EMERGING NATIONS AND IDEOLOGIES OF AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENTISTS.

The article focuses on emerging nations and the ideologies of American social scientists. Confronting the rapidly expanding literature on political and social change in emerging nations, one finds it difficult not to ask the old question, never satisfactorily resolved, of the value implications of social science. The purpose of the author in this paper is to do just that by inquiring about some of the assumptions of American social scientists who have been studying political and social modernization in the world's new states and older poorer nations. These assumptions, though not usually stated as such are ideological in their implications in the sense that they involve normative views of the social order. Many discussions of the politics of emerging nations contain a redefinition of political democracy so as to include political systems within the term that by customary standards would be regarded as authoritarian regimes. Given the cultural heterogeneity and economic backwardness of the new states, non-democratic political systems are in some sense an inevitable outcome. Another characteristic is the denigration of the motives behind the nationalist or revolutionary movements occurring in the underdeveloped world. To the disadvantage of the emerging nations, invidious comparisons are drawn between their current strivings and the earlier ideologies of the West.