9_Law and State_Volume 17

Underdevelopment, Dcpendencia, and Modernization Theory 65
ties, it can also more precisely comprehend and analyse the effects in the
Occident, as well as those in the remainder of the “Europeanized” world.
However justified one’s scepticism may be about the value of possibility
of imitating the capitalist West or the socialist Occident32, every socalled
“individual road” in the Third World ultimately involves only a
minor correction, since it will not have its own historical experience; and
development is not conceivable without regulating Leitbilder which, however,
can only be designed if they take account of basic phenomonological
traits in the image of historical modernity. Without having to duplicate
the experiences of and traverse the same road as the West - particularly
since here too, there were no standard sequences - every conception of
development will have to start from the fact that a few basic tendencies
are bound up with the road to modernity. Some of these are: attainment
of and striving toward social and political equality, the extension of
planning capacities, the differentiation of the division of labour and the
universalization of the ends-means calculus. Within this horizon of experience,
which modernization studies have thematized, the problems of
the “stragglers” in the modernization process will have to be analysed,
once the task has been set of connecting historically outmoded structures
and their typical tensions with the effects of the ideas and techniques
coming from the outside. The development of a before-and-after construct
or model - which is peculiar to modernization theories - is an unavoidable
task of every developmental analysis and planning. The normativepractical
dimensions inherent in a theory of modernization, which of
course by no means represent a consistent theoretical system, have become
evident in a multiplicity of concepts, categories and models, whose utility
and applicability in social scientific analysis has already been demonstrated.
If an application of modernization-theory model notions, which
amount to the production of catalogues of deficits, to problems of the
developing countries still all too frequently end in disappointments in
the practice of development policy, then this by no means signifies that
the conceptual-theoretical results of the western discussion on modernization
are at best valuable as developmental policy contrasts, which in any
case ought not to be underestimated. Rather, this shows that modernization
theories today must warn against viewing the sum of partial modernizations,
which takes place as development policy is realized in everyday
practice, as development itself. Development ultimately can only be the
result of an ongoing, interactive transformation of an overall social system,
for which it would be difficult ever to produce recipe-like directions.
Despite all its inadequacies, modernization theory, with the sum of its
reflections, concepts, theorems and knowledge, at present offers the prob-
5 Law and State