the twentieth century, the United States embraced autocrats willing to impose American ideas of modernization on Iran, Afghanistan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, much of Latin America, and, indeed, my new home, Turkey. One of the most influential books on American foreign policy and modernization theory, one funded by the State Department, was Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society, which was published in 1958. Most of Lerner’s research was collected in a tiny village in Anatolia. In Turkey.
