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Criteria of modernity




Pictures of the future





Complexities of modernization






The “Western model” reconsidered





Transformation, not transfer






Empathy—mechanism of transformation










The Want-Get ratio




Public opinion—empathy to participation






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Daniel Lerner








































Theoretical approaches









The process of differentiation


The ethos of equality


The growth of political capacity


Democracy and nation-state



Patterns and variables

The autonomy of the polity



Patterns of modernization


Variables affecting modernization








James S. Coleman




































































































Sub-Saharan Africa









Middle East and Latin America






Ronald P. Dore

[See alsoBureaucracy; Stratification, Social.]








































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Peter N. Stearns

The concept of modernization was developed primarily by historical sociologists, and primarily in the United States, during the 1950s. The theory derived in part from earlier work by seminal social scientists, such as Max Weber, dealing with cumulative historical developments such as bureaucratization and organizational rationalization. In addition to these credentials, modernization took from Marxism the idea of progressive historical change while denying the need for revolution as its motor. Modernization provided a more optimistic, less violent view of major change. The theory's sweep and implicit optimism were seen as an alternative to Marxist formulations and took root in the context of the cold war. It also put economic change, including industrialization, in a wide political and social context. Major scholars who outlined the theory and organized empirical studies on its base included Daniel Lerner, Alex Inkeles, and Myron Weiner. Cyril Black and Gilbert Rozman took the lead in historical applications and comparisons.

Modernization theorists contended that there were fundamental differences between modern and traditional societies involving changes in outlook and in political, economic, and social structure. Western Europe (and perhaps the United States) first developed these modern characteristics, which would, however, become standard in other societies over the course of time. Finally, in many formulations the key features of modern society were not only different from but preferable to those of traditional units: they involved more wealth and better health, more political freedoms and rights, more knowledge and control over superstition, and even more enlightened treatment of children.

Modernization theory was widely utilized for two decades, by social historians as well as social scientists. Social historians in the 1970s could easily refer to such developments as the modernization of the European family. Modernization of child rearing, for example, included new levels of affection for children and a reduction in harsh discipline, and historians found evidence of this process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A cluster of scholars worked on patterns of modernization in social protest, from rioting in defense of older, threatened standards to articulate political movements on behalf of newly claimed rights. These imaginative extensions of the theory added to the more obvious uses of modernization such as the expansion of education or greater geographic and social mobility.

Modernization theory also required definitions of traditional society, now sometimes called premodern. Shared characteristics of premodern societies ranged from lack of widespread literacy to an inability to conceive of political issues in abstract terms; premodern people, so the argument went, could only attach politics to the persons of particular monarchs or representatives. "Traditional" personalities looked to the past for guidance and, oriented to groups, lacked a commitment to individual identity. Sweeping generalizations about traditional societies, not always supported by careful research, proved to be one of modernization theory's greatest vulnerabilities.

Attacks on modernization emerged by the mid-1970s, led by critics like Dean Tipps, who argued against the use of purely Western models to measure modern world history. The concept fell into increasing disfavor; but it continues to have partisans and, more broadly, it often slips into untheoretical historical discourse. No longer widely debated or formally utilized by European social historians, modernization nevertheless deserves attention not simply as a relic but as an attempt to link various processes of change during the past several centuries.


As a term "modernization" can be used with many meanings. It can refer simply to technological change: during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries military modernization, in this sense, can mean little more than updating weaponry. Economic modernization, though a bit broader in implication, can be little more than a synonym for industrialization. Thus one could say that the French economy began to modernize in the 1820s, or the pace of modernization accelerated under Napoleon III in the 1850s.

However, the core meanings of the modernization concept, beyond surface descriptions, are twofold, with both aspects closely related. First, modernization often is used to describe patterns outside western Europe that are replicating patterns previously manifested within western Europe, or patterns that will or should develop in future. Thus Kemal Atatürk (first president of Turkey) attempted to modernize Turkey from the 1920s onward, mainly by attempting to introduce social forms that were already part of western European social history, broadly construed, a more secular society, wider education, industrial development, family planning, changes in the roles of women, and so on. This use of modernization treats modern European social history as a template for measuring or predicting developments outside of western Europe. Global modernization, particularly in optimistic 1960s formulations, assumed that all societies could ultimately modernize—that the social history of all civilizations would ultimately draw them closer to the trajectories of western Europe. But the formulations could also be used to identify lags: Why did Turkey modernize more slowly than the Soviet Union? Would India be able to modernize? In addition, the model could be used as a framework for comparisons of different modernization patterns, such as Soviet versus Western.

