Re: [Marxism] Debunking third world myhts

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Patrick Bond wrote:

<I'm downloading this to show my Development Studies masters students an
example of a slicked-up modernised example of tired old modernisation
theory. No concept of politics or uneven/combined development, the poor
fellow.>


Hmm, but isn't the best representative of modernization theory the  
work penned by S.N. Eisenstadt? At least it goes beyond Rostow's  
stageist theory of development, and it also argues against  
eurocentric triumphalism.

Greg McDonald

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmuel_Eisenstadt>

Background and Education

His family moved from Central Europe to Poland a few generations  
before Eisenstadt was born in 1923 in Warsaw, Poland. In the early  
1930’s Eisenstadt’s widowed mother took him to Jerusalem and he was  
educated in Palestine from the age of 12. In 1940, Eisenstadt studied  
at the Hebrew University where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in  
sociology[1]. After the 1947-48 school year, he went back to  
Jerusalem to be an assistant lecturer in Martin Buber’s department  
whom he wrote his master’s thesis under earlier. Eisenstadt stayed at  
the Hebrew University and began teaching there, served as the  
Chairman of the Department of Sociology from 1950-1969 and also  
served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities for a few years[1].

Eisenstadt has contributed to the understanding of cultures and  
civilizations. As a social scientist, “Eisenstadt has focused on the  
interplay between cultural and structural processes of change and on  
inherent tensions and antinomies rather than on uniform process of  
development”[2] Eisenstadt has researched broad themes of social  
change, modernities and civilizations.[2] One of his arguments is  
that “fundamentalism is not a traditional but a modern phenomenon”[2].

Eisenstadt sums up his views saying “I try to understand what was the  
historical experience of the great civilizations…to try to understand  
the major dynamics of these civilizations and how they became modern  
societies, how they modernize and how they develop different cultural  
programs of modernity”.[3]

In honor of Eisenstadts’s contributions to sociology Erik Cohen,  
Moshe Lissak, and Uri Almagor compiled the book, Comparative Social  
Dynamics: Essays in Honor of S.N Eisenstadt.[4] The contributions of  
this book were written by Eisenstadt’s former students and colleagues  
at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Hebrew  
University of Jerusalem. The articles relate to Eisenstadt’s major  
themes in the study of cultures, modernization, and social and  
political change. Eisenstadt’s work touches many different fields of  
sociology, time periods and cultures and the editors felt the leading  
concept of Eisenstadt’s work was social dynamics.



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu