Abstract
Early interest in the development of the underdeveloped areas had been a mixture of humanitarianism, ethnocentrism and economic expansionism. Economic development of the Third World was seen as both beneficial to the Third World and good for capitalist business. Modernisation theories merely provided the appropriate theoretical underpinning for comprehensive social and economic planning.
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Notes and References
This is as Wallerstein sums it up in a title of one of his essays, ‘Modernization, Requiescat in Pace’, in I. Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1979). This is not to say that the modernisation perspective is entirely dead. Some of the old-timers continue to whistle the same tune, even in the 1970s. There is the new edition of Talcott Parsons’s The Evolution of Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977);
Wilbert Moore’s article ‘Modernization and Rationalization, Processes and Restraints’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 25, supplement, 1977;
S. N. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change and Modernity (New York: Wiley, 1973);
and Marion Levy, Modernization, Latecomers and Survivors (New York: Basic Books, 1973). However, I would yet maintain that as a theory it has lost much of its vigour, its capacity to innovate and come forward with new concepts and/or ideas, and that, above all, it has been driven back from its position as the dominant intellectual paradigm by both the neo-Marxist dependency theories, and the bourgeois world development writers.
For the most comprehensive collection of essays on the methodology of world futures theories, see J. I. B. Fowles (ed.), Handbook of Future Research (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).
T. Parsons, ‘Social Systems’, Part II of ‘Systems Analysis’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968) p. 458.
An example here is Amilcar O. Herrera et al., Catastrophe or New Society? (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1976).
T. Parsons, Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966) p. 111, where he argues the case for structural analysis to take precedence over the analysis of process and change. In presenting his ‘systems’ of different societies he speaks of ‘paradigms’ throughout the book.
This section is in particular indebted to the excellent review of world futures theories by Sam Cole, ‘The Global Futures Debate, 1965–1976’; in Christopher Freeman and Marie Jahoda(eds), World Futures: The Great Debate (London: Martin Robertson, 1978) pp. 9–49.
H. Kahn and A. J. Wiener, The Year 2000 (London: Macmillan, 1967) p. 116, quoted in Cole, ‘The Global Futures Debate’, p. 20.
D. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972; and London: Pan Books, 1974).
See, for instance, William D. Nordhauss, ‘World Dynamics, Measurement without Data’, Economic Journal, vol. 83, 1973, pp. 1156–83.
For a useful collection of pro and contra arguments, see A. Weintraub, E. Schwartz and J. R. Aronson, The Economic Growth Controversy (New York: International Arts & Sciences Press, 1973).
For a useful and critical summary of the Meadows argument, which has been closely followed here, see H. M. Enzensberger, ‘A Critique of Political Ecology’, New Left Review, vol. 84, 1974, pp. 3–32.
Jay Forrester, World Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen, 1971).
H. Kahn et al., World Economic Development, 1979 and Beyond (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1979) p. 54.
W. W. Rostow, Getting from Here to There (London: Macmillan, 1978).
E. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (London: Sphere, 1974).
J. Tinbergen and A. Dolman (eds), Reshaping the International Order (New York: Dutton, 1976).
R. L. Heilbroner, Business Civilisation in Decline (London: Boyars, 1976).
The Ecologist, A Blueprint for Survival (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
Barbara Ward and R. Dubois, Only One Earth (London: Deutsch, 1972).
D. Gabor, U. Colombo et al., Beyond the Age of Waste (Oxford: Pergamon, 1978). This is a fourth report of the Club of Rome. It is written by what one might call ‘technological optimists’ who stress that the technical problems associated with the physical limits to growth are far less intractable than the social-psychological, political and economic problems. They also make the point that the population factor is much less critical than it was thought to be at the time of the first report to the Club of Rome (The Limits to Growth).
M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point (New York: New American Library, 1976).
W. W. Leontief, The Future of the World Economy (New York: United Nations, 1976).
OECD. Interfutures: Facing the Future (Paris: OECD. 1979).
A. Herrera et al., Catastrophe or New Society? (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1976). This work was carried out by the Bariloche Foundation, Argentina, under the auspices of the Club of Rome.
Ervin Laszlo, The Inner Limits of Mankind: Heretical Reflections on Today’s Values, Culture, and Politics, with a commentary by A. Peccei (Oxford: Pergamon, 1978).
See also E. Laszlo and J. Bierman, Goals in a Global Community, the original background papers for Goals for Mankind, a report to the Club of Rome (Oxford: Pergamon, 1977) 2 vols.
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© 1982 Ankie M. M. Hoogvelt
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Hoogvelt, A.M.M. (1982). From Modernisation to Global Growth: New Directions in the Bourgeois Liberal Tradition. In: The Third World in Global Development. The Sociology of Developing Societies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16777-7_5
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