Modernization Theories
AI 2201 - Lecture 3
Three themes
• We can distinguish three main themes among
the many multidisciplinary approaches
constituting “modernization” theories. Those
discussing:
– 1. “Traditional” vs “modern” condition
– 2. “Traditional” vs “modern” subject
– 3. Stages/transition/movement
1. traditional vs modern condition
• Traditional society
– Non-Western societies that appear to be
“underdeveloped”or “backward” (Walt Rostow)
– Include (Rostow, Daniel Lerner, Guy Hunter):
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Slave systems of early Greece and Rome
Peasants societies in early Egypt, India and China
Feudal societies of medieval Europe
Many people in mid XXth century Africa, Asia and LA
– Features:
• Relatively static as economic activity was repeated
generation after generation;
• Low ambition/expectation => People accustomed to a
relatively stable, low output economy and believed that
no more was possible;
• Attempt at change was resisted by ruling elites whose
power was based on religion authority and custom;
• High birth and death rate; widespread illiteracy, lack of
incentives for improvements
1. Cont. => attitudes to the
construction of “backwardness”
• Development as “hopeless”
– For reason of “racial inferiority” masked in
geography and climate arguments.
– For cultural reason: non-Christian, non- Western
people were incapable of true economic
development => building on Max Weber idea of
“protestant ethics”
• Development as promising
– Subject to the introduction of advanced technology
and Western institutions
– Development assistance from the West
– 1960s Establishment of foreign aid programmes
such as the UN development decade and the U.S.
Alliance for Progress in LA
2. “Traditional” vs “modern” subject
• “The essential difference between modern and traditional
society . . .lies in the greater control which modern man has over
his natural and social environment. This control, in turn, is based
on the expansion of scientific and technological knowledge.”
(Samuel Huntington 1968)
• “Traditional man is passive and acquiescent; he expects
continuity in nature and society and does not believe in the
capacity of man to change or to control either. Modern man,in
contrast, believes in both the possibility and the desirability of
change, and has confidence in the ability of man to control
change so as to accomplish his purpose.” (Samuel Huntington
1968)
The “empirically identifiable modern man and . . .his
outstanding characteristics”(Alex Inkeles 1969)
• Openess to new experience
• The assertion of increasing independence from authority of traditional
figures like parents and a shift of allegiance to leaders of government,
public affairs, trade unions, cooperatives, and the like”
• Belief in the efficacy of science and medicine,and a general
abandonment of passivity and fatalism in the face of life’s difficulties
• Ambition for oneself and one’s children to achieve high occupational
and educational goals
• Are on time and show an interest and take active part in civic and
community affairs and local politics
• Strive energetically to keep up with the news and within this effor to
prefer news of national and international import over items dealing with
sports, religion, or purely local affairs
Modernization as Westernization
(Daniel Lerner 1958)
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Lerner sees the modern man as the “empathic” man. Here is the story:
“Many generations ago, in the West, ordinary men found themselves relatively
free to move” [really? Check next week on England’s “bloody legislation”
following land enclosures]
Physical mobility gave rise to social mobility and system of bourgeois values
that take social change as normal.
Mobile society => encourages rationality “for the calculus of choice shapes
individual behavior and conditions its rewards. People come to see their future
manipulable, rather than ordained.. .”
“Whereas traditional man tended to reject innovation by saying ‘it has never
been thus,’ the contemporary Westerner is more likely to ask ‘Does it work?’
and try the new way without further ado.”
“The mobile person is distinguished by a high capacity for identification with
new aspects of his environment [empathy]; he comes equipped with the
mechanisms needed to incorporate new demands upon himself that arise
outside of his habitual experience.”
Modernization as Westernization
(Daniel Lerner 1958): participation
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“The high empathizer tends to become also the cash costumer, the radio
listener, the voter”, I.e. the participant.
“Traditional society is nonparticipant -- it deploys people by kinship into
communities isolated from eachother and from a center . . .hence there is no
need for a transpersonal common doctrine formulated in terms of shared
secondary symbols” I.e. a “national ‘ideology’ which enables persons
unknown to each other to engage in political controversy or achieve
‘consensus’”
“the model of behavior developed by modern society is characterized by
empathy, a high capacity for rearranging the self-system on short notice.”
– isolated communities of traditional society => require highly constrictive
personality
– Interdependent sectors of modern society => require participation =>requires an
expansive and adaptive self-system, ready to incorporate new roles and to
identify personal values with public issues” (my emphasis)
How would development from “traditional
man” to “modern man” take place?
• Through a “. . . Pervasive social
transformation . . .a wholesale
metamorphosis of habits, a
wrenching reorientation of values .
. .an unweaving and reweaving of
the fabric of daily existence itself . .
.[introduced and fostered by] . .
.regimes audacious enough to
unleash social change.” Robert
Heilbroner, The Great Ascent
• What does “regimes audacious
enough to unleash social change”
mean? Maybe ask Walt W.
Rostow?
3. Stages/transition: Walt Rostow
• Walt Whitman Rostow (October 7, 1916 - February 13, 2003)
• An American economist and political theorist who served as
Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to Lyndon Baines
Johnson.
