Modernization and Dependency: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Underdevelopment Author(S): J

The City University of New York Modernization and Dependency: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Underdevelopment Author(s): J. Samuel Valenzuela and Arturo Valenzuela Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Jul., 1978), pp. 535-557 Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/421571 . Accessed: 07/07/2011 16:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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Samuel Valenzuelaand Arturo Valenzuela* The end of WorldWar II markedthe beginningof fundamentaltransformations in world affairs. The defeat of the Axis powers and the devastatingtoll which the war had exacted on Britain and the Europeanallies propelled the United States into a position of economic and military preeminence. However, the United States' power did not go unchallenged. The Soviet Union was able to influence the accession of power of socialist regimes throughout Eastern Europeand Chinese Communistsdefeated their Western-backed adversaries to gain control of the most populous nation on earth. These events called for an urgent strategy to revitalize the economies of the Western nations. With massive U.S. public and private economic investment, Western Europe and Japan soon recovered from the ravages of war. But WorldWar II usheredin anotherimportant change whose global implica- tions would not be felt for some years to come. The weakeningof the European powers and the logic of a war effort aimed at preserving self-determination, markedthe final collapse of the vast colonial empiresof the nineteenthcentury and the establishmentof a multiplicityof states each claiming sovereign and independent status. The "new nations" soon drew the attention of U.S. policymakersconcerned with the claim that Marxism presentedthe best and most logical road to full incorporationinto the modem world. They also capturedthe attentionand imaginationof U.S. scholars who in the pursuitof knowledge, as well as the desire to influence government policy, began to produce a vast literatureon the "developing" nations. For many economists the solutionwas anotherMarshall plan designedfor the ThirdWorld. But other social scientists argued that fundamental differences between the devel- opmental experience of Europe and the less-developed countries mitigated 0010-4159/78/0715-0006$05.00/1 ? 1978 The City University of New York 535 Comparative Politics July 1978 againstthe success of such a strategy.It was not simply a matterof reconstruc- tion but one of development and, as such, a fundamentalquestion needed answeringbefore policy recommendationscould be advanced:Why was there such a starkcontrast in the developmentalexperience of a few Westerncoun- tries and most of the rest of the world? The answer to this question led to the developmentof the "modernization perspective." Elaborated by a few economists and by anthropologists, sociologists, andpolitical scientists, this perspectiveargued that it was essential to consider the culturalcharacteristics of "new" nations in determiningtheir potential for development. These "noneconomic" factors became the cor- nerstoneof a conceptualframework which would influence the U.S. response to the Third World.1 Though "Latin Americanists" did not write the major theoreticalor conceptualworks of the modernizationliterature, that perspective soon became the dominantapproach influencing the methodologyand conclu- sions of the most importantand trend-settingstudies. U.S. scholars, however, were not the only ones preoccupied with the difficulties of applying neoclassical economic assumptions to the devel- opmental problems of Latin America. In internationalagencies, notably the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, and university researchcenters, LatinAmerican social scientiststried to come to grips with the widespread economic stagnation which affected the region in the postwar period. Workingseparately, often with little communication,scholars in vari- ous disciplines soon turnedto the broaderand more basic question of the roots of LatinAmerican underdevelopment. Many intellectualstrands came together in the 1960s with the elaborationof a more generaland comprehensiveconcep- tual framework. The "dependency perspective" became the dominant ap- proach in most Latin Americanintellectual circles by the mid to late 1960s. It is revealingthat the most importantwritings of the "dependencyperspec- tive" still have not been translatedinto English, over a decade after the first mimeographeddrafts began to circulate in Santiago. Dependency analysis became knownin the United Statesand Europe not throughthe writingsof Latin Americansbut throughinterpreters such as Andre GunderFrank whose work differs substantiallyfrom that of importantauthors in the field such as F.H. Cardoso, O. Sunkel, and T. dos Santos.2 Modernizationand dependencyare two sharplydifferent perspectives seek- ing to explainthe same reality. They originatedin differentareas, with different evaluative judgments, different assumptions, different methodologies, and differentexplanations." The purposeof this review essay is not to describethe origins of the two perspectives, their "extra scientific" elements, but to comparetheir conceptual approaches to the studyof LatinAmerica. As such, it will be necessaryto considerthe two perspectivesas "ideal types," accentuat- ing importantcharacteristics of each frameworkin a mannernot found in any particularauthor. There is a good deal of varietyand several polemics (particu- 536 J. Samuel Valenzuelaand Arturo Valenzuela larly in the dependency literature)stemming from disagreements over the emphasisgiven to key elements of the conceptualframework, the operationali- zation of concepts, and the way in which certainprocesses occur empirically. Though the essay will mention some of the controversieswithin each perspective, its purposeis to drawbroad comparisons and to providesome judgmentas to the relative utility of these competing frameworks in explaining Latin American underdevelopment. The Modernization Perspective This review will examine the modernization perspective's conceptual frameworkby drawingon the work of some of its most importantauthors, and then illustratethe use of that frameworkin the study of Latin America. This format is dictatedby the fact, noted earlier, that specialists on Latin America failed to contributeimportant theoretical efforts to the field.4 Thoughthere are several explanationsfor this failure, one of the most compelling is that Latin America'sclose (particularlycultural) ties to the West made it more difficult by contrastwith Asia andAfrica, to pointto obvious differenceswith the European experience. Indeed, the early theorizing made a distinctionbetween Western and non-Westernexperiences, and, as J. Martznoted, "the Latin Americanist inevitablywondered if his own region was included." Thatfact, however, did not preventstudents of LatinAmerica from drawing extensively on the modernization literatureto interpretLatin American development. Assumptions The basic building blocks of the modernizationperspective are parallel tradition-modernityideal types of social organizationand value sys- tems, distinctions borrowed from nineteenth-century sociology.6 Since societies are understoodto move from traditionto modernity,the ideal typical dichotomy constitutesthe polar ends of an evolutionarycontinuum, though at some point incrementalchanges give way to the qualitativejump into modernity. The location of this point is unclear; and yet, Third World countries, including those of Latin America, are perceived to be below the thresholdof modernity, with a preponderanceof traditionalfeatures. The specific elements includedin the two polaritiesvary substantiallyin the literature.The traditionalsociety is variouslyunderstood as having a predomi- nance of ascriptive,particularistic, diffuse, and affective patternsof action, an extended kinship structurewith a multiplicity of functions, little spatial and social mobility, a deferentialstratification system, mostly primaryeconomic activities, a tendency toward autarchy of social units, an undifferentiated

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