Modernization: some reflections

Abstract

There is no need to bore everyone with the arguments; most of the participants are sufficiently familiar with them. I might just note that, at the heart of it, it is dead because it took a local experience and theorized it as a universal experience or process to be undergone by every society or nation. Worse, it did so without due recognition of how that local experience was very much shaped by global and local circumstances and history, instead seeing it as the working out of an endogenous, ineluctable, law-like process, in keeping with the positivism of the time. In so doing, it took a largely unplanned, hugely contested, and often misperceived process and turned it into a practical theory for how every society or nation can make the passage from tradition to modemity. Rostow's little book exemplifies this.