The Only Revolution

...estant" work ethic...

...On the other hand, one cannot discover the essence of modern life by excluding them from one's conceptual scheme...

...They form the ever-present past and become our own incubi when we struggle to adjust to (or deny) the possibilities of abundance and automation...

...Marxist writers were not, of course, blind to these aspects of social life, but they did center their analysis upon the ownership of property, an issue which now seems secondary...

...All sorts of distinctions, some rather obvious and some very subtle, can be made among societies which are on their way to modernity, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that modernity itself is singular in form...

...As that process nears completion, he tends to talk of "areas" of backwardness and "pockets" of discontent and then to call for political or economic "mopping up...

...Socialists, in fact, have not anywhere produced societies conforming to their own aspirations...

...Socialist writers, for example, foresaw the transformation of work into a kind of play or, at any rate, into esthetic creativity...

...The theory of modernization appears in an earlier form as Weber's "rationalization"—a process culminating in a "rational-legal" society...

...Or again, now that decentralization is technically more feasible than ever before, how necessary to that job is the creation of a bureaucratic hierarchy...

...Thus they become social critics and even revolutionaries—abroadout of sympathy for their fellow men, in a good cause, and with admirable energy and skill...

...If Bolshevism is seen as a modernizing ideology, then Russian totalitarianism can be described as an institutionalized arrangement appropriate to a certain stage in the modernization process...

...And he sets this over-all view of society against the possibilities which the future holds and towards which the aspirations of actual men point...

...Large numbers of American social scientists have suddenly become defenders of social change—in the backward countries...

...Now, none of these insights are in any way unavailable to the theorist of modernization so long as he studies premodern societies or societies which are in some sense in transition towards modernity...

...When social scientists accept this prideful evaluation of contemporary life, they cut themselves off from historical understanding...

...Modernization theory thus opens the way for a social science as self-confident as was the historiography of nineteenth-century Whigs...

...And he surely does not see the way in which the structure of modernity, like any other structure, may become an impediment to further progressive transformations...

...Then the human price for rapid social change will be gladly paid...

...Once again, there is historical justification for this view...

...Marxist writers have struggled to explain why it is that "proletarian" revolutions have occurred only in countries which have never had "bourgeois" revolutions...

...Modern" men decline to speculate on their future, but absorb themselves instead with their heroic and painful past—confident that masses of men in other parts of the world are now re-enacting that past...

...Theorists of modernization have no trouble in avoiding this difficulty, for in effect they argue that only one revolution is ever to be expected...

...They both require, for example, the same work-ethic: thus recent writers have rediscovered Weber's Puritanism among the Bolsheviks...

...The character of the emergent society will be determined by the point in economic development at which the crisis takes place and by the social classes which respond to its turmoil...

...The aspirations expressed during the "crisis" period are indeed not fulfilled by modernity...

...So long as modernity is conceived in a singular and narrowly contemporary image, with "Protestant" workers and a centralized bureaucracy part of that image, there is only one historical pathway and it culminates in the American present—or in that immediate future which Khrushchev promises the Russians...

...If only modernization offered some solution to the problems of the modern...

...it is a way men have of indicating those aspects of the present in which they take special pride and by which they distinguish their own cultural, political or technological achievements from those of previous generations...

...they study modernization at least in part to learn how coercion can be minimized and totalitarian terror avoided...

...It suggests connections only between the historical past and the unhistorical present, the conventionally admitted world around us...

...Given the character of contemporary backwardness and the character of contemporary modernity, it is probably correct to argue that modernizing regimes will always be authoritarian and their methods always coercive, if not terroristic...

...1 Historical concepts always tell us as much about the men who use them as about the events they are supposed to describe...

...If, by contrast, modernity is seen as having a multitude of forms then there are a multitude of paths, and all sorts of choices to be made and opportunities seized...

...Soviet modernity does not depend first upon the activity of the party and then upon its withering away...

...they advocated the radical decentralization and simplification of bureaucratic structures...

...He is singularly blind to the anxieties and frustrations which seem endemic precisely in the "modern" life he unquestioningly accepts and which are the result, in part, of that very failure of socialist aspiration which he claims to understand...

...The nearer one is to the fully realized modern, the more disturbing is the idea that radical social change is a thing of the past...

...That excludes too much: modernity always appears in particular historical forms, in which Americans and Russians, Chinese and Indians struggle with the past, adjust to it, evade and endure it, but never escape it...

