In the aftermath of World War II, American modernization theorists began to employ survey methodology as a means of discerning behavioral patterns in the developing world. The behavioralist turn in the social sciences also coincided with the postwar rise of the United States as a military and technical-aid regime. In the Middle Eastern context, the power of that regime was bolstered by developmental projects funded by the Point Four Program as well as the consolidation of area studies programs in U.S. research institutions. One product of the alignment between social scientific practice and policymaking was a survey targeting Voice of America listeners across the Middle East, funded by the State Department and conducted by the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University. A comprehensive analysis of the survey data would form the basis of sociologist Daniel Lerner's famed work, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), which remains a staple of teaching on the region across a variety of disciplines.

Hemant Shah's The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and “The Passing of Traditional Society” is an ambitious attempt to chronicle the makings—“historically, intellectually, geopolitically, culturally”—of Lerner's seminal text (p. 8). Situating Lerner's book as the centerpiece of his own proves to be a resourceful organizational device for Shah, who delivers a painstaking analysis of the institutional affiliations, intellectual predecessors, and legacies of the author and text alike. The structure of the book reflects Shah's commitment to excavating the intellectual influences behind Passing, whereby each chapter revolves around an institution that Lerner was involved with, including the U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, BASR at Columbia, and the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at MIT.

In sketching an intricate profile of the institutionally embedded production of Passing, Shah is able to elucidate the core concepts behind that text while capturing the changes in Lerner's thinking over the years. A close reading of Lerner's dissertation “Sykewar: Psychological Warfare against Germany, D-Day to V-E Day” (1949), which chronicles his experiences in military intelligence during the war, as well as his subsequent involvement in the Revolution and the Development of International Relations project at Hoover, details Lerner's conversion to behavioralist social scientific thinking in the postwar years. That gradual shift coincides with Lerner's move away from his wartime ambivalence about the effectiveness of propaganda, “which morphed seamlessly into an interest in mass media effects” (p. 53). While Lerner joined his BASR colleagues, such as Paul Lazarsfeld, in their skepticism toward the direct influence mass media could have on American audiences, he would display a commitment to its efficacy in the context of Middle Eastern modernization by the time he arrived at MIT to compose his influential text on the region (pp. 45–46).

Lerner believed that the allure of modernity was best conveyed through the conduit of mass media, which cultivated the ability to envision and covet otherwise foreign lifestyles, occupations, and places. A crucial component of this formulation of modernization was empathy, defined as the ability to imagine oneself outside of the self. Shah is able to illuminate the particular inflection Lerner gave to this concept by closely examining the scoring criteria for the “empathy index” based on the survey data. He then traces the origins of Lerner's conception of empathy to a review essay he wrote on the effect Turgenev had on Henry James as a student of literature prior to the war. Shah also circumvents the customary identification of David Riesman's work as the primary source behind Lerner's threefold typology of modern, traditional, and transitional societies. In order to do so, he underscores Lerner's engagement with personality types employed in a propaganda study conducted on German prisoners of war, as well as his reliance on the “Chicago school sociologists” who identified a link between urbanization and modernization: “the parallels in thinking are noteworthy,” even though Shah concedes that “no evidence indicates that Lerner somehow copied or cribbed the Chicago sociologists” (p. 120).

Shah's otherwise thorough account of the intellectual influences behind Lerner's thinking could benefit from a more detailed contextualization within the emergence of modernization theory. Though the work of Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils are credited, there is little discussion of Lerner's colleagues at CENIS at the time of his writing. CENIS was host to other prominent modernization theorists, such as W. W. Rostow and Lucian Pye, and Lerner collaborated with Pye in the Political Development series of the Social Science Research Council, which was crucial in the dissemination of modernization theory in a cross-disciplinary fashion. While writing Passing, Lerner also relied on the works of Turkish and Arab social psychologists and sociologists that examined the effects of transportation on changing perceptions of time, space, and measurement in rural settings; these seem to have factored into his conception of urbanization. Even though the diverse influences behind Lerner's involvement with modernization theory could be further explored, one of the many strengths of Shah's book is the way in which it situates the salience of Lerner's work within the field of communications. The final chapter cogently demonstrates Lerner's legacy in contemporary research by noting the frequency with which his model of modernization is employed in studies examining media impact on development.

In his closing chapter, Shah suggests that the persistent relevance of “Lerner” (the quotation marks substituting for a “certain distillation of his thought”) stemmed from his contribution to securing “America's conceptions of itself as exceptional and benevolent” (pp. 147–8). On this point, Shah's book is a timely complement to recent intellectual histories of modernization theory, such as the work of David Engerman, Nils Gilman, and Michael Latham, who have presented pertinent critiques of the ideological commitments guiding social scientific inquiry during the Cold War. The exclusive treatment of Lerner's work further reveals the tensions between the ostensibly inevitable and universal nature of modernization, on the one hand, and its presentation as an exceptionally American model, on the other hand. Transported to the Middle Eastern context, Shah astutely observes, modernization theory helped render the region “comprehensible, controllable, and culturally redeemable” (p. 151).

The backdrop for this particular “production of modernization” was informed by three factors that are revisited throughout the book: the geopolitical context, postwar racial liberalism, and the onset of behavioralism in the social sciences. Shah treats the first two in conjunction, as a testament to the interrelated nature of American foreign policy concerns and domestic identity. In this reading, it was the adoption of “the cultural theory of race” that “created space for the Point Four-inspired notion of development and the theory of modernization” (p. 22). According to Shah, Lerner came to subscribe to a cultural theory of race through his inclusion of Gunnar Myrdal's work in his syllabi while teaching at Stanford, and it was this theory that led him to view the “traditionals” of the Middle East and minorities in the United States in commensurable terms: “both experienced a certain ‘backwardness,’ and both needed assistance from enlightened whites to reach their full potential in democratic political environments” (p. 71). Joining aforementioned intellectual histories, Shah thus provides a compelling account of modernization theory as a product of the Cold War era pangs of American liberal thought.

Shah is also interested in the rise of behavioralism in the social sciences insofar as it impelled “Lerner's spirited attacks on the humanities,” which “seem surprising when considered in the light of his early training and apparent love for the humanities” (p. 75). The tone of lamentation is consistent with Shah's frequent display of generosity regarding Lerner's prowess as a literary analyst. While Lerner did employ narrative tropes in his account of the Middle East surveys, however, it is not clear to what degree his training in literature equipped him with insight into the motivations and aspirations of the survey respondents, even those he depicted as pivotal protagonists driving the narrative of modernization forward. Though he does not engage with the original questionnaires, Shah is nonetheless careful to disclose that the answers yielded by the open-ended interview setting were lost in the reported form of condensed scores and indices signaling empathy or modernization in Lerner's text (p. 65). In any case, a more elaborate exposition of the perceived fit between attitudinal research and foreign policy incentives across the Middle East may have revealed a deeper level of complicity, rather than a stark opposition, between “the institutional needs” of organizations like the Voice of America and the “scholarly interests of BASR researchers” who conducted and coded the original surveys (p. 86).

Through his conscientious treatment of primary sources and of Lerner's writings, Shah succeeds in providing a vibrant account of Passing’s entrenchment in a wide array of institutions, schools of thought, and intellectual forerunners. As an unprecedented foray into the origins of that text, Shah's book is a welcome addition to a growing literature on the Cold War era alignment between American liberalism, social scientific theories of modernization, and projects of uplift as they were implemented across the Middle East.