modernity
and rights of individuals, and the notion of social
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Copyright 2006. Cambridge University Press.
modernization
advantages and efficiencies. (A good example is
justice to which even the most acerbic critics of
modernity subscribe, even as they use these
values to highlight modernity’s shortcomings
and its hypocrisies.
As Durkheim observed, the moral ideals of mo-
dernity treat the rights and prerogatives of indi-
viduals as sacred. Each of us should possess these
rights to an equal extent. But these ideals are
contradicted by some very deep-seated modern
realities. Capitalism intrinsically generates vast
inequalities between the rich and the poor,
whether it is in the British slums Dickens described
in nineteenth-century England or the slums found
in every Third World conurbation today. Merely
noting the vast difference between average age of
death among modernity’s rich and poor alerts us to
how dramatic these inequalities are. But, as Pierre
Bourdieu observes, modernity also includes many
forms of cultural inequality that are insidious
insofar as people unselfconsciously reproduce
their habitus, even though in doing so they may
put themselves at a cultural disadvantage vis-à-vis
dominant groups. Some prominent inequalities
between women and men, racial and ethnic mi-
nority groups, and minority groups based upon
sexual differences can be understood in this way.
But critics of these inequalities have had a meas-
ure of success. From socialist movements a cen-
tury ago to women’s movements today, periodic
rebellions against inequality are as modern as the
forms of inequality to which they object.
Social estrangement has been a recurrent
theme in social theory. Marx’s notion of alien-
ation refers both to the loss of control over labor
by workers and to the estrangement of workers
from their material relations with fellow workers
and members of their community. In Suicide (1897
[trans. 1951]), Durkheim conceived estrangement
in two forms: anomie, which is the sense of pro-
found confusion brought about by the social dis-
ruptions to which modernity is prone, and egoism,
an excessively selfish, utilitarian form of individu-
alism which is the unappealing underside of the
moral individualism of which Durkheim approved.
Georg Lukács saw modernity in Kafkaesque terms
as subject to reification, that is, the sense that we
live a social world with hard realities that seem
too vast and powerful to change. Habermas’s
notion of the colonization of the life-world
speaks to estrangement in the sense that the in-
strumental policies of capitalism and the modern
state invade areas of public culture and private
life, suppressing meaningful ties of social inte-
gration in favor of calculations of organizational
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the bureaucratization of universities and schools.)
Though each of these notions of estrangement
makes a specific point, all of them underscore
one of modernity’s enduring problems, the inabil-
ity of modern civilization to generate groups to
replace the local communities that provided cul-
tural meaning, moral solidarity, and spiritual as-
surance in premodern forms of social life. There is
no single great impediment to the maintenance
of communal ways of life in modernity. Capitalism,
the bureaucratized social policies of the state,
the impersonality of scientific technology, and
modern individualistic culture – each adds its
own share of obstacles in this regard. However,
estrangement is not an all-or-nothing matter.
Community groups, stable intimate relationships
and personal friendships, and close extended fam-
ilies remain a part of the modern social scene. But,
then, there is no denying that feelings of power-
lessness, meaninglessness, loneliness, and insecu-
rity are common experiences in modern social
life. And to the extent that these feelings are found,
the critics of estrangement in modernity are right.
Ironically, all of these complaints hinge on
modern values. Other epochs had different com-
plaints. IRA COHEN
modernization
As the United States emerged as the world’s hege-
monic power after World War II, the structural–
functionalist modernization paradigm became
the dominant perspective in United States soci-
ology and world social science. Elaborated by
Harvard’s Talcott Parsons, the lead figure in
American sociology, the modernization paradigm
saw societies as a relatively stable set of inter-
related parts changing along similar lines, from
traditional agricultural to modern industrial soci-
eties, part of a global pattern. The models for this
transition from developing to developed societies
were the industrialized states of western Europe
and their settler offshoots in Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and the United States, along with
countries such as Japan. Poor underdeveloped
traditional societies were believed to be in the
earlier phases of this transition, having yet to go
through the modernization process. Here, the
weight of traditional cultural beliefs and practices
supposedly inhibited the industrialization, differ-
entiation, and specialization of occupational roles
necessary for success. Parsons aimed to provide a
holistic analysis of this process, discussing the
host of structural requirements necessary for
 modernization
the orderly functioning of the social system, so as
to promote their diffusion worldwide.
