The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 1981, Pages 565-590

  Pletsch, Carl E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84971957472     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500013566     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. For a general survey and critique of Western teleologicai views of history, sensitive to the fact that modernization theory is one of them, see Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, trans, and ed. (revised by Francis Bowen, and further corrected by Phillips Bradley) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1945), II, 14–18.
3. For an exhaustive account of the American discourse at least, see Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
4. The difference that the Cold War made in area studies can be calculated by comparing Robert Hall, Area Studies with Special Reference to Their Application for Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1947), and Wendell Bennett, Area Studies in American Universities (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1951 ), with more recent surveys like Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973), sponsored by the Social Science Research Council.
5. The Discovery of the Third World (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1976); see also Sidney Mintz, “On the Concept of a Third World,” Dialectical Anthropology, 1:4(1976), 377–82.
6. Hoyt Purvis, The Third World and International Symbolism, Working Paper no. 5, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin (1976), especially pp. 7–8.
7. Federalist Opinion, 1:8 (June 1951), 15.
8. On the general phenomenon of terms of social scientific discourse devised since 1950, see Ithiel de Sola Pool, “The Language of Politics: General Trends in Content,” in Propaganda and Communication in World History, Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Hans Speier, eds. (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980), III, 171–90. De Sola Pool is unfortunately interested only in the quantity of new terminology, not the relative importance of the different terms, and in their frequency of use, not their meaning or significance.
9. Joseph Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (Paris: n.p., 1789), 3: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.” Sauvy clearly thought that one might substitute Third World for Third Estate in these powerful sentences.
10. This has become fashionable only since the publication of Dean Tipps’s “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15:2 (1973), 199–226. It must be remembered, however, that even though ridiculing modernization theory has been popular for several years now, certainly no alternative has replaced it, and its old popularizers have not abandoned it either. In view of the fact that no generally acceptable alternative has emerged, the burgeoning literature attacking modernization theory poses itself as an interesting subject of research in its own right. In this paper, unfortunately, I have not room even to list the relevant authors, much less analyze the genre.
11. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, a Study (London: James Nisbet, 1902). Hobson’s repudiation of imperialism as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century rested on his belief that the practice was economically unprofitable, and a conviction that some other and principally ethical intervention in the non-European world was necessary.
12. See the contributions of Sauvy in Institut national d’études démographiques, Le “tiers-Monde,” sous-développment et développement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956); the 1961 edition of the same work with new introduction by Sauvy; and his books De Malthus à Mao Tsé-Toung (Paris: Denö, 1958) and Théorie générale de la population (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966).
13. This is perhaps more illustrative of the fact that the peoples of the third world are dependent upon the first world even for the categories in which they organize to defend themselves from exploitation than it is significant of any truth-value that the concept of the third world might possess. For an interesting case study (in brief) of such conceptual dependence, see Edward W. Said, “Islam through Western Eyes,” The Nation (26 April 1980), 488–92.
14. This pair of binary distinctions that yields three social categories is not unlike the pair of distinctions underlying the idea of three estates common in European social discourse until the eighteenth century. By dividing the world into sacred and profane and noble and common, one can derive the first estate of the clergy (sacred), the second estate of the nobility (profane but noble), and the residual third estate of the commoners. This obviously reinforces the relevance of Sauvy’s association of the third world with the third estate. On the social vocabulary of the ancien regime in terms of estates, see William H. Sewell, Jr. “Etat, Corps, and Ordre: Some Notes on the Social Vocabulary of the French Old Regime,” Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift fiier Hans Rosenberg (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, 1974). It is striking that Western culture is pervaded by such sets of three social categories based on pairs of binary distinctions. The French anthropologist Georges Dumezil has spent nearly his entire career studying this substratum of indo-european categorization. See especially his short book, L’ldeologie tri-partite des indo-europeens (Brussels: Latomus, 1958).
15. Alfred Sauvy, Fertility and Survival (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 7–8.
16. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1960).
17. André Gunder Frank’s “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review 18:4 (1966), 17–31, was one of the first Marxist critiques of modernization theory; John C. Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production (New York: Macmillan, 1979), esp. 3–98, is perhaps the most recent and extended critique. It may be of passing interest that right-wing thinking about the third world has been more The Third World can be regarded as simply a residue: what is left when one has subtracted from the world as a whole the industrialized West—mostly living under a system of capitalist or mixed economies—and the communist empires of Russia, China, and their satellites. But that residue contains countries of very different degrees of economic advancement and with a vast number of different types of social and governmental organization. One could, therefore, argue that the phrase “the Third World” itself is a kind of abbreviated ideology. Those who use it in the Third World do so to justify claims for assistance in moving towards a higher degree of economic organization and greater material wealth; those who use it in the West implicitly concede these claims.
18. On area specialists and disciplinary generalists, see Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review; and James N. Rosenau, International Studies and the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1973), sponsored by the International Studies Association.
19. See, for example, Francis L. K. Hsu, “The Cultural Problem of the Anthropologist,” The American Anthropologist, 81:3 (1979), 517–32.
20. The Wealth of Nations, Edwin Carman, ed. (1904; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), I, 478. “The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”
21. Rosenau, International Studies, 30–33; and Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review, 1–6.
22. Lambert, Language and Area Studies, 3.
23. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 255.
24. Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), vii.
25. I shall take the sad state of Soviet and Eastern European studies as a given. I have no ambition to demonstrate or analyze particular weaknesses of the field in this paper—which is devoted to a more general problem—although I would like to do so in the future. I do not therefore base my judgment upon my own evaluation of the field, but upon the extended evaluation that has been made by Jerry F. Hough. His authority is good, for in writing The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (cited in note 29) and rewriting Merle Fainsod’s How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953) under the new title, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), he has unquestionably provided the best extant survey of the scholarly work in this field. He has, furthermore, set his evaluation in the context of social scientific and especially comparative scholarship generally— something that Soviet and Eastern European scholars have been loath to do in the past.
26. Hough, Soviet Union and Society Science Theory, 1.
27. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), XXI, 273.