This first use of modernization theory, to summarize western European patterns as a predictive or at least descriptive model, assumed that such patterns could be agreed upon. Familiar components included industrialization, urbanization, the demographic transition (dramatically lower birth rates but also lower infant death rates), the rise of science, mass education and literacy, the growth of government and business bureaucracies, and changes in political structure, including wider suffrage. But there were areas of debate: Did modernization involve growing secularization or could/should it include new kinds of religious interests? Did it necessarily expand political participation and freedom? And there were areas of extension that went beyond some of the staples of modern European history: some modernization theorists thus posited the emergence of a modern personality type, contrasting with more traditional personalities in being more individualistic, more committed to a belief in progress, and less fatalistic.

The second meaning of modernization applied more directly to western European social history, though it undergirded the global application as well: modernization theory suggested an intertwining of otherwise discrete processes, so that somehow (it was not always clear how, save in rough chronological lockstep) the processes supported each other and conjoined. Thus economic modernization—in the sense of industrialization, technological change in agriculture, and the growth of business units—occurred in relationship to several other major, parallel changes: the spread of education; the diffusion of more scientific outlooks; changes in the state, such as new levels of political participation, shifts in governmental function (more promotion of economic growth, less promotion of particular churches), and bureaucratization; changes in family structure, such as new levels of birth control and growing emphasis on the nuclear as opposed to the extended family; and a decline of privileges of birth and a rise of legal equality and opportunities for social mobility. The range of interconnections could be awesome, particularly when modernization involved not only structural changes—like the spread of factories or urbanization—but also shifts in outlook, including new attitudes toward children or, at its most ambitious, the new personality types. In both its meanings, modernization theory obviously assumed major and mutually related changes between traditional and modern societies.

The theory had a number of potential advantages. It could provide a shorthand: rather than running through all the discrete developments that made a modern society different from a traditional one, modernization theory would sum them up. It suggested attention to process: modernization took place over decades or possibly centuries in cases, such as western Europe, where there was no established model to imitate. The emphasis on interrelationships was attractive not only to social scientists interested less in history in detail than in history as a source of large, intelligible trends, but also to social historians concerned about linking their special topics—like family history—to more general developments, including some of the staples of modern political and intellectual history. Modernization theory made it possible to integrate more easily. Changes affecting ordinary people—the social historian's preferred focus—related to more familiar shifts in elite policy and behavior, if the whole society ultimately was heading in a common, modernizing direction. Changes in one facet of behavior, such as sexuality, could be linked not only to shifts in other clearly sociohistorical facets, such as attitudes to the body or health, but also to trends in political or intellectual life.

Finally, many historians of Europe who dealt with areas outside the western European core and with periods before the nineteenth century found modernization theory useful. Russian experts, for example, were able to link some of the major trends in Russian history to apparently common, if earlier, modern patterns in Britain or France. Students of early modern European history, dealing with what might otherwise seem a rather remote seventeenth century, for example, gained new salience by suggesting that in order to understand the European modernization process, one had to go back to its prior stages, to patterns first shaped three or four centuries ago. The emphasis on process and interrelationship in modernization theory encouraged broad thinking yet at the same time could generate new claims for the significance of specialized areas of study.

Discussing modernization theory in the context of European social history involves three stages: first, defining what the theory implies in greater detail; second, noting some of the questions the theory inherently raises, to which social historians have supplied varying answers; and third, probing the various objections to the theory that have so dramatically reduced its acceptance among social historians (without, however, fully eliminating its use).


Western and eastern Europe obviously underwent a series of transformations in the framework for social and personal life, mostly beginning in western Europe in the eighteenth century. These changes include industrialization—with its conjoined features of expanded manufacturing, rapid technological shifts, and alterations of the organization of work, particularly through factories—and ultimately the increase in available wealth, however inequitably distributed. They also include the growth of urban influence and then the rapid growth of cities themselves. Change in basic social structures also involved the expansion of governments, including larger and more specialized bureaucracies, and, by the nineteenth century at least, the redefinition of government functions. The state's gradual assumption of responsibility for the education of all children, public health activities, mass military conscription, and some preliminary regulatory and welfare functions fall in the category of structural modernization, in altering the relationship between state and society.