Nils Gilman’s important book, Mandarins of the
Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America
(2003), analyzes how United States social scientists
and policymakers converged on this model in the
context of American superpower competition
against the Soviet Union, including in the struggle
for the hearts and minds of those in the Third
World. Third World states were seen as being
held back by traditional beliefs and cultural prac-
tices, thought to be barriers inhibiting the steps
required for successful growth.
Perhaps the classic work of modernization or
development theory and its vision of elite-guided
democracy was economist Walt W. Rostow’s The
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(1961). Rostow argued that all countries could
pass through these stages to achieve high mass
consumption as had the United States. Rostow, a
former Rhodes Scholar, became an important
member of a host of United States presidential
administrations, playing a significant role in plan-
ning the Vietnam War as part of the group
of men David Halberstram called The Best and the
Brightest (1993), eventually becoming President
Johnson’s National Security Council adviser. As
critics pointed out, many social scientists working
within the modernization framework, from
Rostow to Parsons to Samuel Huntington, saw
their task not just to analyze reality but to try
and shape it to the benefit of the capitalist
nation-states of which they were a part. In the
context of the Vietnam War, such dual roles raised
many questions about the objectivity of social
scientists, and became an important part of the
critique of modernization theory.
While the modernization perspective domi-
nated United States and world social science up
until the 1960s, the tumult of this period, from
civil rights through the anti-war movement, to the
related worldwide revolts of 1968, ushered in a
sharp critique of this view and the forwarding of
radically different perspectives. Forming an influ-
ential critique here were the various brands of
international political economy, including world-
systems analysis formulated by Immanuel Waller-
stein and followers, which borrowed from Third
World radicalism and a host of critical perspec-
tives in world social science. Wallerstein and
others traced the rise of the modernization para-
digm to the shift from biological to cultural
racism, not surprisingly given the horrors of the
Holocaust, the political context of the civil rights
movement, and the progress of decolonization.
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modernization
Rather than simply arguing for the racial inferior-
ity of the colonized as during the heyday of colo-
nialism, now Third World backwardness was
seen instead as the result of cultural differences
and traditions, views critiqued most recently in
Jared Diamond’s landmark Guns, Germs and Steel
(1999). This culture of poverty argument also saw
cultural traditions as the cause of minority pov-
erty in the advanced core states. While moderniza-
tion was thus seen as an ideological formulation
designed to uphold power and inequality, Waller-
stein nonetheless recognized that there were
many liberal scholars honestly concerned with
the plight of world poverty and seeking to add
knowledge that could aid in its overcoming. That
being said, it was argued, the modernization view
seriously distorted the actual history of the capit-
alist world-system, within which development
and underdevelopment were part of a single his-
torical process, whereby the minority in powerful
core states benefited from the exploitation of
the great majority in the periphery, the semi-
periphery and the internal peripheries of the core.
There were many critical blows to the paradigm
which represented the dominant consensus in
sociology and the social sciences. In particular,
profound criticisms of the underside of modern-
ization came from the Frankfurt School of critical
theory – Walter Benjamin, Theodor Wiesengrund
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas –
and from Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the
Holocaust (1989). There were also periods of revival,
expressed in the 1980s and 1990s, as in Francis
Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
(1992). Today, modernization theory appears to
be making something of a comeback, this time
not so much by analyzing national backwardness,
but in the clash-of-civilizations discourse.
Increasingly, in the aftermath of the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks, United States scholars
such as Bernard Lewis have sought to explain the
failure to modernize of Islamic civilizations in
ways that provided ideological support to the
Anglo-American argument that it is necessary to
bring democracy to the Islamic world, if necessary
through force, as with the United States’ and
United Kingdom’s retrospective justification of
the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent military
occupation. Yet in spite of the nominal transfer
of sovereignty and elections, the revelations of
United States torture in Iraq and elsewhere have
undermined American claims of promoting free-
dom and modernization. Sociologists such as Paul
Lubeck criticized this new modernization ap-
proach, relating the decline of Islamic civilization
395