It may well be a tendency rooted in human nature that both individuals and larger collectivities, when faced with an intractable problem, like to think that someone, somewhere, must have the definitive solution. This tendency has certainly been visible in the area of Third World development. When this area was first brought into public consciousness in the years following World War II, there was the widespread assumption (by no means limited to North Americans and Europeans) that the advanced industrial societies of the West had discovered the secret of development. They constituted the model; the problem for other societies was how to follow this model as rapidly and painlessly as possible. This was the time when Talcott Parsons, for example, could refer to the United States as the "lead society," sincerely believing that this designation reflected sober social-scientific analysis rather than messianic nationalism. Then came the great ideological upheaval of the late 1960s and early '70s. The success of the Western model was either challenged in toto—as was done by Marxists of various denominations—or at least deemed to be negative in its effects on non-Western societies— as in the perspective of the more moderate versions of "dependency theory." The American "lead society" model was replaced by miscellaneous "vanguard societies," ranging from China to Tanzania, that had little in common except a commitment to a socialist development strategy.