The Emergence of a Politics of Order

Abstract

A basic and usually explicit assumption of the modernisation theories we have been considering was that the ‘developing’ societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America were in the process of being transformed into stable democracies of the western pluralist type. There can be little doubt that the already industrialised world, especially the US, provided the model for political modernity just as for modernity in general. The democratic ideal, it seemed, had reached its zenith in the West and this was the condition towards which the societies of the Third World were evolving. The traumas and strains of this transformation are frequently intense but they are worth enduring for the goal, once arrived at — and arrival was thought to be inevitable — will be more than adequate compensation. As Huntington has pointed out, these modernisation theories exhibited the kind of evolutionary optimism of early sociologists such as Comte and Spencer (Huntington, 1971).