...Their experience provides the basis for a theory about the stages, crises and turning points of the modernizing process, and about the character of its active agents and still vigorous opponents...

...The activity of the modernizers requires a goal which can be assumed...

...Presumably men must struggle along that pathway as quickly and with as little pain as possible, and since the end is preordained, theorists can only distinguish between forced marches and voluntary advance...

...But there is another difficulty in modernization theory: it fails to provide any very interesting means of distinguishing among different presents...

...The question is, transformed in what way...

...The immediate past is more parochial, the present more universal, chiefly because of the worldwide diffusion of ideas and artifacts, itself an aspect of modernization...

...And if only these men were revolutionaries at home...

...Social-democracy (in, for example, its Scandinavian form) seems indeed a modern social system, far closer to welfare state capitalism than to the Marxist vision...

...Complacently they wait for their straining, backward fellows, as if they had no more history of their own to act out...

...Similarly, the Western experience of Puritan repression and bourgeois egotism is not simply one pathway into the modern world...

...Most American social scientists, of course, do not believe that all costs are justified...

...Repression and egotism gives rise to modern capitalism and are to an extent embodied in their own creation...

...There is some truth to this, perhaps, if it is expressed with sufficient caution...

...American social scientists use the concept "modernization" first of all for reasons of convenience: it groups together all the complex transformations now going on in Africa and Asia and it suggests useful comparisons with similar transformations presumed to have occurred at one time or another in Europe...

...The two are equally the products of the revolution against traditional order...

...However useful it is in explaining the past, it fails to alert the men who use it to that which is transient in the present...

...For this reason, the Marxist writer has one decisive advantage over the academic theorist of modernization...

...The current doctrine, then, represents a major act of intellectual reduction, an act not without some empirical justification...

...Now either of these views represents an advance over the cold war conception of the Soviet system as permanent and monolithic evil...

...With automation so near a prospect, for example, how necessary to the job they are doing is the discipline of a "Prot...

...the disease of Stalinism will be shaken off and the patient brought to a condition which, it is assumed, will be healthy simply because it will be modern...

...The alternatives in the backward countries depend upon the alternatives in the advanced countries...

...They approach the problems of development with a lively pragmatism which is often appealing...

...The theory of the single revolution, however, commits the social scientist who holds it to view the problems of "rising expectations" or historical unevenness as susceptible to definitive solution through the completion of the modernization process...

...Modernization theorists (here following Weber) tend to deny that there are significant differences between capitalism and socialism...

...Eighteenth-century theories of progress were characterized by a curious notion that the past might be abolished: each new advance in science or politics not only overcame the obstacles which older men had erected, but literally annulled the darkness in which they had lived...

...And insofar as parties and politicians make different decisions, they or their descendants will find themselves living in different worlds...

...There is a "job-to-be-done" air about modernization theory and the theorists may well feel that the pressure of poverty and hunger are so great that there is no time for complicated analyses of modernity...

...but neither are they abolished...

...They both foster the conjugal family and shatter the ties of extended kinship systems...

...Alternatively, totalitarianism, with the purges, can be conceived as a "disease" to which nations are peculiarly susceptible during the crisis period—a view which justifies efforts to prevent the disease and has therefore been favored by American writers...

...Like Hegel in the Prussian state, though with a more catholic sense of human destiny, they view their own achievement as the culmination of historical development...

...My purpose is to suggest some of the intellectual tendencies fostered by the theory and already visible in those books (by Daniel Lerner, W. W. Rostow, S. M. Lipset, Gabriel Almond, etc...

...But contemporary social scientists seem unwilling to confront the modern world in a critical way...

...Not even the spread of a single technology or the increasing interrelatedness of the various divisions of mankind seems likely to produce in the near future a single history and a singular modernity...

...It is not really a historical, let alone a scientific, word at all...

...Acutely aware of the discomforts of rational-legal civilization, he sensed that there would be future transformations...

...Their theory then fails to do what a theory of history and society ought to do: to suggest possible or likely connections between the past and future...

...And so on: they wrote also of changes in the character of political participation...

...how coercive...

...For them, feudalism and capitalism, where property was privately owned, seemed more closely related to each other than either was to socialism, where private property was abolished...

...artists, writers, even social scientists must choose the way they wish to see the world and invariably they choose ideas which suit their needs or convenience...

