Social change with sticky features and the failures of modernizationism

Abstract

The paper dismisses four ‘western’ models of history and social change, namely progress, rupture, time‐series, and palette. It is argued that none of the four models provides conceptual tools for analysing the historical process as both continuity and change. Increasing the number of analytical components does likewise not provide better results. Instead what is needed is an analytical instrument that captures the complexity of novel constellations of ‘old’ and ‘new ‘ components, beyond simple admixtures.

Notes

This article is part of the author's book project provisionally entitled Social Change by Fusion. Parts of an earlier version of this material have been presented at the Euroconference on Multiculturalism and Migration, London School of Economics, 1 September 1995. The preparation of this project was partly supported by grant No. T6739 received from OTKA (the National Science Research Fund of Hungary), various hidden and explicit subsidies by the Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Science, partial research travel expenses covered by the University of California, Irvine and Rutgers University, and conference travel support by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences in Vienna. The author is very grateful for useful conversation with, and comments on various, earlier versions by, first of all, his graduate students at Irvine who inspired its first version—Aneesh, Erica Bornstein, Eric Kaldor, Yoonies Park and Caleb Southworth —and his colleagues and friends Lanfranco Blanchetti‐Revelli, Judit Bodnár, András Bozóki, Fran‐ccsca Cancian, Wilfred Dolfsma, Kaveh Ehsani, Felicitas Hillmann, Susan Gal, Martha Lampland, Attila Melegh, Antal Örkény, Ákos Róna‐Tas, Endre Sik, David A. Smith Judith K. Treas, Miklós Vörös, Anna Wessely, Robin M. Williams, and Susan Zimmermann.