The modernization of social frameworks could include at least three other facets. First, with industrialization and also the legal changes encouraged by the French Revolution (including equality before the law and the abolition of guilds), social class, based on property, earnings, and to a lesser extent education, began to replace social order or estate, based on legal privilege as well as property, as the structure for social relationships. With this shift also came new popular definitions of, and interest in, social mobility; it seemed possible and desirable for more people to acquire schooling and money and so move up in status. Earnings replaced inherited legal status as the building block for social hierarchy.

Second, many modernization theorists were also comfortable with the idea of cultural modernization, whereby Europeans increasingly embraced a belief in progress and science and a growing interest in individual identities. These changes were associated with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, particularly as now understood by cultural-social historians eager to probe popular beliefs as well as more formal intellectual activities. The decline of credence in magic, or at least public approval of beliefs rooted in magic, and their replacement by more rational calculations such as insurable risk would be part of a cultural modernization that redefined the structures of life as much as the fundamental alterations in government functions did. In a similar vein, though less strictly tied to the Enlightenment, the rise of national identities, replacing or modifying more traditional local and religious loyalties, were taken by some historians as signs of a modernizing mentality in western Europe. This development, beginning around the time of the French Revolution, was actively encouraged by expanding networks of newspapers and state-sponsored schools in the nineteenth century.

Finally, the idea of a modernization of health continues to appeal to some scholars. At first gradually and unevenly, then by the later nineteenth century quite rapidly, health conditions improved in western Europe. Measures such as vaccination, gains in food supply and the reliability of food transportation, the ultimate impact of public health programs such as sewage systems, and in the long run the results of more sanitary and effective medical procedures did improve longevity—while at the same time tolerance for traditional high levels of mortality decreased.

With structural modernization defined, some modernization theorists turned to related (perhaps resultant, perhaps merely concomitant) changes in people's behaviors, particularly in private areas over which they have greatest control, and in the values they apply to their behaviors and their environment. Here is where the modernization of the family entered. The concept of family modernization included growing emphasis on the nuclear unit as opposed to more extended family relationships. It also included, ultimately, a commitment to unprecedented levels of birth control, designed both to protect the family's economic standing and to permit greater attention to, and expenditure on, individual children. It could include reevaluation of traditional child discipline. In some formulations, family modernization also meant the transition of the family from a unit largely intended as the basis for economic production, and formed with this goal in mind through arranged marriages and dowries, to a unit more focused on emotional and recreational satisfactions, with production increasingly moving out of the domestic setting.

Some social historians applied the idea of behavioral modernization, within the framework established by cultural modernization, to other developments they identified in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, especially in the west. Naming was one example. We know that by the late eighteenth century western Europeans had changed practices of naming infants in at least three respects, on average. First, they named infants relatively early, rather than waiting, as some Irish peasants once did, as much as two years to make sure the infant survived. Second, they no longer reused a name after a child died: new names were attached to each child born. Third, they gradually began to favor names based on criteria other than family tradition or religious figures, a shift that began to generate a certain faddism in name popularities that has continued to the present day. This set of changes can be taken as a sign of secularization in outlook and also of individuation, as parents came to see children as individual figures and to seek names that would encourage each child to do the same.

Similarly, historians of crime and historically minded criminologists explored the application of modernization theory to their area of interest. They examined how modernization brought a reduction in the ratio of crimes of violence to those of property, along with changes in policing and crime techniques. Some scholars, noting the unquestionable decline in murders per capita in western Europe from the Middle Ages at least until the late twentieth century, also discussed more effective social control and personal restraint and the link between these social and behavioral changes and broader processes of political and economic modernization.

The modernization of protest, particularly when it involved new beliefs about the relevance of political rights and a new capacity to raise novel demands, even more clearly linked behavioral changes to the larger patterns of structural modernization, including the redefinitions of the state. New state functions increased popular belief that the state should be a target of protest and that overtly political means could be used to obtain new rights.

On another, personal front, heightened consumer interests, now traced clearly to the eighteenth century in western Europe, seemed to signal a new commitment to materialism and material progress and also a new capacity to express personal meaning and identity in the acquisition of objects such as clothing—another possible sign of personal modernization. Few social historians have shared the sociological theorists' enthusiasm for a sweeping modernization statement that would attribute crime, education, protest, and consumerism to a modernized, as opposed to traditional, personality, but obviously social history findings have established ingredients that seem to reflect significant shifts in this direction.


