Mandarins of the future : modernization theory in Cold War America
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Mandarins of the future : modernization theory in Cold War America
（New studies in American intellectual and cultural history）
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003
Available at 17 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [277]-312) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Because it provided the dominant framework for "development" of poor, postcolonial countries, modernization theory ranks among the most important constructs of 20th-century social science. In this book, Nils Gilman offers an intellectual history of a movement that has had far-reaching, and often unintended, consequences. After a survey of the theory's origins and its role in forming America's postwar sense of global mission, Gilman offers a close analysis of the people who did the most to promote it in the United States and the academic institutions they came to dominate. He first explains how Talcott Parsons at Harvard constructed a social theory that challenged the prevailing economics-centred understanding of the modernization process, then describes the work of Edward Shils and Gabriel Almond in helping Parsonsian ideas triumph over other alternative conceptions of the development process, and finally discusses the role of Walt Rostow and his colleagues at MIT in promoting modernization theory during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
By connecting modernization theory to the welfare state liberalism programs of the New Deal order, Gilman not only provides a new intellectual context for America's Third World during the Cold War, but also connects the optimism of the Great Society to the notion that American power and good intentions could stop the postcolonial world from embracing communism.
Table of Contents
- Introduction - modernization theory and American modernism
- Contests - the European past and the American present
- The Harvard Department of Social Relations
- SSRC's Committee on Comparative Politics
- The MIT Center for International Studies
- The collapse of modernization theory
- The postmodern turn and the aftermath of modernization theory.
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