Latin American political thought and scholarship has historically evidenced preoccupation with the problem of self-definition. Simón Bolívar, for example, concerned with the distinctive quality of Latin American civilization, said that it was not European nor North American nor Indian, but a new synthesis. A century later Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, father of the Aprista political movement, insisted that he had spawned a new ideology derived from the unique reality of Indoamerica. The contemporary Christian Democratic movement formally acknowledges its debt to the European tradition but also highlights its differences, which stem from the disparity between industrial and emerging nations. The well-known thesis of Herbert Eugene Bolton and the ‘Atlantic Triangle’ of Arthur P. Whitaker are variations on the same theme.

A tendency for progress (and change, generally) to accelerate is clearly perceptible in the present epoch and has been commented upon many times. Quantitative additions to population, national income, and wealth, and other measurable indicators come larger by every decade. The number of scientifically trained persons alive in this year is much larger than the sum of all those that lived in previous generations. Revisions of even basic scientific theory occur more often than before, and the lead time between a basic invention and the blueprint for mass production grows shorter and shorter.

Possessing little knowledge or competence in either demography or economics, I am in no position to comment on the central portion of Professor Dovring's paper. Fortunately, I feel no call to do so, for I very much doubt that it can be faulted. No refinement of data or analysis is likely to set aside his basic conclusions. If the time intervals analyzed are made long enough to eliminate local fluctuations, accelerated rather than linear growth, whether of population or productive capacity, has characterized man's life on earth since at least the conquest of fire. Only historical myopia can account for the view that an increasing tempo of change dates only from the Industrial Revolution, that our current condition is, with respect to the existence of acceleration, essentially new.

The gist of Professor Kuhn's remarks seems to be a low appreciation of the role of the intellect in nonscientific technology and a high emphasis on the positive role of chance discovery.

The ‘modernizer’ is a special species of the genus ‘innovator’ and one which only in the last century has appeared in large numbers on the human scene. There have, to be sure, been groups and individuals at many moments in world history who would qualify under the definition of the modernizer which I propose to use: ‘one who seeks the transformation of his own society or segments of it in imitation of models drawn from another country or countries’. Those Japanese court officials of the seventh century who tried to remould their country on the model of T'ang China are a case in point, and one could probably find many examples on the fringes of the great empires of the past. But it is only in the last century of Western colonialism and rapid technological change that this has become a world-wide phenomenon. It is also only in the last century that the doctrine of human progress has achieved such implicit world-wide acceptance that the imitated models have been seen not simply as ‘superior’ but also as ‘more advanced’—further ahead, that is, in some imputed scale of linear progressive development. The consciousness of backwardness, the concept of underdevelopment, are relatively new.

This paper is based on certain concepts about the nature of social and cultural order and traditions. We view social and cultural traditions, first, as the major ways of looking at the basic problems of social and cultural order, and of posing the major questions about them; second, as giving various possible answers to these problems; and, third, as the organization of institutional structures for implementing different types of solutions or answers to these problems.