The above presentation of the main lines of structural and associated behavioral modernization suggests a tidy package—which is what advocates of the theory seek. Modernization, according to its advocates, should link a variety of major changes that distinguish a traditional from a fully modern society, and its clarity in summing up changes in western Europe should permit application of an empirically derived modernization model to other areas.

Yet, even in its most successful formulations, modernization theory has some obvious weaknesses and raises several crucial questions—some would add, like any very ambitious social-historical theory. Most obviously, causation was unclear. Modernization theory was primarily descriptive, talking about linkages whose concomitant occurrence could be traced. Unlike Marxism, it does not really seek to assess what would cause the whole process to start. Yet the interconnections among trends that modernization theory insists upon imply causation. The problem is that the theory itself does not clearly stipulate priorities; it does not clearly indicate what factors came first in launching the whole process. To the extent that most social historians, confronted with some of the big changes in modern history, also seek to explore the factors that prompted them, modernization tantalizes more than it satisfies.

What, for example, was the role of education in the European modernization process? Many non-European observers, looking in the nineteenth century at Europe's industrialization, felt that education was a key factor in causing economic change. Thus Muhammed Ali, the reform leader who seized power in Egypt in the 1820s and 1830s, sent students to European technical schools. Japanese reformers in the 1860s, like Yukichi Fukuzawa, saw educational reform as the key means of introducing Western-like commitments to science and innovation into Japanese culture. But actual educational change occurred very slowly in European social history. Literacy had advanced by the later eighteenth century, though often to rudimentary levels, but exposure to formal schooling was in most places haphazard and incomplete until after the 1860s. Further, several social historians have shown that until the late nineteenth century the connection between educational achievement and industrial development was loose at best—as witnessed by the individual success of relatively uneducated workers or, at a more macro level, the industrial achievements but educational lag of Great Britain. So the question of where education fits in the causation stream of European modernization goes unanswered.

The issue of technology change is another example. Modernization theory obviously assumes major changes in industrial and military technology, and technology levels form one of the most obvious contrasts between traditional and modern societies. But modernization theory does not indicate causal priorities, whether new technology causes or results from basic initial modernization. Once again, the theory invites causal analysis—from what stage of structural or behavioral modernization did a key invention like the steam engine flow, for example—but offers no clear resolution.

Linked to the problem of causation is modernization theory's chronological imprecision, particularly when applied to European social history. When, in time, does modernization definitively begin? Unlike Japan after 1868, western Europe made no explicit decision to reform in modernizing directions. The above discussion suggests the eighteenth century as seedbed, but many historians would place key changes earlier. Was the Renaissance, with its more secular outlook and commercial emphasis, part of the modernization process? Some medievalists, eager to claim their period's role in ongoing trends, have argued that the inception of the modern European state goes back to the twelfth century, when greater centralization, expansion of governmental function, and the beginnings of bureaucratic specialization can clearly be traced. How can this claim, empirically accurate, be assessed in terms of modernization theory? Because the criteria for the inception of modernization are vague, answering chronological questions of this sort is difficult. Yet, without the capacity to deal with these issues, can the theory be of use in European social history?

Problems of chronological origins are not necessarily irresolvable. Because modernization theory insists on the cooccurrence of major changes, it is possible to argue that a single strand of development, such as the expansion of the central monarchies in the high Middle Ages, does not constitute the process, however much such changes may unintentionally prepare the way. But the theory remains vague, and this kind of sorting out has not occurred.

The same problems of definition, causation, and chronological precision apply when the theory is extended to other parts of Europe. Russia provides a classic example. Peter the Great's selective Westernization program, initiated around 1700, brought major change to Russia. Military technology and organization, aspects of economic production (particularly in metallurgy and arms), and elite culture and education all shifted significantly. Virtually all surveys of Russian history refer to Peter's major role in Russian modernization. But is this when modernization began in Russia? Did Peter's forceful changes merely accelerate earlier developments, or were his initiatives too lopsided and forced to initiate a broad modernization? Again, the answer to when modernization begins may be sought in the coherence of change, particularly in terms of social history. A historical setting like eighteenth-century Russia, in which commerce and merchant groups did not significantly advance, mass culture was unaltered, and conditions of serfdom became more rigorous, is not a setting that clearly suggests modernization. Dissociation of Peter's reforms from modernization would not downgrade the reforms' significance, but it would remind us that not all major change, even within the last three centuries, can be lumped under a single heading. Yet modernization theory is not in fact historically precise enough to permit a definitive response to this aspect of the Russian case: the issue of when modernization begins opens more questions than answers.

