Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey

It is a rewarding yet sobering experience to read Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey, Begüm Adalet’s fascinating account of Turkey’s role in the rise of an intellectual titan— modernization theory—in twentieth-century political science. As she sees it, Turkey was both the “template on which modernization theory was based” and an “object on which it was enacted” (p. 3). Hence, although pioneers of the theory and ultimately practitioners viewed modernizing processes unfolding in Turkey as inevitable and worthy of study—even of imitation by other countries—they also, paradoxically, believed such processes needed to be encouraged or induced, including by themselves as supposedly disinterested scholars. So was modernization theory discovered or invented? Although this classic question is usually posed by philosophers in reference to mathematical theory—was math invented or discovered? —it is also at the heart of Adalet’s book. The first chapter takes a deep dive into the life story of Dankwart Rustow, aMiddle East specialist and contributor to modernization theory in its formative years. Adalet casts him as an “obligatory passage point,” an “uncertain translator between Turkish and American social scientists” (p. 26) whose own doubts about the broad-brush claims of early modernization theory would come to be forgotten. Adalet’s archival work, especially her analysis of Rustow’s private papers, provides an eyeopening and at times disconcerting glimpse behind the curtain of official knowledge production. Indeed, when Rustow was asked to write the Near East section of The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960)— a landmark work in comparative politics edited by Gabriel Almond and James Coleman and described by the publisher as “the first major effort toward a valid comparison of the political systems of Asia, Africa, the Near East, and Latin America”—he confessed to Coleman that “quite honestly and strictly between you and me and the bedpost, I could not name a single newspaper in Afghanistan, Libya, the Sudan or Saudi Arabia. Hence it hardly seems cricket for me to indicate boldly that political functions are performed by the press in these various countries” (p. 35). Although he contributed to the volume anyway, Rustow would become increasingly skeptical of universalism and behaviorism in political science. As he warned in a quip that also serves as an epigraph to Adalet’s first chapter, “The political scientist who insists that the world is his oyster is likely to suffer a bad case of indigestion” (p. 23). Nevertheless, the volume became extremely influential, the doubts and reservations of its authors eclipsed by a new certitude tied to US ascendancy in the Cold War. Adalet deftly uses episodes like this to underscore the fragility of attempts at theory construction in comparative social science (and the resulting need for humility). The second chapter is similarly incisive with respect to Daniel Lerner, another key modernization theorist, whose book, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958), is a widely considered canonic work in the development of the theory. Adalet’s focus is the tenuousness of Lerner’s cross-country surveys, which, in her view, “were conducted not merely to measure or describe but also to occasion the performance of the very categories—modern, transitional, and traditional—that they sought to explain” (p. 65). Although the evidence is more limited here, it is certainly suggestive. For example, to illustrate the psychosocial dimensions of modernization, Lerner opens his book with a lively and now famous story, what he calls the parable of the Grocer and the Chief, which is based on research in a rural Turkish village. The two characters are presented as modernization archetypes: the Chief is “traditional” (hopelessly backward and unable to imagine himself outside his current milieu), whereas the Grocer is inching toward “modern” and thus is a “transitional” Turk with a greater capacity for imagining improvements to his society and circumstances. Yet Adalet shows that these labels are based on strikingly fragile evidence. For instance, the Chief and other subjects were deemed “traditional” in part because they gave wholly realistic answers to Lerner’s somewhat idiosyncratic and whimsical (“projective”) questions. So when asked, for instance, whether they could imagine themselves living in a different country or as the head of government, many did not answer or cited their lack of