• Is economic development something all nations share democratically as it spreads from Great Powers to the industrializing world? By outlining a linear progression of economic growth, the American economist Walt Whitman Rostow used modernization theory to create a road map for countries to follow as they evolved from “traditional” to “mature” states. Brazilian dependency theorist Celso Furtado disagreed. For Furtado, economic development in the United States and Europe made the rest of the world dependent upon those countries and inhibited the spread of development. A key difference in their interpretations concerns countries’ relationships to the international economy.

Walt Whitman Rostow, 1960

“It is possible to identify all societies, in their economic dimensions, as lying within one of five categories: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass-consumption. . . .

First, the traditional society. A traditional society is one whose structure is developed within limited production functions, based on pre-Newtonian science and technology, and on pre-Newtonian attitudes towards the physical world. Newton is here used as a symbol for that watershed in history when men came widely to believe that the external world was subject to a few knowable laws, and was systematically capable of productive manipulation. . . .

The second stage of growth embraces societies in the process of transition; that is, the period when the preconditions for take-off are developed; for it takes time to transform a traditional society in the ways necessary for it to exploit the fruits of modern science, to fend off diminishing returns, and thus to enjoy the blessings and choices opened up by the march of compound interest. . . .

We now come to the great watershed in the life of modern societies: the third stage in this sequence, the take-off. The take-off is the interval when the old blocks and resistances to steady growth are finally overcome. The forces making for economic progress, which yielded limited bursts and enclaves of modern activity, expand and come to dominate the society. . . .

After take-off there follows a long interval of sustained if fluctuating progress, as the now regularly growing economy drives to extend modern technology over the whole front of its economic activity. . . . The economy finds its place in the international economy: goods formerly imported are produced at home; new import requirements develop, and new export commodities to match them. The society makes such terms as it will with the requirements of modern efficient production, balancing off the new against the older values and institutions. . . .

We now come to the age of high mass-consumption, where, in time, the leading sectors shift towards durable consumers’ goods and services: a phase from which Americans are beginning to emerge; whose not unequivocal joys Western Europe and Japan are beginning energetically to probe; and with which Soviet society is engaged in an uneasy flirtation. . . .

When technological maturity is reached, and the nation has at its command a modernized and differentiated industrial machine, to what ends should it be put, and in what proportions: to increase social security, through the welfare state; to expand mass-consumption into the range of durable consumers’ goods and services; to increase the nation’s stature and power on the world scene; or to increase leisure?”

Celso Furtado, 1970

“As a consequence of the rapid spread of new production methods from a small number of centers radiating technological innovations, there has come into existence a process tending to create a world-wide economic system. It is thus that underdevelopment is considered a creature of development, or rather, as a consequence of the impact of the technical processes and the international division of labor commanded by the small number of societies that espoused the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. The resulting relations between these societies and the underdeveloped areas involve forms of dependence that can hardly be overcome. The dependence was initially based on an international division of labor in which the dominant centers reserved for themselves the economic activities that concentrated economic progress. In the following phase, the dependence was maintained by controlling the assimilation of new technological processes through the installation of productive activities within the dependent economies, all under the control of groups integrated into the dominant economies.

On the assumption of the foregoing, we infer that underdevelopment cannot be studied as a “phase” of the development process since such a “phase” would be overcome if certain factors came into play simultaneously. And, since the underdeveloped economies are contemporaries of — and in one way or another, dependent on — their developed counterparts, the former cannot retrace the experiences of the latter. Therefore, development and underdevelopment should be considered as two aspects of the same historical process involving the creation and the spread of modern technology.”

Sources: W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 4–10, 16. © Cambridge University Press, 1960. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press; Celso Furtado, Obstacles to Development in Latin America, trans. Charles Ekker (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1970), p. xvi.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS