¹ McClellan, Grant S., ed., U. S. Foreign Aid (The Reference Shelf, Vol. XXIX, No. 5 [New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1957]), 90Google Scholar, taken from a speech by Eugene R. Black, made when he was President of t ie World Bank.

² ibid., p. 205, taken from a report by Richard Nixon to President Eisenhower.

³ ibid., p. 140, taken from “Final Report of Eleventh American Assembly.”

⁴ Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), pp. 15Google Scholar, 54–57, 61–63, 66–69, 74–76, 80–85, 87, 105–8, 135, 181, 224, 249.

⁵ McClellan, Foreign Aid, p. 122, taken from an article by Max F. Millikan.

⁶ ibid., pp. 53–54, taken from a message to Congress of May 22, 1957. It is significant that all five of the quotations cited so far to illustrate the view that economic growth leads to political stability could be found in one anthology. The number of writers who have accepted this argument must be very large indeed.

⁷ Millikan, Max and Blackmer, Donald, eds., The Emerging Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1962), pp. 142–45;Google Scholar and Shonfield, Andrew, The Attack on World Poverty (New York: Random House, 1960), pp. 3–14.Google Scholar

⁸ Millikan, Max and Rostow, W. W., A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), pp. 19–23Google Scholar. See the criticism of this book in Banfield's, Edward C.American Foreign Aid Doctrines (Washington, D. C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1963), especially p. 6.Google Scholar

⁹ Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: The New American Library, 1951), p. 17Google Scholar and passim. See also Komhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, I11.: The Free Press, 1959), especially pp. 14–15Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man, The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1960).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Beer, M., A History of British Socialism (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1940), pp. 153–54.Google Scholar

¹¹ See Galenson, Walter, The Danish System of Labor Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Scandinavia” in Comparative Labor Movements, Galenson, , ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), especially pp. 105–20Google Scholar. See also Lipset, Political Man, pp. 68–72.

¹² Simon Kuznets, while pointing out that in recent times the long-run trend in the advanced economies is toward greater equality of incomes, has suggested that in the early phases of economic growth (which are the main concern of this paper) there is a tendency toward increasing inequality. Kuznets' focus is on the inequality of the overall income distribution, while this paper is concerned with the distribution of the gains and losses only; thus it would be logically possible that even when the distribution of gains and losses from economic growth was extremely unequal, the overall distribution of income could become less unequal, since the poorer people could get the gains and the richer the losses. Nonetheless, Kuznets' conclusions about changes in income distribution in the early phases of economic growth would appear to support the argument offered here. See “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review, XLV (Mar. 1955), 1–28.Google Scholar

¹³ R. A. Kessel and A. A. Alchian have in an interesting article denied the usual contention that wages rise more slowly than prices and profits during inflations, but I do not find their conclusion persuasive. See “The Meaning and Validity of the Inflation Induced Lag of Wages Behind Prices,” American Economic Review, L (Mar., 1960), 43–67.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Is this factor offset by those who have lost in absolute terms but gained in relative terms? It is not, because in any society in which there has been economic growth, from which more have gained than have lost, all those who have lost in absolute terms will also have lost in relative terms, so there will be in this case no class of absolute losers and relative gainers to offset the class mentioned above. The only case in which there could be a class of absolute losers and relative gainers would be that in which the number of losers exceeded the number of gainers. But the Duesenberry investigations also tell us that those whose incomes are falling absolutely have a higher propensity to consume than those people who have the same level of income but whose incomes have not been falling. Those who are absolute losers and relative gainers may therefore also feel that they are suffering from the economic advance.

¹⁵ The importance of this factor will be limited by the likelihood that most of the saving will come from the rich.

¹⁶ de Tocqueville, Alexis, L'Ancien Regime, trans. M. W. Patterson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), p. 186.Google Scholar

¹⁷ E. A. J. Johnson, after hearing this paper presented at the Economic History Association meeting, objected that totalitarian nations fit the author's hypothesis better than other nations do, in part because the subject people naturally blame the ubiquitous state for all difficult economic adjustments. He seemed to relate the opposition leading to Stalin's purges, after a period of rapid Soviet growth, and the apparent liberalization in some current communist regimes (especially Tito's), to the rapid economic development. I feel that his criticism, if I have understood it correctly, is very much worth investigating.

