Introduction

Abstract

In 1960, towards the end of his life, the sociologist C. Wright Mills visited South America for the first time. At a seminar there on ‘the problem of industrial development’, he urged his audience to Imagine all the range of alternatives that might exist’ (1967, p. 156) to the state of underdevelopment in which they found themselves. The need for this exercise of sociological imagination arose because, in Mills’ view, none of the existing patterns of development pioneered in Europe, North America and the Soviet Union offered an appropriate model for underdeveloped societies to follow. Characteristically, Mills was at odds with the conventional wisdom of his time in which the range of options for poor countries seeking to escape underdevelopment was restricted to mimicry of either capitalist or state socialist paths of industrialization. Mills saw neither option as ideal, since both were variants of what he called ‘the overdeveloped society’ in which ‘the style of life is dominated by the standard of living‘ (1967, p. 150, emphasis in original) and where the course of change threw up serious obstacles to the attainment of reason and freedom in social relations. Following either the USA or the Soviet Union held out the prospect of the material poverty of ‘the underdeveloped society’ being replaced by the waste, alienation and other irrationalities of ‘the overdeveloped society’ in which individuals degenerated into ‘cheerful robots’.