Paving the world with good intentions: The genesis of modernization theory

This dissertation provides an analytical narrative of the rise of modernization theory, the dominant framework from the late 1950s to the early 1970s for understanding development in poor, postcolonial countries. The dissertation describes modernization theory as the most highly developed example of social modernism in the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century.;After an ideegeschichte of "modernization" up through the early 1940s in chapter 1, the next three chapters present ethnographies of the three institutions that did most to promote this idea in the postwar United States. Chapter 2 explains how Talcott Parsons and his collaborators at the Harvard Department of Social Relations constructed a social theory that challenged the prevailing economics-centered understanding of the modernization process. Focusing on the role of Edward Shils in transmitting and Gabriel Almond in popularizing Parsonian ideas in political science, chapter 3 examines how these ideas triumphed over alternative conceptions of how political science ought to interpret the politics of postcolonial nations. Chapter 4 analyzes the works produced by M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies, the think tank most responsible for promoting modernization theory among policy-makers in the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Special attention is given to the work of Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, and Walt Rostow, as well as the reports the CENIS prepared for the United States Senate in the late 1950s.;Finally, chapter 5 shows how modernization theory constructed the category of "modernity" out of contemporary conversations about the meaning and nature of postwar American society. By comparing the modernization theorists' ideas about modernity to debates about American society by "consensus historians," theorists of industrialism, and advocates of the end of ideology hypothesis, this chapter argues that an idealized version of the contemporary United States as a unique economic, political, and social success underpinned the modernization theorists' conception of modernity. The dissertation concludes that modernization theory provided an idiom for negotiating the complicated task of defining the United States not only as a uniquely successful and powerful global superpower, but also as a model for "development" for nations emerging from colonialism.