The Right Kind of Revolution
Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7309066 |
|---|---|
| Authors | W Michael Weis (Illinois Wesleyan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 643-644 |
| Publication date | 2012-08-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jas207 |
| OpenAlex | W2032223784 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 31 |
Since the end of the Cold War there has been an enormous increase in scholarship by historians of U.S. foreign relations on American efforts to “modernize” or develop the poorest areas of the world after World War II. Michael E. Latham has been at the forefront of this research. Indeed, his Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (2000) started the trend and is rightly considered a classic study not only of the Kennedy administration but also of modernization and of American liberalism packaged for the developing world. In many ways The Right Kind of Revolution is a more ambitious work. Latham seeks to present the history of modernization as a theory from its roots in the Enlightenment to its post–Cold War resurrection as neoliberalism. He largely succeeds. This is an exceptionally well-written synthesis that will become a staple in college and graduate classrooms for years to come. Showing the interplay between theory and policy with a wide variety of case studies, not only of postcolonial leaders such as India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser but also of major developmental efforts such as population control and the green revolution, Latham explains how modernization became such a pervasive idea in the 1950s and 1960s. Modernization was a fairly malleable concept and its adherents, such as Nasser, Nehru, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, were able to embrace, modify, and reformulate modernization theory for their own ends, often at odds with the United States
Economic history · Ideology · Liberalism · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · World War II · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law
The Political Lives of Deserts
Global Value Chains and Agribusiness in Africa
Circular Conversations and Missed Opportunities
Managing violence
Revisiting the methodology of Myrdal in Asian Drama 50 years on
Science for Governing Japan's Population
Society on the Edge
Introduction
Neomalthusianismo en América Latina
Foreign aid for rural development
Constructing a “Scientific Manpower Crisis”
The creation of a postcolonial subject
Intertribal' Development Strategies in the Global Cold War
Modernization, Race, and the Rural Past in Brazil
The geopolitics of passive revolution and the ghost of Malthus in the American Century
Deflating Cold War rationality
Economic Statecraft with Chinese Characteristics
The evolution of norms
Desert Geopolitics
Modernizing Peasants and “Master Farmers”
Food as a weapon? The geopolitics of food and the Qatar–Gulf rift
Development Theory and the Cold War
Beyond the Cold War
Sociólogos Rurais, Modernização e Ideais de Comunidade na América Latina
The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq's First Baʿthist Regime
Teaching development
Rethinking the 'crisis of expertise
Badges Without Borders
Dudley Seers, the Institute for Development Studies, and the Fracturing of International Development Thought in the 1960s and 1970s
Development in Decolonization
"The Emergence of Filipino Technocrats as Cold War "Pawns
| Unique citing works | 31 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,07 |
| Citation span | 2011 - 2025 (15) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 27 |