• Prominent for his role in the shaping of American policy in
Southeast Asia during the 1960s, he was a staunch opponent
of Communism, and was noted for a belief in the efficacy of
capitalism and free enterprise.
• Rostow served as a major adviser on national security affairs
under the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
administrations.
• He supported American military involvement in the Vietnman
War.
• He wrote extensively in defense of free enterprise economics,
particularly in developing nations.
• Rostow was famous especially for writing a book The Stages of
Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto (1960) which
became a classic text in several fields of social sciences.
Stages/transition: Walt Rostow
Stages/transition: Walt Rostow
• I Traditional Society
– Limitation on productivity; agricultural system based on
hierarchical structure with narrow scope for vertical mobility;
value system geared towards long-run fatalism;
• II Precondition for takeoff
– Science (as in late XVIIC Europe) translated into new
production function in Agriculture and Industry
– More general case “non endogenously but from some external
intrusion by more advanced societies. These invasions . .
.shocked the traditional society and begun or hastened its
undoing; but they also set in motion ideas and sentiments
which initiated the process by which a modern alternative to
the traditional society was constructed out of the old picture”
– “The idea spreads not merely that economic progress is
possible, but that economic progress is a necessary condition
for some other purpose, judged to be good:be it national
dignity, the general welfare, or a better life for the children”
Stages/transition: Walt Rostow
• III Takeoff stage
– “is the interval when the old blocks and resistances to
steady growth are finally overcome. The forces making for
economic progress, which yielded limited bursts and
enclaves of modern activity, expand and come to dominate
the society. Growth becomes its normal condition.
Compound interest becomes built . . .into the habits and
institutional structure.” (my emphasis)
– New industry expands rapidly. Large profit reinvested in
new industries (see I=S of Harrod Domar growth models).
– Expanding requirements for factory workers and for
services supporting them
– Expanding urban areas. New entrepreneur class; “the
economy exploits hitherto unused natural resources and
methods of production”
– New technology spread to agriculture, increasing
productivity
Stages/transition: Walt Rostow
• IV Drive to maturity
– “the stage in which an economy demonstrates the
capacity to move beyond the original industries
which powered its take-off and to absorb and to
apply efficiently over a very wide range of
resources. This is the stage in which an economy
demonstrates that it has the technological and
entrepreneurial skills to produce not everyhting,
but anything that it chooses to produce.”
• V High Mass Consumption
– Two things happen
• Real income per head reached a poitn in which large
number of people command consumption far beyond
food/shelter and clothing
• Structure of working force changes that a) increased
urban to total population and b) greater proportion of
population working in offices or skilled factory jobs.
Question: what does this Rostow’s representation of
“stages” leave out?
Question: what does this Rostow’s
representation of
“stages” leave out?
What to make of the co-presence of
“backwardness” with “modernity”?
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Dualism
– Dual economy. Advanced sector with capital intensive technique. Traditional sector
with labour intensive technique. They are interdependent.
– Marxist version: a social structure imposed by colonial power is devised to keep the
two sector interdependent in this way, and using the traditional sector as a source of
cheap labour.
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Arthur Lewis Labour Surplus Model
– Subsistence sector, agriculture. Existence of labour surplus, in the sense that
overcrowded conditions. Workers tend to live in h extended families for reason of
customs rather that economic advantage. Some agricultural employment is
disguised employment, “workers marginal output < wages”.
– Industrial or modern sector small. Wages can be kept low because jobs are easily
filled by surplus labour in subsistence sector.
– Development => migration from subsistence sector to modern sector. Wages are
kept low initially, because new workers migrate. Profit grow relatively and absolutely.
After all surplus labour is absorbed, wages start to grow and capitalists start to
mechanize.
– Policy implication: use migrants as cheap labour to make infrastructure for
development as this will not make the country side suffer (given Lewis assumption).
Nine characteristics of modernization process
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(according to S. Huntington review of literature)
M is a revolutionary process “comparable to the changes from prehuman to
human existence and from primitive to civilized societies”
M is a complex process. “It involves changes in virtually all areas of human
thought and behaviour”. At minimum it includes: “industrialization,
urbanization, social mobilization, differentiation, secularization, media
expansion, increasing literacy and education, expansion of political
participation”
M is a systemic process: “changes in one factor are related to and affect
changes in the other factors”
M is a global process. “all societies were at one time traditional; all
societies are now either modern or inn the process of becoming modern.
M is a lengthy process. Hence not only revolutionary but also evolutionary.
M. is a phased process. “Societies . . .can be compared and ranked in
terms of the extent to which they have moved down the road from tradition
to modernity.”
M. is a homogenizing process. M. “produces tendencies towards
convergence among societies,” which may lead “to a stage ‘at which the
various societies are so homogeneous as to be capable of forming a world
state.”
M is a irreversible process
M is a progressive process.
Next week:
• Through the category of “primitive
accumulation” we will discuss
– How the classic transition to “modernity” and the
emergence of new subjectivities, is grounded on
historical contingent struggles over the commons
and not some sort of natural evolutionary
processes through stages;
– How even in the contemporary age of
“globalization”, continuous “primitive
accumulation” is necessary to reproduce “modern”
subjectivities and allow growth and capitalist
development.