It is a rewarding yet sobering experience to read Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey, Begüm Adalet’s fascinating account of Turkey’s role in the rise of an intellectual titan—modernization theory—in twentieth-century political science. As she sees it, Turkey was both the “template on which modernization theory was based” and an “object on which it was enacted” (p. 3). Hence, although pioneers of the theory and ultimately practitioners viewed modernizing processes unfolding in Turkey as inevitable and worthy of study—even of imitation by other countries—they also, paradoxically, believed such processes needed to be encouraged or induced, including by themselves as supposedly disinterested scholars.
So was modernization theory discovered or invented? Although this classic question is usually posed by philosophers in reference to mathematical theory—was math invented or discovered?—it is also at the heart of Adalet’s book. The first chapter takes a deep dive into the life story of Dankwart Rustow, a Middle East specialist and contributor to modernization theory in its formative years. Adalet casts him as an “obligatory passage point,” an “uncertain translator between Turkish and American social scientists” (p. 26) whose own doubts about the broad-brush claims of early modernization theory would come to be forgotten. Adalet’s archival work, especially her analysis of Rustow’s private papers, provides an eye-opening and at times disconcerting glimpse behind the curtain of official knowledge production.
Indeed, when Rustow was asked to write the Near East section of The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960)—a landmark work in comparative politics edited by Gabriel Almond and James Coleman and described by the publisher as “the first major effort toward a valid comparison of the political systems of Asia, Africa, the Near East, and Latin America”—he confessed to Coleman that “quite honestly and strictly between you and me and the bedpost, I could not name a single newspaper in Afghanistan, Libya, the Sudan or Saudi Arabia.… Hence it hardly seems cricket for me to indicate boldly that political functions are performed by the press in these various countries” (p. 35).
Although he contributed to the volume anyway, Rustow would become increasingly skeptical of universalism and behaviorism in political science. As he warned in a quip that also serves as an epigraph to Adalet’s first chapter, “The political scientist who insists that the world is his oyster is likely to suffer a bad case of indigestion” (p. 23). Nevertheless, the volume became extremely influential, the doubts and reservations of its authors eclipsed by a new certitude tied to US ascendancy in the Cold War. Adalet deftly uses episodes like this to underscore the fragility of attempts at theory construction in comparative social science (and the resulting need for humility).
The second chapter is similarly incisive with respect to Daniel Lerner, another key modernization theorist, whose book, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958), is a widely considered canonic work in the development of the theory. Adalet’s focus is the tenuousness of Lerner’s cross-country surveys, which, in her view, “were conducted not merely to measure or describe but also to occasion the performance of the very categories—modern, transitional, and traditional—that they sought to explain” (p. 65). Although the evidence is more limited here, it is certainly suggestive.
For example, to illustrate the psychosocial dimensions of modernization, Lerner opens his book with a lively and now famous story, what he calls the parable of the Grocer and the Chief, which is based on research in a rural Turkish village. The two characters are presented as modernization archetypes: the Chief is “traditional” (hopelessly backward and unable to imagine himself outside his current milieu), whereas the Grocer is inching toward “modern” and thus is a “transitional” Turk with a greater capacity for imagining improvements to his society and circumstances.
Yet Adalet shows that these labels are based on strikingly fragile evidence. For instance, the Chief and other subjects were deemed “traditional” in part because they gave wholly realistic answers to Lerner’s somewhat idiosyncratic and whimsical (“projective”) questions. So when asked, for instance, whether they could imagine themselves living in a different country or as the head of government, many did not answer or cited their lack of qualifications or interest in those things. Undeterred, Lerner interpreted these responses as traditionalism, rather than as a sign of his own questions’ inadequacies, and erased them from the overall narrative of results. In Adalet’s sharp estimation, this “speaks to his awareness of the necessity to write the script...and direct the performance of modern, traditional, and transitional” (p. 73), to fabricate rather than discover such categories.
Chapters 3–5 turn to the material foundations of modernization in Turkey—the hotels and highways of the book’s title. Both the Marshall Plan-funded highway network and the US-assisted development of a tourism industry are presented, as are Lerner’s surveys, as far more tenuous and prone to cross-cultural misunderstanding than official histories might suggest. In Adalet’s telling, American social engineers and also sometimes Turkish ones had wildly romantic notions about what roads and tourism could accomplish. Thus, “it was expected…that villagers…would greet their saviors with open arms and tears of joy, given the promise of modernity, democracy, and prosperity associated with roads” (p. 142). But, of course, not everyone has those associations or wants a parade of vehicles zooming by the front door. Adalet also suggests possible unintended consequences of this new mobility, such as lessened empathy. (On p. 155, she quotes Barbara and George Helling observing that the “old Turkish custom of free hospitality to the stranger cannot survive beside a busy highway” in Rural Turkey: A New Socio-Statistical Approach, 1958.)
