Thomas Bender's Modernization Theory

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Thomas Bender, an accomplished and versatile historian at New York University, has undertaken a synthetic narrative of American history from a global perspective. By some measures, this might seem an impossible or contradictory task because it entails dissolving the solitary, progressive, and self-aggrandizing story of discovery, settlement, nation building, and international hegemony in favor of an international point of view from which the nation itself seems less in focus than the interplay of larger forces shaping development, economic change, competition among empires, and so on. Unlike modernization theory with its depiction of inevitability and a more or less singular model of success, this bird's-eye view of the nation links it to larger…show more content…
history into five broad sections, discussed within a general chronological framework. These sections depict (in my own words) 1) beginnings, 2) the American Revolution, 3) concepts of freedom, 4) the self-denying American Empire, and 5) social freedom and the welfare state. Within these rubrics, Bender describes ways in which the United States is part of a shifting constellation of nations and regions, which interact to form new shapes and meanings. Indeed, what is most striking in this work is the ability of the author to discover the very broad connections among all of these subjects between what occurs in the United States and elsewhere. And the elsewhere is not just confined to Western Europe (England, Germany, and France), even if these nations loom particularly large in our…show more content…
In some respects, this revision follows the lead of historian William Appleman Williams who developed the notion of an American informal empire, growing out of nineteenth-century "Manifest Destiny," aggressive protection of free trade and open markets, and finally, into direct confrontation with the old empires of Europe in the twentieth century.[1] Bender's view is slightly different, emphasizing the very long history of American engagement with European Empires--the successful American Revolution was, after all, partly a consequence of the enmity of France and Britain. As Bender concludes: the "American way of empire was even presented as anti-imperialism because it guaranteed openness, in contrast to the exclusivity of the old empires" (p. 233). This statement is an important argument because it links the visionary perspectives of Thomas Jefferson, for example, to the much later engagement of the United States with European colonial empires. It also illustrates an essential point, which is the moral center of the work. It is Bender's contention that "American Exceptionalism," the notion that the peculiar circumstances of American history exempted the United States from many of the struggles and brutalities of Europe, is not only a misjudgment, but that, in a curious way, any inward-looking national narrative almost inevitably
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