliberately inducing development. Both theories and program, in their turn, rested on an optimistic ideology. The ideology, as F. X. Sutton has reminded us, involved three central tenets: "(1) the capacity of governments as agents and guides to development; (2) the efficacy of education and training; and (3) the possibility of mutually beneficent cooperation between rich and poor countries in an equitable international order" (Sutton 1982: 53). Early United Nations programs of aid to poor countries embodied the ideology and promoted the spread of the associated theories; for all their cantankerous variation, academic specialists in development shared a certain confidence in the three tenets. They took on the mission of building theories that would simultaneously explain and guide the development of one country after another. All such theories established a continuum of societies having rich Western countries at one end; they were, obviously, "modern" and "developed." Economists had the easiest time of it. For many of them, development came to mean increasing national income, or income per capita. Whatever one could say about the difficulties of measuring DIFFERENTIATION IS A PROGRESSIVE MASTER PROCESS 45 national income accurately and in comparable terms, as a criterion of development national income had splendid virtues: Properly measured, it provided a principle on which all countries could be ranked with little ambiguity. 2 Those countries which economists generally regarded as most advanced unquestionably stood at the top of the scale. 3 Countries in all parts of the world were moving up the scale with few important reversals. 4 Position on the scale clearly (if imperfectly) correlated with international power, material well-being, and a great deal more. With that imperfect correlation, however, the troubles began. For political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others took on the job of specifying, measuring, explaining, and even promoting the other changes that presumably accompanied rising national income. Political development, communications development, educational development, and a dozen other forms of development came into being. A new vocabulary proliferated: developing countries, underdevelopment , late developers, and so on. Whatever other virtues these multifarious criteria of development had, none of them matched national income in simplicity or efficacy: International rankings remained quite arguable, odd countries kept showing up near the tops of the relevant scales, the continuous drift of the world's countries in the same direction was hard to establish, and the correlations among different presumed forms of development left something to be desired. Yet the nagging correlations persisted. It was somehow true...