Chapter 5 centers on the iconic Istanbul Hilton and argues that tourism, like scholarship and infrastructure, came with a certain amount of ideological baggage. In the Cold War context, the hotel was expected to be a showcase for American-style success: as Conrad Hilton declared, “I am convinced that it is to be our business in the next half of the twentieth century to see to it that our civilization continues, that our revolution spreads over the world, that our western spark ignites and lights the world of the orient, Africa and northern Europe” (qtd. on p. 169). As with highways, hotels were seen as springboards for civilization and modernity. For example, they would help cultivate a hospitable mindset in Turks, one that would be more modern (impersonal and efficient) than the “traditional” Turkish version and thus more appropriate for a Western hotel chain. Yet misunderstandings and unintended consequences were again rife, as Adalet shows, particularly regarding the extent to which hotels should erase Turkishness and cater entirely to Western tourist appetites.
Overall, the book tells a compelling story about the fragility of social science—in theory but also in practice. It is valuable reading not only for students of Turkey, the Middle East, and the developing world but also for those with theoretical interests in the sociology of knowledge and politics of expertise. As such, the book speaks to an enduring research tradition that tackles questions of ideology and social engineering, including work by Miguel Centeno, Peter Kenez, Timothy Mitchell, James Scott, Rogers Smith, Robert Vitalis, Eugen Weber, and Lisa Wedeen. Social engineers throughout history have often believed that what they sought to “create” in society was inevitable and good, be it nationalism, class consciousness, or, as in Adalet’s case, an American vision of modernity. Yet the very fact that social engineers felt they needed to “create” the change they desired belied assumptions about such change’s inevitability or universal appeal.
Some readers may wish that Adalet had engaged more extensively with this broader tradition and the deep questions raised by it. Can knowledge ever be divorced from power, be it traditional political power or the power of fads, ideology, and partisanship? Should political scientists seek to exorcise any and all normative judgments from their work, or will doing so only make them more irrelevant? To what extent are today’s scholar-activists vulnerable to the same dilemmas faced by early modernization theorists? Perhaps Adalet assigns too much blame to individuals such as Rustow and Hilton and not enough to larger structural forces—the geopolitical context certainly, but also the local context, such as academic incentives to erase doubt and profess more certainty than may be due. Despite the book’s subtitle, for instance, we hear relatively little about the role of the Cold War.
Another important question pertains to modernization theory itself. Adalet often writes as if there is only one “modernization theory,” and yet modernization today is a fairly big tent with considerable internal contestation and diversity of thought. In this sense, there may be something of a genetic fallacy at work, blurring genealogical origins of theories with their present-day value and validity. Consider variants on modernization theory proposed by scholars such as Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and Michael Ross, which are often far more contextual and limited in scope and do not seem to valorize authoritarianism in the way Adalet suggests. In short, are all hypotheses inspired by modernization theory equally problematic, prone to imperial entanglement and supercilious dichotomies? Should scholars refrain from testing them? Or can we draw important distinctions? What exactly does genealogical knowledge of a theory’s complicated and problematic origins mean for the way we study it today?
Adalet’s conclusion takes political scientists to task: “In their disregard for the histories and political effects of their theories and research agendas, political scientists have, for the most part, abandoned inquiry of a crucial domain: the work of uncertain experts such as themselves” (p. 201). This seems generally true. But it overlooks the small but growing body of work by political scientists on fieldwork ethics, data quality, and the appropriate extent of data access and research transparency, including by Middle East-focused scholars such as Lisa Anderson, Lindsay Benstead, Lisa Blaydes, Amaney Jamal, Sarah Parkinson, Wendy Pearlman, and Sean Yom, among others (see, for example, “The Ethics of Research in the Middle East,” 2014, Project on Middle East Political Science, and Political Science Research in the Middle East & North Africa: Methodological and Ethical Challenges, edited by Janine A. Clark and Francesco Cavatorta, 2018). Adalet’s thoughtful book leaves one hoping that political scientists have made at least some progress—however fragile and uncertain—since the era in which modernization theory was first invented/discovered.
