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Dissertation Information for Michael Edward Latham

NAME:
- Michael Edward Latham

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1996)

ADVISORS:
- Michael Salman

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Joyce Oldham Appleby
- Theodore M. Porter
- Mariko Tamanoi

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Modernization as ideology: Social scientific theory, national identity, and American foreign policy, 1961-1963

Abstract: From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, modernization and international development were central issues on an agenda shared by American social scientists and foreign policymakers. Focused on the Kennedy period, this dissertation is an intellectual and cultural analysis of the relationship between applied social science, U. S. foreign policy, and constructions of national identity. In the context of the Cold War, the concept of modernization was more than an academic paradigm. It also functioned as an ideology through which a social scientific theory was used to define the strategies for political practices and the nature of societies involved in the development process. This dissertation addresses three major questions. First, it considers how a community of social scientists established the significance and political relevance of the knowledge it produced. This involves an intellectual history of modernization theory's rise in American social science and the way its authors defined threats to the nation and claimed expertise to deal with them. Second, this project investigates the relationship between social scientific theory and foreign policy through a study of three specific institutional settings: the Alliance for Progress between the United States and Latin America; the Peace Corps; and the Strategic Hamlet Program of the Vietnam War. Finally, it analyzes the way claims that the projection of American resources and values would modernize materially and culturally deficient areas recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism during the Cold War. The ideology articulated by American social scientists and applied to policymaking in these three institutional sites went beyond insisting on the relevance of the United States' experience to the dilemmas of the "developing" world. Proposing to accelerate the passage of foreign societies along a transitional path toward liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, it also defined the nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. Used by theorists and policymakers to analyze other societies in terms of their progress toward an endpoint represented by the United States, the ideology of modernization guided the continued expansion of America's global power during an era of formal decolonization.

MPACT Scores for Michael Edward Latham

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2009-01-15 16:32:17

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Students under Michael Edward Latham

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None