426
PARTISAN REVI EW
There is of course something to be said for discouraging mere po–
litical blackmail. Not every dictator who threatens to go Communist
if he is not given atomic weapons to play with need be taken at his
word; there are instances where a firm refusal to be rattled will have
a beneficial effect. But by and large this is not the issue. The basic
challenge comes from societies in the transitional stage between agrarian
stagnation and industrial progress. This is now almost a commonplace.
What is not so well understood is the political mechanism whereby these
societies effect the transition. Here one still comes across evidence of
the old uncritical worship of mere progress and the ideologies instru–
mental thereto. The underlying assumptions tend to be a trifle on the
optimistic side. Where motives are imputed they are generally of the
nobler sort. Thus in an otherwise hardheaded and professional discus–
sion of the topic by two well-known authors, published in a recent issue
of a highly regarded quarterly, there occurs the following characteristic
passage :
"Both historically and at present the building of modem economies and
centralized modem governments has been driven along less by the
profit motive than by the aspirations for increased national and human
dignity. Merchants and the profit motive played their part in the
modernization efforts of Bismarck's Germany, Meiji Japan, Witte's Rus–
sia and Ataturk's Turkey; but soldiers, civil servants and nationalism
were the most powerful agents. And so it is today in Asia, the Middle
East and Africa." (M. F. Millikan and W . W. Rostow, "Foreign Aid :
Next Phase",
Foreign Affairs,
April 1958.)
A reflection which comes to mind upon reading this instructive
passage is that the authors seem to have imbibed something of the anti–
bourgeois ideology characteristic of the countries in question at the
moment when they made the transition to the modem world: at any
rate the distinction between sordid commercialism and patriotic ideal–
ism is in the best nineteenth-century Prussian or Japanese tradition. Odd–
ly enough it was this very emphasis on the superiority of their respective
national ideologies over the Western bourgeois mentality which subse–
quently led the rulers of these societies astray, with results fatal to their
plans. What after all has become of Bismarck's Germany and Meiji
J apan, not to mention the Russia which Count Witte tried so indus–
triously (and ineffectively ) to modernize without touching its central
political institutions? And if the future of the Turkish Republic looks
somewhat more promising, may this not be due to the fact that it owes
its origin to a revolution?
In
principle Mr. Millikan and Mr. Rostow
would not of course deny this, but a certain facile optimism keeps
breaking through; witness the following passage:
