From the mid-1960s a younger generation of historians, many of them excited by the possibilities of a 'social history' that looked beyond the state to examine society, were travelling to the Soviet Union through expanded academic exchange programmes. The luckiest among them were privileged to work in heavily restricted archives, but all of them saw at first hand the intricacies, complexities and contradictions of everyday Soviet life that fitted poorly with the totalitarian image of ubiquitous fear and rigid conformity.
Excited by the idea of a 'history from the bottom up', social historians pointed out that by concentrating on the political elite and the repressive apparatus, the totalitarian approach neglected to note that in the actual experience of these societies the regime was unable to achieve the full expectation of the totalitarian model, that is, the absolute and total control over the whole of society and the atomisation of the population. What was truly totalitarian in Stalinism or Nazism were the intentions and aspirations of rulers like Hitler or Stalin, who may have had ambitions to create a society in which the party and people were one and in which interests of all were harmonised and all dissent destroyed. But the control of so-called totalitarian states was never so total as to turn the people into 'little screws' (Stalin's words) to do the bidding of the state. Despite all the limitations of the model, scholars writing in this tradition illuminated anomalous aspects ofthe Stalinist andpost-Stalinist regimes that contradicted the fundaments oftotalitarianism. At the same time, though less widely regarded, critics of liberalism and market society, from the Marxists of the Frankfurt School to post-modernist cultural theorists, took note of the 'totalitarian' effects of modernity more generally - of technology, industrialism, commercialism and capitalism - which were excluded from the original model.[72]
The modernisation paradigm
The Cold War American academy celebrated the achievements of American society and politics, which had reached an unprecedented level of stability and prosperity. Historians of the 'consensus school' held that Americans were united by their shared fundamental values; political scientists compared the pluralistic, democratic norm of the United States to other societies, usually unfavourably. America was 'the good society itself in operation', 'with the most developed set of political and class relations', 'the image ofthe European future', a model for the rest of the globe.[73] Western social science worked from an assumed Western master narrative brought to bear on non-Western societies: they too were expected to evolve as had Western Europe from theocratic to secular values, from status to contract, from more restricted to freer capitalist economies, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, in a word, from tradition to modernity.
Elaborating ideas from the classical social theorists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, modernisation theory proposed that societies would progressively assume greater control over nature and human suffering through developments in science, technology, mass education, economic growth and urbanisation. While Marxism may also be understood as a theory of modernisation, complete with its own theory of history that reached beyond capitalism to socialism, what might be called 'liberal modernisation theory' was elaborated in opposition to Marxism and claimed that the best road to modernity lay through capitalism (though not necessarily through democracy as well), with no necessary transcendence to a post-capitalist socialism.[74] Since the modern was usually construed to be American liberal capitalist democracy, this powerful, evolving discourse of development and democracy legitimised a new post-colonial role for the developed world vis-a-vis the underdeveloped. The West would lead the less fortunate into prosperity and modernity, stability and progress, and the South (and later the East) would follow.
Modernisationists were divided between optimists, who held that all people had the capacity to reach Western norms if they had the will or managed the transition properly, and pessimists, who believed that not all non-Western cultures were able to modernise and reach democracy. For an optimist like Gabriel Almond, one of the most prominent comparative politics scholars of his generation, human history was generally seen to be progressive, leading upward, inevitably, to something that looked like the developed West.[75] Classic works such as Seymour Martin Lipset's Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (i960) and Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture (1963) considered a democratic political culture with civic values of trust and tolerance, crucial prerequisites for democracy that would somehow have to be instilled in modernising societies. Democracy, development and anti-communism were values which went together. As in the years following the First World War, so during the Cold War, poverty was not only undesirable but a positive danger precisely because it inflamed minds and could potentially lead to communism.
The Soviet Union presented the modernisationists with an anomalous example of a perverse road to modernity that looked very seductive to anti- imperialist revolutionaries. With American scholarship intimately linked to the global struggle against Soviet Communism, the modernisation paradigm both provided an argument for the universal developmental pattern from traditional society to modern, a path that the Third World was fated to follow, and touted the superiority and more complete modernity of capitalist democracy American-style. A team of researchers and writers at MIT's Center for International Studies (CENIS), worked in the modernisation mode, developing analyses of the deviant Soviet road. CENIS, a conduit between the university community and the national government, had been established with CIA funding and directed by Max Millikan, former assistant director of the intelligence agency. No specialist on the Soviet Union, the MIT economic historian Walt Whitman Rostow published The Dynamics of Soviet Society (1952), in which he and his team argued that Soviet politics and society were driven by the 'priority of power'. Where ideology came into conflict with the pursuit of power, ideology lost out.[76] After being turned over to the CIA and the State Department and vetted by Philip Mosely of Columbia's Russian Institute and others before it was declassified and published, Rostow's study was released to the public as a work of independent scholarship.[77]
In his later and much more influential book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (i960), Rostow proposed that peoples moved from traditional society through the preconditions for take-off, to take-off, on to the drive to maturity and finally to the age of high mass-consumption. He trumpeted that Russia, 'as a great nation, well endowed by nature and history to create a modern economy and a modern society', was in fact developing parallel to the West.[78] But traditional society gave way slowly in Russia, and its take-off came only in the mid-1980s, thirty years after the United States, and its drive to maturity in the First Five-Year Plans. Its growth was remarkable, but there was no need for alarm in the West, for its growth was built on under-consumption. Communism, which for Rostow was 'a disease of the transition', 'is likely to wither in the age of high mass-consumption'.[79]
72
Key texts for the Marxists are: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno,
73
From Seymour Martin Lipset,
74
The classic statement on the priority of order over democracy in the process of development can be found in Samuel P. Huntington,
75
Gabriel Almond,
i970), p. 232.
76
WW Rostow and Alfred Levin,
77
Allan A. Needell, 'Project Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences', in Christopher Simpson (ed.),
78
W. W. Rostow,
79
Ibid., pp. 163,133. Rostowlater became a key adviser to President Lyndon Baines Johnson and an architect ofthe American intervention in Vietnam.