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Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era. By Michael E. Latham. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 304 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95. ISBN: Cloth 0-807-- 82533-6; paper 0-807-84844-I. How does the climate of intellectual opinion within American society affect the foreign policy of the government of the United States? In a book that can be thematically grouped with Robert Packenham's Liberal America and the Third World (1973) and Michael Shafer's Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counter-Insurgency Policy (1988), Michael Latham explores this question in the specific context of U.S. relations with the less developed world during the cold war. In examining the ideology of modernization and U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy years, he identifies three effects and presents evidence from three cases: the Alliance for Progress; the strategic hamlet program in Viet Nam; and the Peace Corps.
Echoing earlier findings, Latham concludes that the ideology of modernization shaped the justifications for U.S. policy. It also supposedly supplied "an analytical model deliberately used in private, institutional settings to evaluate options and generate effective policies." However, Latham claims even more. In his view, modernization theory was a "constellation of mutually reinforcing ideas that often framed policy goals through a definition of the nation's ideals, history and mission." Since interests are perceived through the lens of ideology, the former cannot be understood without reference to the latter. Thus, Latham views his study as a complement, not a substitute, for explanations rooted in interests (pp. 12-14). Latham does not argue that modernization ideology was novel or confined to...