An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the meetings of the American Historical Association, December 1979, and at the Toronto Semiotic Circle in March 1980. Special thanks to my friends Jon Anderson, Richard Eaton, and Gertrude Lenzer for their comments on that draft.

¹ For a general survey and critique of Western teleological views of history, sensitive to the fact that modernization theory is one of them, see Nisbet, Robert, Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

² de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, Reeve, Henry, trans, and ed. (revised by Bowen, Francis, and further corrected by Phillips Bradley) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1945), II, 14–18.Google Scholar

³ For an exhaustive account of the American discourse at least, see Filene, Peter G., Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ The difference that the Cold War made in area studies can be calculated by comparing Hall, Robert, Area Studies with Special Reference to Their Application for Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1947),Google Scholar and Bennett, Wendell, Area Studies in American Universities (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1951),Google Scholar with more recent surveys like Lambert, Richard D., Language and Area Studies Review (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973), sponsored by the Social Science Research Council.Google Scholar

⁵ The Discovery of the Third World (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1976);Google Scholar see also Mintz, Sidney, “On the Concept of a Third World,” Dialectical Anthropology, 1:4 (1976), 377–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ A personal communication from Alessandro Pizzorno. I have not found Balandier using the term prior to his contribution to Le “tiers monde” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956).Google Scholar A look at Balandier's, Sociologie actuelle de l'Afrique noire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955) seems to indicate that he was using the concept without the name in 1953–54.Google Scholar

⁷ Purvis, Hoyt, The Third World and International Symbolism, Working Paper no. 5, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin (1976), especially pp. 7–8.Google Scholar

⁸ Federalist Opinion, 1:8 (06 1951), 15.Google Scholar

⁹ On the general phenomenon of terms of social scientific discourse devised since 1950, see de Sola Pool, Ithiel, “The Language of Politics: General Trends in Content,” in Propaganda and Communication in World History, Lasswell, Harold, Lerner, Daniel, and Speier, Hans, eds. (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980), III, 171–90. De Sola Pool is unfortunately interested only in the quantity of new terminology, not the relative importance of the different terms, and in their frequency of use, not their meaning or significance.Google Scholar

¹⁰ However one refers to the differences between what might also be called “east” and “west,” one betrays one's biases and assumptions. When writing in my own voice, I prefer the terms “the Soviet bloc” and “the capitalist democracies” not only for their greater concreteness and direct referential value, but also because they reveal my assumptions immediately.

¹¹ Sieyès, Joseph Emmanuel, Qu'est-ce que le tiers état? (Paris: n.p., 1789), 3: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.” Sauvy clearly thought that one might substitute Third World for Third Estate in these powerful sentences.Google Scholar

¹² This has become fashionable only since the publication of Tipps's, Dean “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15:2 (1973), 199–226. It must be remembered, however, that even though ridiculing modernization theory has been popular for several years now, certainly no alternative has replaced it, and its old popularizers have not abandoned it either. In view of the fact that no generally acceptable alternative has emerged, the burgeoning literature attacking modernization theory poses itself as an interesting subject of research in its own right. In this paper, unfortunately, I have not room even to list the relevant authors, much less analyze the genre.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Hobson, J. A., Imperialism, a Study (London: James Nisbet, 1902). Hobson's repudiation of imperialism as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century rested on his belief that the practice was economically unprofitable, and a conviction that some other and principally ethical intervention in the non-European world was necessary.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See the contributions of Sauvy in Institut national d'études démographiques, Le “tiers-Monde,” sous-développment el developpement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956);Google Scholar the 1961 edition of the same work with new introduction by Sauvy, ; and his books De Malthus à Mao Tsé-Toung (Paris: Deno, 1958)Google Scholar and Théorie génerate de la population (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966).Google Scholar

¹⁵ This is perhaps more illustrative of the fact that the peoples of the third world are dependent upon the first world even for the categories in which they organize to defend themselves from exploitation than it is significant of any truth-value that the concept of the third world might possess. For an interesting case study (in brief) of such conceptual dependence, see Said, Edward W., “Islam through Western Eyes,” The Nation (26 April 1980), 488–92.Google Scholar

¹⁶ This pair of binary distinctions that yields three social categories is not unlike the pair of distinctions underlying the idea of three estates common in European social discourse until the eighteenth century. By dividing the world into sacred and profane and noble and common, one can derive the first estate of the clergy (sacred), the second estate of the nobility (profane but noble), and the residual third estate of the commoners. This obviously reinforces the relevance of Sauvy's association of the third world with the third estate. On the social vocabulary of the ancien régime in terms of estates, see Sewell, William H. Jr, “État, Corps, and Ordre: Some Notes on the Social Vocabulary of the French Old Regime,” Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift fiier Hans Rosenberg (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, 1974).Google Scholar

