One World Emerging? Convergence and Divergence in Industrial Societies. - Review - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Harold Perkin

One World Emerging?: Convergence and Divergence in Industrial Societies. By Alex Inkeles (Boulder: Westview Press, A Division of Harper Collins Inc., 1998. xix plus 423pp. $39).

Alex Inkeles is the doyen of modernization theory and has devoted a long career to its comparative explication across the globe. He now brings together in one volume a series of previously published papers stretching from 1963 through 1997. They include two perspectives on the general principles of his theory; three comparative studies of nation-states including the USA and the USSR, India and China; two essays on comparative education and the family; three studies of the evolution of institutions, namely social stratification, communication, and due legal process; and three interpretations of the effects of modernization on the individual, in industrial work and society, the quality of life, and on the pull between traditional and modern values along the Pacific Rim.

Like the systematic sociologist that he is, he constantly makes lists of characteristics of modernization to prove to his own satisfaction that the developed world is nearing convergence on every dimension from GNP per capita to moral values. Typically he lists nine or ten material features of this convergence, plus six broad categories of social and political values. The first include: more and better food, amenities such as piped water and sewage, improved medicine and health, universal education, instant communication, increased leisure, physical security of the person, social welfare, and a better environment and ecology. The second embrace six freedoms: of movement, belief, association, political choice or determination, economic freedom for the worker, the consumer and the saver, and freedom from discrimination and denigration. He illustrates these laudable developments with empirical evidence from surveys by himself and others in a vast range of countries.

In general, all this is very admirable and logically incontrovertible. No one is likely to argue that it is better to live in a traditional society without enough food to eat, or modern medicine, or welfare services, or the right to a fair trial. Individuals in eponymous modern societies eat better, enjoy more comforts, live longer and healthier lives, have greater access to culture, leisure and travel, and can generally expect more expansive and abundant lives. To that extent there is no contest, and criticism would be churlish and curmudgeonly. The devil, however, as always is in the details, and what is omitted is more important than what is claimed.

There are a number of problems with the concept of modernization. For one thing, modernity is a Protean, ever-changing concept. It rapidly passes its sell-by date. It is like new bread: it soon becomes stale, then mouldy, and finally crumbles to dust. That is why it has constantly to be replaced, inevitably by equally empty neologisms like post-modern, post-industrial, and post-Fordist. For another, it usually conceals the author's preference for the values and practices of his own nation and culture. Reading between the lines, the underlying meaning of modernization in this work is Americanization: "I have seen the future and it is American." To a certain extent this is undoubtedly true. All the world is becoming wishfully American in the sense that we all want the same high living standards, high-tech medicine, car and air-borne mobility, email and the Internet, American TV, films and cartoons--the whole "American dream". And we (nearly) all pay lip service to the theory of American democracy, its free ins titutions, and its free market cornucopia.

Yet what is never discussed here, or in the output of right-wing think-tanks like the Hudson Institute to which Inkeles belongs, is the price the Americans themselves pay for their modernization. If we accept the goodies America offers, do we also have to accept the rest of the package: the lack of a comprehensive welfare system, the absence of a health service for a large minority--not only for the poorest but for middle- class divorcees, the stressful work style and the paucity of holidays, the homeless beggars on city streets, the barbarous gun laws, the murder rate five or ten time that of Western Europe or Japan, the numbers of children killing children, the drug dealing and the crime and corruption that go with it, the racism and white supremacist militias, the moralizing politicians who sacrifice good governance to sex scandals, and, despite the charitable impulses of the many generous Americans, the "devil take the hindmost" ethics of the free market?

It is true that some of these less welcome features of the American dream are beginning, along with Disney, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, to be exported overseas. Blue jeans and heroin now go together in Glasgow, Dublin, Moscow, Tokyo and other world cities, though scarcely on the scale of New York or San Francisco. This is the price we all now pay for modernization on the free market American model.