Abstract
One of our most familiar stories of American social science in the Cold War era concerns the rise and dominion of “modernization theory.”1 American social scientists tried to systematize knowledge of how societies “became modern,” in response to post-World War II decolonization and in the expectation or hope that poor countries would steadily achieve standards of economic growth, national state formation, generalization of mass education and common citizenship rights associated with the contemporary liberal society of advanced Western countries. Germinating in the late 1940s and 1950s, this kind of standard modernization model predominated in U.S. social thought in the early and mid 1960s and began losing its sway by the early to middle 1970s. By that time, world events (economic stagnation and the political decay of postcolonial new states, or anticolonial revolutionary campaigns of the “third world” and the brutality of counterinsurgency war) had combined with the rise of new oppositional social theories on the Left to cast “modernization” in doubt.
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Notes
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), views the Cold War in the Third World largely as a conflict of ideological visions (United States vs. Soviet) on modernization.
Cf. Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Tower: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
On the link of modernization theory and the Democratic administrations of the 1960s, see Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2008). On “rates of urbanization and of modernization” in rural South Vietnam, discussed by the conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington, included by some observers in the modernization school and not by others, see Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 232.
Carl Degler noted that “social scientists, beginning in the late 1940s, [became] increasingly interested in the relation between biology and their particular social science,” but he found the neo-evolutionist anthropologist Leslie A. White to stand entirely outside that trend. The word “heredity,” Degler noted, “did not appear at all” in the index to White’s 1949 book, The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949). See Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 226, 208.
The most compelling analysis of the origins of sociocultural evolutionism appears in George Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987). Stocking identifies the tradition with the mid- to late-nineteenth century British writers John Lubbock, J. F. McLennan, and Edward B. Tylor—a current quite distinct from others devoted to hereditarian theories of race. Indeed, the American evolutionist Lewis Henry Morgan stood apart from “racial science” in the United States. Nonetheless, ideas of sociocultural stages of development and racial hierarchies became by the end of the nineteenth century much more closely associated, especially when mobilized in defense of imperial civilizing missions.
Several academic events marking the centennial of Origin of Species included discussion of “social and cultural evolution” as well. While that discussion still aroused some rancor among different groups of anthropologists, a number of observers recognized a climate of opinion that vindicated the efforts of “neo-evolutionists” over the preceding two decades to revive attention to the matter. See “Social and cultural evolution,” in Sol Tax and Charles Callender, eds., Issues in Evolution, vol. III of Sol Tax, ed., Evolution after Darwin: The University of Chicago Centennial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 207–243; Betty J. Eggers, ed., Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal (Washington, D. C.: The Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959);
William J. Peace, Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 201–207.
On evolutionary themes in economics, see the widely influential book on the origins of growth economics, Colin Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress (London: Macmillan, 1940).
Talcott Parsons began his famous 1937 treatise, The Structure of Social Action asking “Who now reads Spencer?” He made his peace with the tradition of sociocultural evolution, however, by writing an introduction to a 1961 re-issue of Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961), remarking, “Whereas evolutionary thinking in the social sciences has suffered more than a generation of eclipse since Spencer’s day, there is currently a notable revival going on…” (viii).
See also Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966).
David Scott, “Modernity that predated the modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean,” History Workshop Journal, no. 58 (Autumn 2004), 191–210. The re-branding of some latter-day neo-evolutionist studies as “historical anthropology” may contribute, along with the strength of the Boasian heritage and its more influential contender, British structural functionalism, for the relative neglect of neo-evolutionism in the history of American anthropology. Stocking pays scant attention to the neo-evolutionists in Victorian Anthropology, 291–292, 299. Marvin Harris pays greater attention to the work of neo-evolutionists Leslie White and Julian Steward, along with other significant figures in the evolutionist revival, archaeologist V. Gordon Childe and sinologist Karl Wittfogel, mainly to distinguish his own theory of “cultural materialism” from their work. See Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 634–687.
George Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968).
Hamilton Cravens, “What’s new in science and race since the 1930s,” The Historian 72 (Summer 2010): 299–320.
Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949).
William J. Peace, Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
Quoted in Virginia Kerns, Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory (Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 122.
Marshall Sahlins and Elman R. Service, eds., Evolution and Culture, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 2. Lest this be considered merely a repetition of the Western view of colonized people lacking history to begin with, compare with Frantz Fanon’s statement, in The Wretched of the Earth, that on the eve of independence, the Algerian “people are getting ready to begin to go forward again, to put an end to the static period begun by colonization, and to make history.” Quoted in Ned Curthoys, “The refractory legacy of Algerian decolonization,” in Richard H. King and Dan Stone, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 118.
Alexander Lesser, “Evolution in social anthropology” (1939), published in 1952 and reprinted in History, Evolution, and the Concept of Culture: Selected Papers by Alexander Lesser, ed. Sidney W. Mintz (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 80.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).
Regarding Childe’s influence, see Clifford Wilcox, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).
Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), 2, 3, 15, 79, 136.
Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1955), 122–150, 8.
William Peace, “Columbia University and the Mundial Upheaval Society: A study in academic networking,” 143–165, in Dustin M. Wax, ed., Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism, and the CIA (London: Pluto Press, 2008). Another young and left-wing Columbia anthropology student, Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987), did not belong to the MUS. She was a student of archaeologist Duncan Strong, not Steward, and she sensed that the MUS was an exclusive “boy’s club.” Her marginalization from the core group of neo-evolutionist students was especially ironic since her study of the transformation of Montagnais-Naskapi culture in Labrador wrought by the French expansion of the fur trade became a key exemplar of the multilinear method in Steward’s Theory of Culture Change. Steward, Theory of Culture Change, 144, and Eleanor Leacock, “The Montagnois ‘Hunting Territory’ and the fur trade,” American Anthropologist 56 (1954), No. 5, Part 2, Memoir No. 78.
Julian H. Steward, et al., The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 1–27.
Michael Lapp, “The rise and fall of Puerto Rico as a social laboratory, 1945–1965,” Social Science History 19 (Summer 1995), 169–199. Joan Vincent, Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press), 301.
Eric R. Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 256.
Quoted in Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing, Friction: The Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 81–83 (emphasis added).
Peter Worsley, An Academic Skating on Thin Ice (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 33–58.
Worsley, An Academic Skating on Thin Ice; Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Society: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). In his introduction to Peasants and Peasant Society, Shanin’s caveat echoes principles of “multilinear evolution” charted in Steward’s 1955 Theory of Culture Change: “Like every social entity, peasantry exists only as a process, i.e., in its change. Regional differences among peasants reflect to a large extent their diverse histories. The typology suggested can be used as a yardstick for historical analysis, types of peasants can be approached as basic stages of development. One should beware, however, of the pitfalls of forcing multi-directional changes into neat and over-simplified schemes which presuppose one-track development for peasantries of every period, area and nation.” Shanin, in Peasants and Peasant Society, 16.
Peter Worsley, The Third World (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1964). See “Peter Worsley: A life,” notes on an interview by Alan MacFarlane, 25 February 1989.
John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003);
Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; and Worsley, An Academic Skating on Thin Ice.
Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, Penguin, 1985), xxiv, xxvi. See also David Scott, “Modernity that predated the modern.”
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974);
Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change (New York, 1980);
Robert Reich, The Next American Frontier (New York, 1983);
Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Solution: Building a World-Class American Economy (New York, 1985); Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late Capitalism,” New Left Review no. 146 (July–August 1984): 53–92;
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
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© 2012 Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens
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Brick, H. (2012). Neo-Evolutionist Anthropology, the Cold War, and the Beginnings of the World Turn in U.S. Scholarship. In: Solovey, M., Cravens, H. (eds) Cold War Social Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013224_9
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