Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America

New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History

by Nils Gilman

Because it provided the dominant framework for "development" of poor, postcolonial countries, modernization theory ranks among the most important constructs of twentieth-century social science. In Mandarins of the Modernization Theory in Cold War America Nils Gilman offers the first 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-centered 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 M.I.T. 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.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, 20th Century

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 2004

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm shelving Mandarins of the Future next to my Vietnam War books because this is the intellectual history behind why the best and the brightest went into a small Southeast Asian country and lost everything.

The end of the Second World War, with its victory over fascism and the next struggle against international Communism, offered a great opportunity for American academics. 1950s America, prosperous, tranquil, and democratic, clearly stood at the endpoint of history. All that needed to done was to prove this was true, and then export the American system to the newly liberated Third World before the pernicious virus of Communism got there first. This project was one of "modernization", first a universal social science to describe the trajectory of nations from a traditional past to an industrialized, democratic, scientific and stable modernity, and then a set of overarching policy projects in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, to make this vision a reality.

The three cases studies on academic units and their leaders: Talcott Parsons at Harvard, Edward Shils and Gabriel Almond at Princeton, and Walt Rostow at MIT, provide a thorough accounting of modernization theory, and its troubled and multifaceted links to American history and Marxism. In promoting an America System of modernity, these thinkers espoused a vision of 'conflict-less' progress and expansion of wealth in America that ignored the very real evils of genocide against Native Americans, slavery and the Civil War, or the struggle between labor and capitalist robber barons in the late 19th century. They conceived of the social scientist as a kind of collective psychoanalyst, a specialist that could help elites display democratic virtues without the chaotic hurly-burly of mass political participation. Abroad, modernizers conceived of a project of state-directed development that required a firm, national hand. In the absence of a robust civil society, the military could do this just fine, and there were no contradictions between modernization and authoritarian regimes.

As Gilman recounts in the final chapters, modernization theory collapsed comprehensively with the failure of liberal policy in the 60s and 70s, as the Kennedy/Jackson initiatives around the Vietnam War and the Great Society failed to produce victory at great expense, and the economy stagnated. Modernization theory, having been so close to the apex of the military-industrial-academic-complex, became an easy target from critics across the political spectrum. A resurgent Right, from old-guard segregationists to neoliberal deregulators, dismantled the modernist project of active government intervention. The counter-culture, from street-fighting youths to post-modern intellectuals, railed against the closed totalizing vision of modernity, finding solace in individual and subjective identities.

Mandarins of the Future matters, because for all that they got wrong, the conception of modernity developed by the subjects of this book remains a durable default. The welfare state, elite deliberatve democracy, and a basic optimism about technology and the future, are at the core of left-central politics today. Modernization theory was dusted off and used to justify the non-military aspects of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the Global War on Terror. For all the battering that these political ideologies and ideals have taken in recent years, modernization is at least a productive theory, unlike the intellectual cynicism and nihilism of the various flavors of post-modernist thought, or the Darwinian accelerationism that seems to be the end-state of global capitalism.

Perhaps modernity is, to rephrase Churchill, the least bad of all our ways of existing in the 20th century. If so, it is important to understand it as an idea with a particularly genesis and background, and not an automatic endpoint of history. This book serves as important intellectual stepping stone between Marx and Weber, and the conditions of life in the 21st century.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future is a lucid intellectual history of the rise and fall of modernization theory in the United States. Gilman argues that modernization theory projected New Deal liberalism into the realm of geopolitics. His treatment of modernization theory as liberal ideology -- as opposed to social science -- challenges the consensus historiography (see Economic Development) which treats it as a social-scientific response to the problems facing the new postcolonial countries. Like the beatniks and greasers, modernization theory rose and fell with the 'ambient ideological environment' of the '50s and '60s.

The book’s core is a series of three case studies of academic institutions, and their leading thinkers, which sought to propagate modernization theory. Gilman covers Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, Edward Shils, Max Millikan, Clark Kerr, Alex Inkeles, Daniel Lerner, and many others. These chapters might have been painfully boring in the hands of a lesser historian. But Gilman is a gifted storyteller and I found many scenes totally engrossing. It’s impossible not to appreciate the drama of Talcott Parson’s heroic attempt at unifying the social sciences within a single Grand Theory. So cool.

The final chapters are concerned with the supersession of modernization theory by competing ideologies, and contain some of the book’s best passages. Gilman covers Samuel Huntington’s chilling critique: ‘if rapid growth was the cause of political instability, and political stability was considered a paramount foreign policy objective, then slowing growth rates in the postcolonial world ought to be a foreign policy objective.’ He also takes a look at critiques from the New Left, such as those of dependency theorists Andre Gunder-Frank and Emmanuel Wallerstein, who argue that free trade is an intrinsic impediment to growth in the South.

But it was ultimately the postmodern turn which doomed Parsons, Rostow, and the rest of them. Unlike the conservatives and New Leftists with whom the modernization theorists shared certain assumptions about the intrinsic good of modernity, it was the postmodernists who flatly rejected the good, inevitability, and even coherence of modernity altogether. By the 1970s the modernization theory moment was over.