It is striking that Western culture is pervaded by such sets of three social categories based on pairs of binary distinctions. The French anthropologist Georges Dumezil has spent nearly his entire career studying this substratum of indo-european categorization. See especially his short book, L'Idéologie tri-partite des indo-européens (Brussels: Latomus, 1958).Google Scholar

¹⁷ The word “natural” is problematic in any comparative discussion of societies, and I do not introduce it without trepidation. It is especially problematic here, since there is another sense of the word precisely opposite the one which I invoke here and will characterize in greater detail further on in the paper. What I am suggesting with the use of the word here is that the social scientists whose work is governed by the three worlds concept assume that the first world of modem capitalist democracies is natural in the sense of being unconstrained and self-regulating. This is primarily an eighteenth century use of the word that we are likely to remember best in relation to Adam Smith and discussions of free market economics; it was, however, used commonly by nearly all the Enlightenment critics of eighteenth century society. We seldom use the term in this sense now, I think, largely because its normative dimension gradually became superfluous after the industrial revolution and the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. It is, however, still implicit in our thinking about the first world. It is the very basis of whatever degree of scientificity we accord the social sciences. When I use the word “natural” here then, I emphatically do not mean it in the sense of simple, primitive, or close to nature as some have done in reference to exotic societies ever since Montaigne's essay, “On Cannibals.”

¹⁸ Sauvy, Alfred, Fertility and Survival (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 7–8.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1960).Google Scholar

²⁰ Frank's, André Gunder “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review 18:4 (1966), 17–31,CrossRefGoogle Scholar was one of the first Marxist critiques of modernization theory; Taylor, John C., From Modernization to Modes of Production (New York: Macmillan, 1979), esp. 3–98, is perhaps the most recent and extended critique.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

It may be of passing interest that right-wing thinking about the third world has been more critical of this notion, but for obviously venal motives. See, for example, Beloff, Max, “The Third World and the Conflict of Ideologies,” in The Third World: Premises of U.S. Policy, Thompson, W. Scott, ed. (San Francisco: The Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1978), 12–13:Google Scholar

The Third World can be regarded as simply a residue: what is left when one has subtracted from the world as a whole the industrialized West—mostly living under a system of capitalist or mixed economies—and the communist empires of Russia, China, and their satellites. But that residue contains countries of very different degrees of economic advancement and with a vast number of different types of social and governmental organization. One could, therefore, argue that the phrase “the Third World” itself is a kind of abbreviated ideology. Those who use it in the Third World do so to justify claims for assistance in moving towards a higher degree of economic organization and greater material wealth; those who use it in the West implicitly concede these claims.

²¹ On area specialists and disciplinary generalists, see Lambert, , Language and Area Studies Review; and Rosenau, James N., International Studies and the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1973), sponsored by the International Studies Association.Google Scholar

²² See, for example, Hsu, Francis L. K., “The Cultural Problem of the Anthropologist,” The American Anthropologist, 81:3 (1979), 517–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).

²⁴ The Wealth of Nations, Carman, Edwin, ed. (1904; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), I, 478. “The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”Google Scholar

²⁵ The competition for funds raises an interesting set of questions about the motives for doing area studies. The core of the problem is this: whereas both anthropologists and disciplinary generalists in economics, sociology, and political science have their motives clearly defined in their professional associations—scientific motives—the area studies specialists are defined largely by the sale of their research to governments. Furthermore, the underlying distinctions governing the division of the globe into three suggests that the area studies people may have perverse motives; otherwise they would not be studying unnatural societies.

²⁶ Rosenau, , International Studies, 30–33;Google Scholar and Lambert, , Language and Area Studies Review, 1–6.Google Scholar

²⁷ Lambert, , Language and Area Studies, 3.Google Scholar

²⁸ Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 255.Google Scholar

²⁹ Hough, Jerry F., The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), vii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁰ I shall take the sad state of Soviet and Eastern European studies as a given. I have no ambition to demonstrate or analyze particular weaknesses of the field in this paper—which is devoted to a more general problem—although I would like to do so in the future. I do not therefore base my judgment upon my own evaluation of the field, but upon the extended evaluation that has been made by Jerry F. Hough. His authority is good, for in writing The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (cited in note 29) and rewriting Fainsod's, MerleHow Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar under the new title, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), he has unquestionably provided the best extant survey of the scholarly work in this field. He has, furthermore, set his evaluation in the context of social scientific and especially comparative scholarship generally—something that Soviet and Eastern European scholars have been loath to do in the past.Google Scholar

³¹ Hough, , Soviet Union and Society Science Theory, 1.Google Scholar

³² Ibid., 2.

³³ Engels, Friedrich, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), XXI, 273.Google Scholar