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Comparative History and the Theory of Modernization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Lester M. Salamon
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Extract

One of the sorest needs in the social sciences is for clear and concise conceptual equipment to give structure to disciplines and order to the range of hypotheses these disciplines purport to explore. Perhaps nowhere is this need for conceptual equipment more pressing, however, than in that amorphous area of study that examines the broad range of social processes gathered under the rubric of “modernization.” Depending on one's perspective, the process of modernization is either primarily economic, or political, or psychological, or social, or technological, or all of the above. Like the elephant in the old tale, the beast is different depending on who touches it and where.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , October 1970 , pp. 83 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1970

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References

1 Pye, Lucian, “The Concept of Political Development,” The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science (Spring 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Pye, Lucian, Aspects of Political Development (Boston 1966), 31–48Google Scholar.

2 Pye, Aspects, 45–48.

3 Deutsch, Karl, The Nerves of Government (New York 1963), 12Google Scholar.

4 Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago 1962), 15Google Scholar.

5 Deutsch, Nerves, 10.

6 Ibid., 16–18.

7 Thomas Kuhn discusses this point in the following terms: “Can it conceivably be an accident, for example, that Western astronomers first saw change in the previously immutable heavens during the half-century after Copernicus' new paradigm was first proposed? . . . The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world. In any case, their research responded as though that were the case.” Kuhn, Structure, 115–16.

8 Feuer, Lewis, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York 1959), 12Google Scholar.

9 Dobb, Maurice, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York 1963), 17–18Google Scholar.

10 Samuel P. Huntington treats this issue skillfully in the first chapter of his book, Political Order in Changing Societies.

11 Lloyd, and Rudolph, Susanne, The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago 1967), 17–154Google Scholar.