...Because of the complex processes through which ideology and technology are imitated and diffused, however, this crisis occurs at different times in different countries and draws different groups of men into its vortex—businessmen, factory workers, peasants...

...In the name of progress and of that efficiency and bureaucratic rationality which progress seems to require, they have set aside one by one precisely those purposes whose achievement would have resulted in a radically new form of modernity and would also have required major changes in the theory of modernization...

...Modernization is thought to be a single, long-term historical process in which all mankind is destined to participate, but in which some men already have participated...

...Of course, totalitarianism is bound to be transformed as the historical process of which it is the product, proceeds...

...In theory, at least, a thoroughgoing critique of the modern world would offer men everywhere a wider range of choices...

...It should be said that a critique of the theory has been begun by Professor Wilbert Moore in his book Social Change...

...it is a word, so to speak, with built-in naivete, the characteristic naivete of contemporary writers who make the modern and familiar into something superhistorical...

...11 Marxist theory was constructed around the notion of two revolutions: one had already occurred when Marx wrote, though not yet in all countries...

...Theirs is a theory of progress, but of progress realized...

...According to our theorists, all these proposals are merely the utopian effervesence of the crisis period, quickly enough forgotten when the time comes for socialists to take over governments and begin the hard but rewarding work of modernization...

...it culminates in modernity...

...Unlike the eighteenth-century French doctrine, it does not point beyond the present...

...It is in this sense that the criticisms suggested above are relevant even to the politicians and economic planners in Asia and Africa who are "doing the job...

...Neither the institutional structures of individualism nor the Communist party, of course, are necessary parts of modernity...

...All debate is then reduced to questions like, how authoritarian...

...IV These criticisms of modernization theory apparently have more relevance in the "advanced" than in the "backward" countries...

...its use is only to suggest, in the language of modernization theory, that while the "crisis" may be comparatively brief, the particular ways in which it is met have lasting effects...

...Similarly, Bolshevism is probably best described as a modernizing ideology, its adherents driven to act out that repressive and disciplinary role currently thought necessary to social progress...

...That society can be either capitalist or socialist...

...When modernity is turned into a sociologist's ideal type, it suggests that impossible escape and then does not provide any clear way to analyze or understand the particular forms of the modern—where the encounter with the parochial past is as essential as is the universal present...

...all costs must seem worthwhile if modernity itself is the purchase...

...In fact, however, the giveness of ends limits and inhibits the debate over means...

...Even the casual use of words like "backward" or "developmental process" suggests forcefully that the direction of historical change is not at issue...

...Both of them provide a historical framework within which totalitarianism can be better understood than it has been until now...

...So much of what they call modern is already outmoded, vestigial, inadequate to human needs...

...If such changes are not required by anything which has yet hap pened, however, one can at least insist that they may yet be required...

...He quickly becomes aware of the way in which historical problems, like those seemingly outmoded social classes in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, accumulate through time...

...They are content to view social problems as functions of backwardness and to offer modernization as a single cure...

...scientific utility for its extraordinary popularity...

...And for the moment, at least, it is useful to argue that some of these societies will be totalitarian...

...The two forms of contemporary socialism can both be accommodated better by modernization theory than by Marxism...

...Rational-legal and modern are terms very similar in meaning, but Weber avoided the word which his followers have chosen, perhaps because he realized the instability of the social system he was describing...

...So men continually escaped the consequences of their own history...

...For no country has had more than one revolution, or at any rate, no country has had two revolutions which can usefully be described as bourgeois and proletarian...

...The first result of diffusion is to increase the number of sovereign states, the number of arenas in which political decisions are made...

...He is unalterably committed, living as he always does before the second revolution, to search in his own society for those "contradictions" in social, economic and political life which are manifest in human discontent...

...He warned of revolutions led by charismatic men, calling into question all the achievements of human rationality...

...The Russian people thus are likely to endure their modernizing party as an inescapable incubus for years to come, long after its presumed historical function has been fulfilled...

...As against traditional passivity, they both generate mass activism and participation (though neither requires that that participation be meaningful or democratic...

...The theory of modernization, by contrast, rests on the idea of a single revolution which has already occurred in some but not yet in all countries...

...American academicians seem as certain as were Whig historians that their contemporary world is the modern world, and the modern the very best world there has ever been...

...They have developed a healthy sensitivity to the human misery upon which traditionalism rests...

