The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present

Abstract

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.