ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, early 1980s, I published a series of articles,1 later published as a short book,2 that set off a firestorm of debate within the discipline. Over the preceding 20 years, based on my field work, research, and writing on the Third World, I had become convinced that neither of the two great alternative paradigms of that time, the Marxian and the developmentalist (Rostow, Lipset, et al.) was particularly useful in studying developing areas. Both of these great systems had their advantages, of course, but neither, based as they were on the Western (European and North American) process of development, accurately captured the dynamics of today’s Third World countries. Among other things, neither of these two paradigms paid any attention to culture and culture-area differences; both assumed mistakenly that there was but a single route to development-although the two routes were very far apart and at odds politically and ideologically. Both paradigms were part of the Cold War struggle of that time, with developmentalism as part of US foreign policy and Marxism identified with the Soviet Union.
