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Further Perspectives on Modernization and Aging

A (P)review of the Historical Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

W. Andrew Achenbaum
W. Andrew Achenbaum*
Affiliation:
Carnegie-Mellon University
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Extract

It is wholly appropriate that this article should follow Professor Hendricks’s, for historians’ perspectives on modernization theory generally build on the insights of social scientists. Although its intellectual foundations were laid by social philosophers and critics such as Adam Smith, Malthus, and Condorcet at the end of the eighteenth century, the main lines of modernization theory were formulated in earnest after World War II by economists, political scientists, and sociologists concerned with “developing nations” outside the Western world (Levy, 1966). Historians, in contrast, only began to join serious discussions during the past fifteen years. Our involvement in gerontology—the study of old age and aging—is of even more recent vintage. Whereas social scientists were exploring the “modernization of (old) age” during the 1950s and 1960s, few social science historians or humanists have investigated how the process of modernization affected the meanings and experiences of growing old(er) over time and across geopolitical boundaries (Maddox and Wiley, 1976; Achenbaum, forthcoming).

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , Summer 1982 , pp. 347 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1982 

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Footnotes

Author’s Note: An earlier version of this article was prepared for the 1980 Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America. The author wishes to thank Rachael Rockwell Graham, Peter N. Stearns, Robert Swierenga, David D. Van Tassel, and an anonymous referee for their criticisms and suggestions for revision.

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