DOI
10.1017/S1479244312000200
Abstract
The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2012
Publisher Statement
Copyright © 2012 Cambridge University Press. This article first appeared in Modern Intellectual History 9:3 (2012), 565-595.
Please note that downloads of the article are for private/personal use only.
Recommended Citation
Sackley, Nicole. "Cosmopolitanism and the Uses of Tradition: Robert Redfield and Alternative Visions of Modernization during the Cold War." Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 565-95. doi:10.1017/S1479244312000200.