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Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Nils Gilman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 329 pp., $48 cloth.
Intellectual fashions come and go, and this well-researched book artfully analyzes the rise and fall of one of the more powerful paradigms in post-World War II American political science-so-called modernization theory. Much of the book is a sophisticated history of ideas, tracing the influence of such luminaries from sociology as Talcott Parsons and the Harvard Department of Social Relations, the political scientists associated with Gabriel Almond and the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, and culminating with the policy application of these ideas through MIT's Center for International Studies and especially the influence of Walt Rostow as President Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser during the Vietnam War.
As I read Gilman's book, I felt that I was back in graduate school, struggling to make sense out of Parsons's often impenetrable prose; trying to relate "pattern variables" to something I could recognize in the real world; and remembering some of the fine professors with whom I studied at MIT who are discussed here-Lucian Pye, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Myron Weiner, and Daniel Lerner. Gilman mostly gets it right. Those who pushed the modernization paradigm were anchored in an America-centric world; they tended to be optimistic and liberal; and their self-confidence led them astray, especially in Vietnam, where "nation building" earned its bad name. But he fails to appreciate the extent to...