Rostow, Walt Whitman (1916–2003)

Walt Whitman Rostow, born in New York City to a Russian Jewish émigré family, was an American economic historian and a pioneer of postwar development economics. He taught at Oxford and Cambridge before taking up a chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT (1951–1961). In 1968 he joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained and lectured until his death in 2003.

A speechwriter for Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the 1960s, Rostow took an active part in U.S. politics. Under the Kennedy administration, he was among the architects of the Alliance for Progress. He was later appointed National Security Advisor by President Lyndon Johnson and helped with planning the country's foreign policy as well as determining its strategy in the Vietnam War.

Rostow's academic renown is mostly due to his influential book of 1960, The Stages of Economic Growth. This is a general theory of development based on a comparative historical analysis of the industrialization process in Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. According to Rostow, economic development follows a five-stage path, leading a backward country featuring the typical economic organization of traditional societies (phase 1) through a phase preliminary to the “takeoff,” the takeoff (i.e., the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution), and the “drive to maturity” phase, to an “age of high-mass consumption.”

The stage-based narrative was not Rostow's distinctive contribution—actually, it can be traced back at least to Bruno Hildebrand (1812–1878) and the German historical school. Rostow also drew on economic statistics and postwar sociological research on modernization, mainly Talcott Parsons's study of traditional and modern societies. The element of novelty lay rather in the ideological content imbued in this conceptual framework, which was now intended to be a celebration of free trade within a capitalist system, as it is clear from the emphatic subtitle of the book, A Non-Communist Manifesto. The model soon became controversial and was often criticized for being mechanistic, normative, and lacking empirical validation. On the other hand, the large-scale failure of third-world development policies in subsequent decades would suggest that the idea of a single development path for all countries was naive and unrealistic.

The process described in The Stages can be considered from the point of view of either production or consumption, as both perspectives are combined in the analysis. Consumption, however, receives no extensive coverage until stage five of the model. This is due to the autarchic character of preindustrial economies, which can fulfill only basic needs, ensuring subsistence and the physical reproduction of the household at best. In such contexts, people act according to a pre-Newtonian worldview, and they lack the skills to manipulate the environment to their advantage.

Treatment of the Industrial Revolution in its early phase emphasizes the role of production (the changing pattern of savings and investment) as is typical [Page 1237]of mid-twentieth century historiography. Little attention is paid to the side of demand, which is somehow taken for granted, though new, cheap commodities such as the standardized cotton textiles were in fact the engine of this process, not to mention the contribution that better and richer diet, which resulted from the agricultural revolution between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had given to the demographic transition.

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