The same issue of definition applies to the end of the modernization process. At what point, and by what criteria, can one say that a society is modernized, such that further major change no longer attaches to a modernization process? When a society is urban, industrial, bureaucratized, individualistic—is it modernized? Current theoretical formulations that refer to postmodern societies, as in western Europe after World War II, suggest an end to the modernization process and its replacement with another set of basic trends. But the postmodern concept, outside of specific realms such as art and architecture, is itself rather vague. Some basic modernizing features seem to persist, in western Europe and elsewhere, for example, in the changes in peasant habits that see peasants become avid consumers, eager for complex technology, with reduced interest in the land. The result is another incompletely resolved problem for analysis: Is the concept of modernization useful in dealing with advanced industrial societies in the twenty-first century and, if not, when and by what criteria did its utility cease?

Issues of causation and chronology are joined by those of geography. Here, to be sure, modernization theory is quite clear: basically similar processes should occur when a society modernizes, regardless of where it is located. Yet most European social historians remain attached to older historical habits that insist, to some degree at least, on peculiarities of place. They are thus inclined to point to significant distinctions between the modern history of, say, France and that of England—even though in modernization theory the two nations should be readily coupled. French industrialization emphasized craft products more than British industrialization did, it relied on a larger female labor force, and it generated a more politically radical working class. Modernization would insist on the common elements in the industrialization process, and perhaps rightly so; but many social historians would be uncomfortable with dismissing these important regional differences. And if this problem applies to two close Western neighbors, the comparative issues loom even larger if eastern and western Europe are to be seen sharing a historical dynamic (if at slightly different times), or if the United States (a clearly modernizing society) is amalgamated with western European history. Modernization theory can make allowance for differences in specific context in terms of when the basic process of change begins, but it does not so readily accommodate other distinctions.

This problem of geography relates, in turn, to a final general set of questions, this one about the traditional society from which modernization departs. At an extreme, modernization theorists, in their enthusiasm for common processes of change, might imply an undifferentiated traditional society, which change will itself gradually erase. Comparative scholars more commonly noted the importance of different traditional contexts, caused, for example, by religious distinctions: thus Russia's Christianity contrasted with Japan's cultural heritage, leading to sensitive discussions of different paths to modernization. Even with these allowances, however, the emphasis on common processes remained strong.

Yet most social historians, looking at parts of Europe before the eighteenth century, remain far more interested in regional patterns. Guild structures, for example, loomed far larger in eighteenth-century Germany than in England. Would this difference be wiped away by a common modernization, or would it produce deep differences in the process of change in both countries? Family systems, too, varied considerably. In many parts of Europe, social historians have discovered that the nuclear family was the predominant unit by the later Middle Ages. Thus the assumption by some modernization theorists that a common traditional extended family pattern everywhere inevitably yielded to nuclear family organization loses accuracy in the case of western Europe and much of North America. In other words, empirically "traditional" societies varied greatly, and to the extent these variations continued to affect aspects of modern social history, the resulting diversity seriously compromises modernization's accuracy and claim to universality.


Modernization theory not only raises huge historical issues, it also has provoked ringing dissent and attack. Social historians were reacting vigorously against the theory by the early 1980s: while one held out for "better than no model at all," other comments included "too big and slippery for deft manipulation," "historically crude," "elusive," and "inadequate . . . for comprehending the diversity of the human experience during several centuries of social transformation."

By this point, modernization theory ceased to be applied to many aspects of historical change. Historians who had used modernization to describe changes in protest or family patterns, for example, dropped the reference. Models of changes in protest forms and goals persisted or, as in the case of the family, the links between traditional and more recent patterns might be reevaluated and made more complicated; but either way, modernization no longer seemed to help. Modernization theory seemed irrelevant to major new discoveries, such as the existence of an active consumer culture in western Europe in the eighteenth century. Even when this early culture was directly linked to more recent consumer patterns, analysts no longer made modernization references at all; the links were evaluated and explained more discretely. New findings in the history of crime—for example, that violence shifted in the late nineteenth century from attacks against relative strangers to attacks against family members—similarly implied no new facet of modernization.