...He discovers the unevenness of historical change and senses the troubles of the men left behind...

...But modernization, in theory as in reality, has acquired a momentum of its own...

...They looked forward to changes in the conjugal family, for the household with all the inhibitions it placed upon the freedom of women had clearly survived the breakup of the extended kinship system...

...Yet none of this is integrally connected with socialism in modernization theory—nor, it need hardly be said, in the modern world as we know it...

...This is a view which suits men of different political persuasions: it can provide the basis for arguments about Soviet liberalization or incipient American totalitarianism...

...Somber warnings about the inescapability of the past—and especially of that past which is being made today—must sound to them like superfluous moralizing...

...That word need not retain its apocalyptic overtones...

...Something of this odd notion survives in modernization theory: at a certain point in the process of development, it is thought, men loose themselves from their parochial pasts and, after one or another sort of social trauma, enter a universal present...

...They both depend for efficiency upon an impersonal and bureaucratic rationality...

...All processes arrive and are always arriving at the modern, but this is always a particular modern, determined by its history...

...III A theory with one revolution is a theory with one revolution too few...

...One such reason is probably that modernization theory forecloses a great deal of political debate...

...These two revolutions linked three stages of human history: feudal, capitalist and socialist...

...This revolution links two historical stages: traditional and modern...

...Modernization" is by definition a terminal process...

...one had not yet occurred in any country...

...Modern" has become a term of self-congratulation...

...they thought the Protestant work ethic with its overtones of compulsion characteristic only of capitalist society...

...This remains true even after one admits that the range of choices is not always wide and that the word "choice" does not always indicate debate and deliberation...

...The bias of the theory, however, would appear to favor a forecast of Soviet liberalization, both because the idea of the modern has been shaped in the image of Western experience, and because the Russians being less recently modern presumably have further to evolve...

...Such a description has a certain plausibility, especially if one ignores or deemphasizes the purges of Stalin's time which seem without historical "appropriateness...

...Moderni zation theory, then, lies behind the widely shared view that the United States and the Soviet Union are evolving towards one another and eventually will develop very similar social systems...

...And the society which the Bolsheviks have produced certainly bears striking resemblances to that modern world which has emerged in the West—there also without the benefit of a second revolution...

...That revolution marks the final crisis of the old order: a vanguard of modern men bursts through the trammels of tradition and establishes the new society...

...Most importantly, perhaps, he understands how historical unevenness fixes group interests and social structures into patterns of conflict which are extremely difficult to overcome...

...Instead, the party creates a particular form of modernity, a form to which it is itself integral and not incidental...

...At the same time, however, both of them do us (and the Russians) the acute disservice of suggesting that the future of Soviet society is somehow not a problem (only the past is a problem): the modernizing process will go on...

...Exciting work has been done with this conceptual scheme, but the concept has serious difficulties and these have seldom been treated analytically.* Nor has anyone suggested that there may be reasons beyond • This essay does not pretend to examine in detail the large number of books and articles in which the theory of modernization is used more or less systematically, nor the larger number in which its terminology is vaguely employed...

...We will continue to live in significantly different societies...

...But this reduction is only necessary if the model of modernity imitated in the backward countries is not itself subject to change and if there is only one possible end to the developmental process...

...in which it has been most ably developed...

...modern life must appear as attractive as it is inevitable...

...its terms inevitably have come to have meanings for which its creators are not entirely responsible—though those meanings more often than not are true to the logic of the theory...

...Their sociological and psychological foundations are thought to be identical...

...Thus they have tended to see modernization as a process whose means require further study and debate, but whose ends are given...

...But this very diffusion evokes from each country a particular response, leads to a special form of social unevenness and eventually to a distinct political creed and a cherished independence...

...In other areas as well, however, socialism was thought to involve significant transformations precisely of modern, that is, bourgeois life...

...The academic theorists disagree among themselves and the criticisms which follow by no means apply equally to all of them...

...Indeed, the major purpose of the theory is to facilitate the business of catching up...

...But the American social scientists who write of modernization live wholeheartedly in the midst of the modern...

...The theory thus predicts the failure of socialist aspiration insofar as it points beyond the modern world, even while admitting the possible success of socialism as a modernizing ideology...

...The theory is most successful in explaining the experience of backwardness, that is, the new awareness of men living in traditional societies that they are in some sense "behind" and must quickly "catch up...