¹⁸ For models in which a variety of economic conditions can lead to instability, see Ridker, Ronald G., “Discontent and Economic Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, XI (Oct. 1962), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Davis, James C., “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review, XXVII (Feb. 1962), 5–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Davis contends that it is when a period of growth is interrupted by a depression that revolution is most likely. Davis' conclusion is not necessarily inconsistent with this paper's, which deals with growth as a cause of instability rather than with the precise timing of revolutions.

¹⁹ In pointing to cases of instability, however, it will be necessary to distinguish genuine instability of an entire society from some of the superficial changes that are occasionally mistaken for true instability. In the Third Republic in France there were frequent changes of cabinets and many complaints about “instability.” But the policies of the French government were quite stable, and the different cabinets were composed of roughly the same men, and roughly the same coalitions of parties, so basically nothing in the life of France changed. The French could rightly say that there had been only a reshuffling of the political deck—that the more things changed the more they remained the same. Similarly the “palace guard” or “coup d'etat” type of change of government so common in Latin America should not be confused with a genuine social revolution. The changes of government brought about by the “palace guard” or by the army obviously depend mainly on what goes on inside the “palace guard” or inside the army rather than upon what goes on inside the economy. And these changes of government often bring no changes in policy, in any event. Thus it is important to distinguish the political intrigue of the Third and Fourth Republics from true political upheavals like the French Revolution, and the routine Latin American coup d'etat from the Peronist or Castroist revolution.

²⁰ See for example J. U. Nef, “The Progress of Technology and the Growth of Large Scale Industry in Great Britain, 1540–1640,” and é in Essays in Economic History, ed. Carus-Wilson, E. M. (London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1954), I, 88–134.Google Scholar

²¹ See Hammond, J. L., “The Industrial Revolution and Discontent,” Economic History Review, II (Jan. 1930), 215–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cole, G. D. H., A Short History of the British Working Class Movement, 1787–1947 (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1948), pp. 121–51.Google Scholar

²² De Tocqueville, L'Ancien Regime, pp. 185–86. Just as there are many scholars who subscribe to De Tocqueville's argument, there are also many who dispute it.

²³ Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge [Engl.]: The University Press, 1960), pp. 38Google Scholar, 66–67, 93–105, and Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 5–30.Google Scholar

²⁴ Lipset, Political Man (cited in n.9) pp. 70–71.

²⁵ Hoselitz, Bert F. and Weiner, Myron, “Economic Development and Political Stability in India,” Dissent, VIII (Spring 1961), 172–79Google Scholar. For a general, theoretical treatment of the relationship between economic and political change, with particular application to India, see Wolf, Charles, Foreign Aid: Theory and Practice in Southern Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am indebted to Mr. Wolf for helpful suggestions on this topic.

²⁶ I am indebted for many of these examples to Enke, Stephan, Economics for Development (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963)Google Scholar, and to Benham, F., Economic Aid to Underdeveloped Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).Google Scholar

²⁷ On Italy, see Neville, Robert, “Catholic—Yet Communist—Why?” New York Times Magazine (June 2, 1963), p. 61.Google Scholar

²⁸ “… great delays in industrialization tend to allow time for social tensions to develop and to assume sinister proportions … The Soviet government can properly be described as a product of the country's economic backwardness …If anything is a ‘grounded historical assumption,’ this would seem to be one: the delayed industrial revolution was responsible for a political revolution in the course of which power fell into the hands of a dictatorial government …”Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, p. 28.

²⁹ The relatively brittle character of most institutions in traditional, underdeveloped societies is illustrated by Max Weber's analysis of the origins of castes and classes. He argued that a caste system would thrive only in a relatively static society, for it makes virtually no provision for the changes in individual rankings that changing societies require. A modern class system, by contrast, allows for some changes in the positions of individuals. See Weber, Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociobgy, Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, ed. and trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), especially pp. 193–94.Google Scholar) Presumably most institutions of traditional societies have not had to develop a great deal of flexibility, while those that have evolved in dynamic industrial societies have acquired some capacity to adjust to rapid change. Accordingly, the thesis of this article would explain the social and political effects of rapid growth much better in underdeveloped societies than in economically advanced societies. The thesis here would fit countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand least of all, for these countries of relatively recent settlement have inherited fewer feudal institutions than other nations, and their institutions have had to evolve in rather rapidly changing conditions from the beginning.