Three basic objections emerged by the mid-1970s. First, and most vigorously, scholars from various disciplines objected to modernization's ethnocentric qualities: that all societies should be measured and all predictions should be founded on western Europe as a standard model. This critique was an extension of the geographical homogenization questions about modernization, and it has proved very powerful. Modernization references still are applied to "non-Western" societies such as Latin America and China on the basis of presumed previous Western trends, but all-out partisans are now few in number.

Second, modernization's characteristic optimism drew criticism, even when applied to western Europe. The blanket notion that modern people are in all ways better off than premodern people is not now widely accepted. Here social historians like E. P. Thompson have contributed powerfully, though earlier theories such as Marxism already constrained optimism. Studies of the relationship between modern work and premodern work, in terms of stress and satisfaction alike, call linear progressive models into question; many features of work have arguably deteriorated with greater time pressures, de-skilling, and removal from community life. The same applies to aspects of leisure, or community cohesion, or even child rearing (which once was seen as a dramatic area of modern advance). Ironically, these evaluative objections do not destroy other features of the theory: a society might modernize and get worse, or at least generate mixed results. But in practice, greater skepticism about the benefits of modern life has contributed to modernization's fall from grace.

Finally, and most important in terms of European social history, modernization's implications of ultimate, basic uniformity in the direction of change have drawn attack. Precisely because social historians see societies composed of radically different groups, they have trouble accepting common ultimate dynamics. What does modernization mean, for example, when the experiences and values of workers and the middle class vary so? Where modernization theory once assumed that, ultimately, peasants would modernize (technologically, politically, and culturally) and so merge with urban groups, social historians are now more prone to note persistent distinctions, based on differences in power and prior class culture.

The new levels of attention historians paid to gender called forth similar objections, along with an obvious empirical problem. Modernization theory had focused very little on the issue of gender. Historians now asked, did men and women "modernize" in the same ways? If modernization meant individuation, for example, how can this apply to the special domestic, subservient ideology created for women in the most "modern," middle-class families in western Europe during the century of industrialization? More fundamentally, does modernization mean more or less formal participation for women in the workforce? The answer is clearly less (except for key cases like Russia, where industrialization proved compatible with continuing high levels of women's work). But if the modernization process persists into the mid-twentieth century, then it embraces a massive reinsertion of women into the labor force. Applying the modernization formula is immensely complicated, precisely because of the diverse experiences of different social classes and of men and women.

The combined force of these objections accounts for the waning commitment to modernization theory; its moment of glory in social history has thus far proved brief. In the international arena, world economy theory, arguing for the durable importance of economic relationships first set up in the fifteenth century, is now far more widely used than modernization; it stresses diversity between dominant and subordinate international trading areas and is often pessimistic about outcomes, in marked contrast to the modernization model.

For European social history itself, no model with modernization's sweep has arrived to reclaim the power of synthesis: no overarching framework unites various facets of social change. Important theoretical statements have been devised or revived: considerable work on personal habits and family relationships, for example, utilizes Norbert Elias's theory of the "civilizing process," in which, beginning with the European upper classes, people gained and expected greater restraint over the body and over emotions. But this theory's range of application is more limited than modernization's.

Yet modernization theory has not perished. A group of staunch partisans, mainly survivors of the ambitious cluster of sociologists who first delineated the theory in the 1950s, continues productive work, in general statements and also in using the theory to frame the modern social and political history of places like Russia or China. Gilbert Rozman's syntheses are a case in point. A second locus of the theory involves the casual references to a city "becoming modern" or peasants "responding to modernization" in social history studies that shy away from larger theoretical pronouncements. This second use suggests the ongoing momentum of the theory in summing up related changes in societal structure, and perhaps some ongoing utility as well.

