I would like to thank the editors for organizing this critical dialogue with Calvert Jones and would especially like to thank her for her careful and thoughtful review of Hotels and Highways. I learned a lot from reading Bedouins into Bourgeois and am very grateful for the opportunity to put these books into dialogue with each other.

Jones raises several important critiques of my work, including the suggestion that I assign “too much blame to individuals” at the expense of larger structural forces and that I fail to appreciate the diversity of variations in modernization theory in contemporary political science.

For example, Jones argues that the emphasis placed on Conrad Hilton and Dankwart Rustow neglects the importance of larger contextual factors, including the Cold War and “academic incentives to erase doubt and profess more certainty than may be due.” My intent, however, in focusing on individuals was precisely to draw out how their choices were shaped by the larger context in which they operated. The Istanbul Hilton Hotel, for instance, is important in illustrating the connections between the cultural and economic fronts of the Cold War. Hilton’s ideological motivations to use his hotel as a “challenge to the way of life preached by the Communist world” were important, as was his private corporation’s collaboration with public institutions in the enactment of American foreign policy. I situate the Hilton Hotel in not only the appropriation of government funds (from both the Turkish Pension Fund and the US Economic Cooperation Administration) but also with domestic histories of dispossession in Turkey, including the expropriation of a public park, the destruction of an Armenian cemetery, anti-Greek pogroms, and the creation of an ostensibly “Turkish” architecture combined with elements of the corporate International Style. These episodes had less to do with anxieties about the Hilton Hotel’s erasure of “Turkishness” (as designated by Jones) than its ongoing construction in the context of debates about Cold War modernization, the enticement of foreign capital, and urban redevelopment schemes that entailed the dispossession of ethnic and religious minorities.

Jones also engages critically with the aspects of my book that pertain to the history and politics of knowledge production. One of her charges is that I present modernization theory as a singular formation and ignore the more “contextual and limited” variants proposed by later scholars such as Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and Michael Ross. This, she suggests, has the effect of overlooking how “modernization today is a fairly big tent with considerable internal contestation and diversity of thought.”

I intend the book as a recovery of the transnational and uncertain exchanges that were central in the construction of modernization theory, drawing on my work in the private papers and publications of social scientists who conducted research in Turkey in the postwar period. There are certainly instances in the text where I ascribe too great a coherence to modernization theory, but I do not fully understand the basis for the critique that I neglect internal contestations and diversity of approaches. Rustow, in many ways, exemplifies both uncertainties and pluralities of thought. Rather than “blaming” him, I rely on him as a narrative figure “whose life trajectory contained within it many of the contradictions of modernization theory” (p. 18). Rustow’s historically informed analysis of political development presented a contrast with the behavioralist assumptions of the large-scale survey studies conducted by Daniel Lerner and his collaborators, such as Frederick Frey and Arif Payaslıoğlu. This suggests that modernization theory from its inception “was not an internally consistent formulation” (p. 19).

Rustow also had increasing doubts and anxieties about the relationship between power and knowledge, about teleological and unilinear accounts of development, about the impossibility of objectivity in social-scientific research, as well as the limitations of his own knowledge about the areas on which he was expected to write with certitude. Jones, in her review, presents a familiar narrative of scholarly progress whereby modernization theorists and other political scientists have become more attuned to questions of fieldwork ethics, data quality, and research transparency. My argument in the book is that self-reflection and uncertainty are constitutive features of knowledge production, including in the early moments of the construction of modernization theory, as exemplified by Rustow and his interlocutors in the United States and in Turkey. Rather than a Whiggish disciplinary history, the important question for me is how to uncover and foreground moments of scholarly doubt, internal contradictions, transnational exchanges, and political consequences in both the past and present practices of political science.

I thank Jones again for her thoughtful and critical engagement with my work, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have read her book.