The book's greatest fault is endemic to intellectual history generally. Gilman doesn’t even try to situate modernization theory within the wider historical moment. The book barely touches on the global economy, the political system, or what policy makers were actually doing. Why did foreign policy elites find modernization theory so compelling? Whose interests did modernization serve? How was a geopolitics of modernization implemented? In eliding these questions, Gilman does not live up to Parson’s daring.

The final pages bring the book up to date and include interesting treatments of Fukuyama and later Huntington, a brutal takedown of Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development, and a polemical critique of neoliberalism. Despite modernization theory's shortcomings, Gilman finds its successor ideology, neoliberalism, retrograde by comparison.

[Melissa]

Nils Gilman is a professor of intellectual history at University of San Francisco and the Director of Research for Monitor 360. In Mandarins of the Future, Gilman traces the rise of modernization theory as the center of postwar American social science, its evolution toward authoritative ideologies and policies, and its eventual fall from political and social thought. From the beginning, modernization theory was rooted in uncertainty. In postwar America, modernization theory reflected conflicting sides of the 1950s: the self-congratulatory optimism of a war won and the domestic and international anxiety of the Cold War. Modernity held optimism about the future, but also fear that it may all tumble down. This conflict and its evolution is the central argument of Mandarins.
In the first two chapters, Gilman introduces modernization theory, drawing a distinction between “modern” and “modernization” and intimately connecting the two to the discourse on development. Drawing from sociologist Edward Shils, Gilman explains “modern” as geographically removed from, but influenced by, the West without the onus of following the West. Modernization theory, in Gilman’s words, posited the “existence of a common and essential pattern of ‘development,’ defined by progress in technology, military and bureaucratic institutions, and the political and social structure (82-83) . The American ideological goal of development was for others to emulate the United States and create industrialized and competitive democracy under the watchful eye of US appointed elites. The elites held the task of imposing social, economic, and cultural norms upon the masses. The United States was a modernized country with modern elites and therefore should take up the task through its modernization theorists, the people whom communications specialist Ithiel de Sola Pool called the "mandarins of the future," those "whose ethic of responsibility put them beyond the questioning of the ‘reasonable strata’ of the public” (152-154). The goal was not isolated to economic democracy, but permeated society through culture, art, and music, thus blurring the line between the modern and modernization. Modernization theory became the foreign policy counterpart to "social modernism," the idea that a meliorist, rationalizing, benevolent, technocratic state could solve all social and especially economic ills. (260-261). Gilman reasons that mandarins came in three flavors: a technocosmopolitan flavor, which argued that modernity must be built on the foundations of tradition; a revolutionary flavor, which argued that modernization required a radical rupture with tradition; and an authoritarian flavor, which argued that radical rupture could take place only through the force of a centralizing and omniscient state. Gilman connects the manifestation of modernization theory and its flavors through three case studies, or “mandarins of the future”: Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations (DSR), the Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP) of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The first mandarin is Harvard’s Talcott Parsons. Gilman views Parsons as the foundation to modernization theory, arguing that he articulated modernity and the project of modernization theory “better, earlier, and more thoroughly than anyone else” (1034). The DSR at Harvard aimed to forge a universal science of society, a goal largely driven by the appeal of Parsons to postcolonial issues. More importantly, Parson’s interpretation of Weber’s “Spirit of Capitalism” provided anticommunist theorists a way to replace the relationship between Marx and economic change. Once the reinterpreted Weberian theory (tainted with subtle strains of Marxism) permeated political institutions, such as the CCP, it took on a darker, strategic tone. Under the methodological guidance of political scientist Gabriel Almond, modernization theory shifted from social science theory to a social, economic, and political Enlightenment project for the postcolonial world.
Gilman’s chapter on MIT is the highlight of the book. Gilman argues it was not the Cold War or trade agreements that led the United States to support dictators in the developing word. It was, he argues, the evolution of modernization theory into a vehemently anticommunist and militaristic initiative. As a representative of the CIS, economist Walt Whitman Rostow’s advisory role to Washington laid the foundation for counterinsurgency strategies in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa and advocated of military dictatorships as an apparatus of “consensus building” and modernization.
The three case studies reveal an evolution of modernization theory from abstract Parsonian social theory to Almond’s political development, to Rostow’s elitist policy recommendations. Though Gilman explains how threads of technocosmopolitan, revolutionary, and authoritarian flavors persisted throughout the early years of the Cold War, it ultimately shifted to emphasize authoritarian ideologies. This shift, Gilman argues, represents “in miniature the tragedy of postwar American liberalism” (206).
The following chapters delve into the application of modernization theory as foreign policy doctrine and its subsequent collapse. Gilman argues that modernization theory ultimately helped lead American policy makers into irrevocable and terrible mistakes, most notably the Vietnam War. By the 1980s, modernization theory was discredited and those who continued to subscribe to its doctrine were ill informed and backward thinking. Gilman challenges the widespread view that modernization theory was a conservative ideology. Instead, he argues that it was the manifestation of American postwar liberalism and it must be understood within that context. As liberal confidence in modernity declined, confidence in modernization theory did too.
Despite the slow death of modernization theory and its ambivalent revival, Gilman’s work is optimistic. Modernization theory was not fundamentally malevolent; it did however, hold a flawed idealistic assumption that western modernization was universal. The problem is the way in which modernization theory has been executed, not in the theory itself. He stresses that we must be careful not to let the failures of modernity push us into the “cultural despair (3673) of postmodernism. Gilman criticizes postmodernism, claiming it hides behind false humanitarian rhetoric cloaked in abstract concepts and statistics in order to extend capitalism and power over poor countries. Postmodernism is hopeless, and there is “a more hopeful moment in the contemporary geopolitical discourse of modernity”(3685). Gilman insists that modernist social democracy requires a universal community of humankind that has, at is very foundation, expanded mandates of social justice. Ultimately, according to Gillman, modernization theory is not wholly pessimistic and something can be salvaged from the idealist project of development, if the human welfare motivations of liberal modernization theorists are able to place a greater emphasis on human rights within the framework of democracy. In the end, Gilman’s book is a historiography of modernization theory with a final message of hope for its renewal in democratically and compassionately meeting the challenges of globalization.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book is bracketed by an impenetrable introduction and a lame conclusion, most of it is an interesting and detailed intellectual history of the modernization theory of international economic development, at least as it existed in 1950s American universities. Gilman shows that a few institutions, like Harvard's Department of Social Research led by sociologist Talcott Parsons, and MIT's Center for International Studies led by Max Milligan and Walt Whitman Rostow, dominated the discussion. He also shows that despite Rostow's centrality, most of the theory came out of political science not economics, and, as Parsons said explicitly, was meant to dethrone economics as a universal science of development.