Finally, though hesitantly, a few social historians have tried to refine the theory by noting the key difficulties attached and urging a more selective application. Here, the basic approach is twofold. First, addressing both western European and world history, these cautious advocates urge a clearer agreement on what did, in fact, change very widely—the commitment to mass education is a case in point—where modernization really can describe seemingly universal social impulses. At the same time, areas of greater diversity or complexity must simply be dropped, in an admission that modernization cannot accurately cover all facets of social change and continuity. Thus it is silly to talk of the "modernization of women" without immediate restrictions and complications—even in western European society alone. The second component of the refinement of modernization theory involves urging social historian critics to see the forest as well as the trees, to look at longer-run patterns as well as short-term complexities. For example, critics argue that talking about a shared modernization process makes little sense for middle-class owners and factory workers in the 1870s, despite some common involvements in new levels of schooling, work organizations, and the like. But others would respond that looking at a broader picture, as class differentiations ultimately moderated somewhat, may provide greater support for the idea of participation in common processes—processes that would not produce identical cultures or behaviors, but that would bring some genuine convergence.

Since 1980 modernization theory has inspired relatively little new work in social history. References are infrequent, sometimes dismissive, casual at best, beyond the core of true believers. Yet the need and, perhaps, the possibility for some overarching linkages among major facets of social change over the past three centuries is hard to deny. This, surely, is why modernization continues to crop up as a subliminal scholarly shorthand, in dealing with huge processes such as technology and culture—both in western European history and in the history of places like Russia and Spain, whose relationship to Western history forms part of the essential analytical framework.

See alsoGenerations of Social History (volume 1), the sectionThe Periods of Social History (volume 1), and the other articles in this section.


Black, Cyril E., et al. The Modernization of Japan and Russia. New York, 1975. An important historical application and comparative work.

Black, Cyril E., and L. Carl Brown, eds. Modernization in the Middle East. Princeton, N.J., 1992. One of the most recent full uses of the theory.

Brown, Richard D. Modernization:The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865. 1976. Reprint, Prospect Heights, Ill., 1988. Applies the theory to social history.

Eisenstadt, S. N. Tradition, Change, and Modernity. 1973. Reprint, Melbourne, Fla., 1983. A classic statement of the theory.

Inkeles, Alex. One World Emerging?: Convergence and Divergence in Industrial Societies. Boulder, Colo., 1998. A full statement by a slightly chastened true believer.

Inkeles, Alex, and David Smith. Becoming Modern: Individual Changes in Six Developing Countries. Cambridge, Mass., 1976.

Lee, Joseph. Modernization of Irish Society, 1848–1919. Dublin, 1989.

Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society. Glencoe, Ill., 1958. Offers an early statement.

Levy, Marion J., Jr. Modernization and the Structure of Societies. 1966. Reprint, New Brunswick, N.J., 1996.

Rozman, Gilbert, ed. The Modernization of China. New York, 1981. A very challenging application.

Stearns, Peter N. European Society in Upheaval. 2d ed. New York, 1975. Applies modernization as a framework for modern social history; the approach was dropped in the third edition.

Tipps, Dean C. "Modernization and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective." Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973): 199–226.

Weiker, Walter. Modernization of Turkey: From Ataturk to the Present. New York, 1981.

Weiner, Myron, ed. Modernization: The Dynamics of Growth. New York, 1966. Includes some of the strongest statements about personality modernization.

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SEE ALSO Developing Countries; Development Economics; Liberalism; Modernity









Michael E. Latham

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Dickson Eyoh

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Modernization is a slippery term with manifold relations to science and technology. In a narrow sense, it is often synonymous with bringing more advanced science or technology to bear, as in modernizing a construction process or production plant. In a broader sense, social scientists describe modernity as a particular form of culture or society dependent on and supportive of science and technology, with the process of creating such a society defined as modernization. (Related concepts are urbanization, the concentration of population into cities, and secularization, the recasting of society from a basis in religious beliefs to one based on rationality, science, and technology.)

Insofar as modernization in the broader sense connotes an undermining of traditional values and is presented as a program with its own normative character, it is also of ethical significance, and has been assessed in both positive and negative terms.

Modernization is a somewhat more neutral term for a concept known in the nineteenth century as the "civilizing" process, and during the first half of the twentieth century as "Westernization." The term gained widespread currency in the 1950s, but began attracting substantial criticism during the 1960s.

Positive Assessments

In social, economic, and political theory, modernization is characterized by the achievement of industrialization, high urbanization, secularization, and rationalization. In a 1983 essay submitted for a symposium on Cultural Identity and Modernization in Asian Countries at Japan's Kokugakuin University, Robert M. Bellah analyzed the tension between tradition and modernization, then noted that when these forces successfully collaborate, the results may be remarkable: "A viable tradition should continue to guide individuals and societies in their quest for what is truly good, and modernization should simply supply more effective means for that quest" (Bellah 1983, Internet site). Bellah concludes that although the marriage of tradition and modernization is often over-stated, "the amazingly successful economic modernization" of Japan and the Pacific Rim countries is largely due to "[t]he spirit of the people, their work ethic, their social discipline, their ability to cooperate ... all ... more or less rooted in one or another aspect of the tradition."

