Modernization Theory

Major Themes of Modernization Theory

The major themes of modernization theory are well exemplified by the writings of economic historian Walt Rostow, sociologist Talcott Parsons, and political scientist Samuel Huntington. Rostow, a top adviser to the U.S. administration of President John F. Kennedy and a leading architect of the Vietnam War, argued in his widely read 1960 book, The Stages of Economic[Page 309]Growth, that all societies will tend to pass naturally through a series of six stages of development, going from undeveloped, predominantly rural, agricultural, and premodern to fully developed, predominantly urban, industrial, and modern. Rostow proposed this on the basis of an account of industrial development in Europe and North America, but he argued that the patterns he discerned in these regions of the world would also emerge in the developing countries of the post– World War II era provided that they did not succumb to the projects of Communist parties, which Rostow referred to as a “disease of the transition” to modern society. It was for this reason that Rostow saw military opposition to communism in Vietnam as a logical counterpart to the promotion of modernization in the developing world.

Parsons, in books such as his 1966 work Societies, elaborated sociocultural dimensions of modernization theory by developing an account of how societies move out of and back into equilibrium. Parsons's account implied that as societies change from less developed to more developed, they become more socially and economically complex, based less on personal relationships and inherited status and more open to individual efforts at attainment of wealth and status.

Huntington developed a detailed argument for a process of political development that would correspond roughly to the stages of economic growth proposed by Rostow. Taking up the notion that communism is a disease of the transition, Huntington argued in his 1968 book Political Order in Changing Societies, as well as in other works, for the utility of authoritarian government in countries that were in the midst of the transition to modernity. During this transition, Huntington argued, coalitions of displaced peasants and urban groups such as students might form around the promises of communism and thus attempt to derail the forms of modernization pursued by Western-oriented developmental elites. In this context, U.S. government support for authoritarian regimes was justifiable. As modernization proceeded under military governments, Huntington suggested, the growth of a large urban middle class eventually would undercut the threat of communism and allow democratization on the Western model.

Modernization Theory in Geography

Some ideas from modernization theory were taken up by geographers during the 1960s and 1970s. A specific focus of geographic research was the diffusion of social processes identified with modernity through the development of economic infrastructure in developing countries. Thus, geographers such as Edward Taaffe, Richard Morrill, and Peter Gould examined the development of transportation networks in developing countries, whereas Edward Soja put forward a fairly comprehensive view of the geography of modernization in sub-Saharan Africa. Other geographers, such as Brian Berry and Jonathan Friedmann, presented modernization theory–inspired arguments about patterns of urbanization in the developing world. Within the discipline of geography, however, many early advocates of modernization theory approaches turned in other directions by the 1970s and 1980s, as exemplified by Soja's turn toward postmodernism and Friedmann's development of world systems theory– inspired approaches to urbanization.

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