[Todd Stansbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly straightforward introduction to the modernization theory that seemed to dominate American thought during the fifties and sixties. While many books are a little too academic this one at least flows like a fairly good narrative. Chapter Seven's discussion of the events that led to the disillusionment with modernist theory is especially interesting.

[Geoffrey Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the onset of the Cold War coincided with the end of European and Japanese colonialism in the decades following World War II, American policymakers and social scientists sought to create a development model that would serve as an alternative to Soviet communism, whose rapid industrialization in the 1930s and 40s was widely admired by Third World intellectuals and leaders. In Mandarins of the Future, Nils Gilman traces the formation of that model -- modernization theory -- in elite universities by social scientists with close ties to the US government and corporate philanthropic organizations. Gilman shows how these intellectuals' elitist sensibilities and rose-tinted view of American society and history influenced the policy ideas they generated, and why modernization theory ultimately lost influence following the Vietnam War (which some of the leading figures of modernization theory, such as Walt Rostow, were deeply involved in). He also traces the afterlife of modernization theory, showing how many of its leading proponents during the 50s and 60s became neoconservatives or communitarians in subsequent decades, and also discussing the resurgence of modernization themes under the guise of the Washington Consensus in the 1990s.

I would strongly recommend this book for students of international development and comparative politics. Many American social scientists operate under the illusion that their fields are value-free, objective, and 'progressive' (in the sense that they are moving closer and closer to obtaining a 'complete' understanding of how the world works). Mandarins of the Future should give them pause because it shows how social scientists who considered themselves objective nonetheless produced knowledge that was shaped by their standpoint as white males from middle-class backgrounds educated in elite institutions, which shaped their understanding of American society that thereby served as the 'norm' against which all others should be measured. I would argue that American political science is still shaped by the elitist distrust of populism and the consensus intepretation of American history that Gilman identifies as sources of bias in modernization theory, which in turn distorts the way they measure and theorize about political regimes, states, and economic development in the rest of the world. This book highlights the need for social scientists to be reflexive about how their standpoint shapes the knowledge that they create, because social scientists are the products of the very social orders that they study.

The final chapter of the book, which discusses the postmodernist reaction to modernization theory and social modernism in general, highlights a dilemma that I struggle with. On the one hand, modernization theory and the Washington Consensus present 'one-size-fits-all' approaches to development that are based on distorted understandings of how the 'West' succeeded that conveniently occludes the sources of deepening inequalities within and between countries and the history of coercion that any honest account of European and American history must put in the foreground. When the imperial state and philanthropic organizations backed by wealthy donors create development knowledge, it's hard not to be skeptical because these biases are going to come up again and again -- they're produced by the structure. On the other hand, the postmodernist, post-development critics of development ideology fail (in fact, refuse) to offer strategies for developing nations to improve welfare for their citizens. Gilman has a point when he says that people like Arturo Escobar "throw out the modernist baby with the development bathwater." Criticism of the development apparatus shouldn't lead us to romaticize 'underdevelopment.' What would development without domination really look like? I'm not convinced by Gilman's call for the creation of a global new deal, but I think that he's right that we still need to generate theories of development if we're going to make this century better than the one that came before it (we're not off to a great start...).