The Cold War vision of modernization as a weapon against the spread of Communism strongly differed from this vision of a consensual and beneficial partnership between tradition and the modern. In an influential 1968 article, Samuel Huntington urged "forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power." Rather than basing modernization on the consent of the governed, Huntington posited that less developed nations could be dragged into modernity—an approach applied in the Strategic Hamlets Program in Vietnam, where populations were forcibly removed at gunpoint to new "modern" surroundings, and their old homes burned.

Thus, proponents of modernization saw the process in two entirely different lights: one as a good that could be forced on subjects regardless of their wishes, and the other as a consensual step, greatly desired by the participants, toward participation in "a world of industrial, competitive nations interacting in a capitalist, free-trade, global framework" (Adas 2003, p. 37).

Critical Assessments

While modernization sounds more neutral than a phrase such as "Westernization," critics complain that it nonetheless carries with it substantial Western baggage. Modernization assumes that the sole criteria of success of a society are gross national product (GNP) and the degree of industrialization. Underlying the theory of modernization is an almost entirely unexamined premise that all other nations should seek to imitate the West, and particularly the United States.

The process of modernization has been described as a cover for the introduction of capitalism without regard for the well-being of local populations. Rather than elevating all nations to equal opportunity participation in free markets, thereby lifting their citizens to higher living standards, critics say that modernization leads perversely to increased impoverishment and greater dependency of former colonies. "Modernization and development have previously been built on considerable exploitation of certain segments of the society and have involved a degree of ruthlessness. Imperialism aided them substantially" (Dube 1988, p. 5). Modernization, of course, also brings with it the glitches experienced by Western capitalist nations, including cycles of recession, inflation, and unemployment.

Other critics question whether it is really an absolute good to eliminate diversity and make people the same everywhere. Ironically, modernization, like Marxism, holds that there is a universal historical process in which "a single modernity" will eventually emerge (Gilman 2003, p. 56).

Modernization has also been said to be based on the premise that science and technology can solve all human problems, rendering unnecessary any specific consideration of ethical implications of their introduction. Yet high technology may lead to high unemployment in third world countries, and therefore modernization theory needs to be modified by the addition of an ethical element, wholly lacking from the work of most writers on the topic. One view is that science and technology should specifically be used to address "social needs ... tempered with distributive justice" (Dube 1988, p. 32).

The countervailing forces to modernization include fundamentalism, anomie, violence, decay of norms, and the dysfunction of social institutions. Aslam Siddiqi offers an interesting critique from a Third World and Islamic perspective in a 1974 work; he says that modernization is an essentially materialistic concept lacking higher ethical value. "Human personality has no sanctity ... Abundance of goods is its greatest achievement, and hedonism is the proper way of life" (p. 13). Siddiqi does not propose the rejection of science and technology, but instead says that it is necessary to "identify the framework for society and to find accommodations between modernization and Islamic requirements" (p. 194).


The term modernization is invested with meanings that are better unpacked and examined individually, to see what assumptions are necessary to support them. While in the early twenty-first century, few people argue that a decentralized, agrarian, low-technology way of life is preferable, there is a consensus that development has moral implications that require close analysis and planning.


SEE ALSO Building Codes; Development Ethics; Enlightenment Social Theory; Green Revolution; Industrial Revolution; Secularization; Sustainability and Sustainable Development; Urbanization.


Adas, Michael. (2003). "Modernization and the American Revival of the Scientific and Technological Standards of Social Achievement and Human Worth." In Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Dube, S.C. (1988). Modernization and Development: The Search for Alternative Paradigms. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.

Gilman, Nils. "Modernization Theory, the Highest Stage of American Intellectual History." In Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David

Huntington, Samuel (1968). "The Bases of Accommodation." Foreign Affairs 46(4): 642–656.

Siddiqi, Aslam. (1974). Modernization Menaces Muslims. Lahore, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf.


Bellah, Robert M. (1983). "Cultural Identity and Asian Modernization." Available from

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charles issawi

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