Francis Fukuyama: Samuel Huntington's Legacy
[Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.]
Of all of Samuel Huntington's contributions to the study of politics, the most important was his 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies. This book was probably the last major attempt to write a general theory of political development, and its significance needs to be placed in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the heyday of "modernization theory," probably the most ambitious American attempt to create an integrated, empirical theory of human social change. Modernization theory had its origins in the works of late 19th-century European social theorists like Henry Maine, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber. While based primarily on the experiences of early modernizers like Britain or the United States, they sought to draw from them general laws of social development.
European social theory was killed, literally and figuratively, by the two world wars. The ideas it generated migrated to the United States, and were taken up by a generation of American academics after the Second World War at places like Harvard University's Department of comparative politics, the MIT Center for International Studies, and the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics. The Harvard department, led by Weber's protégé Talcott Parsons, hoped to create an integrated, interdisciplinary social science that would combine economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology.
The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s also corresponded to the dissolution of European colonial empires and the emergence of what became known as the third or developing world -- newly independent countries with great aspirations to modernize and catch up with their former colonial masters. Scholars like Edward Shils, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, Gabriel Almond, David Apter, and Walt Whitman Rostow saw these momentous developments as a laboratory for social theory, as well as a great opportunity to help developing countries raise living standards and democratize their political systems.
If one were to sum up the Americanized version of modernization theory, it was the sunny view that all good things went together: Economic growth, social mobilization, political institutions, and cultural values all changed for the better in tandem. There was none of the tragic sense of loss that one sees in Weber's concepts of disenchantment or the iron cage of capitalism, or in Durkheim's anomie. The different dimensions of social change were part of a seamless and mutually supportive process...
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Of all of Samuel Huntington's contributions to the study of politics, the most important was his 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies. This book was probably the last major attempt to write a general theory of political development, and its significance needs to be placed in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the heyday of "modernization theory," probably the most ambitious American attempt to create an integrated, empirical theory of human social change. Modernization theory had its origins in the works of late 19th-century European social theorists like Henry Maine, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber. While based primarily on the experiences of early modernizers like Britain or the United States, they sought to draw from them general laws of social development.
European social theory was killed, literally and figuratively, by the two world wars. The ideas it generated migrated to the United States, and were taken up by a generation of American academics after the Second World War at places like Harvard University's Department of comparative politics, the MIT Center for International Studies, and the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics. The Harvard department, led by Weber's protégé Talcott Parsons, hoped to create an integrated, interdisciplinary social science that would combine economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology.
The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s also corresponded to the dissolution of European colonial empires and the emergence of what became known as the third or developing world -- newly independent countries with great aspirations to modernize and catch up with their former colonial masters. Scholars like Edward Shils, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, Gabriel Almond, David Apter, and Walt Whitman Rostow saw these momentous developments as a laboratory for social theory, as well as a great opportunity to help developing countries raise living standards and democratize their political systems.
If one were to sum up the Americanized version of modernization theory, it was the sunny view that all good things went together: Economic growth, social mobilization, political institutions, and cultural values all changed for the better in tandem. There was none of the tragic sense of loss that one sees in Weber's concepts of disenchantment or the iron cage of capitalism, or in Durkheim's anomie. The different dimensions of social change were part of a seamless and mutually supportive process...