Week 7 Reading Response

Gilman provides a provocative discussion of the roots of modernization theory as being based in liberal universalism. He asserts that he sees modernism as not only an aesthetic movement, but one that also pertains to social, political, and economics and for that reason he refuses to disaggregate modernization theory from modernisms as many historians have done before. His argument that intellectual modernizers were just as concerned about what modernity and being constituted as a modern subject mean in the U.S. than the applicability of their ideas abroad and that this was a part of a project to promote a “high concept version of Americanism” through modernization narratives of liberal ideas of progress, democracy, market economics. Gilman goes on in a later chapter to discuss, the inclination of Europeans to define themselves in relation to non-European others, he further develops this idea by adding that there was also a process of abstracting modernity into the idea of the universal at work at the same time. I was trying to make a connection between this idea of European preoccupation with the other and Bellah’s characterization of Japanese particularism in group identification and continuity in terms of deference to the rule of the ruler and later the state. In both there is a desire to make the local the primary focus of political concern while at the same time attention to what is outside of the group is important whether through universalism or hierarchical relations of rule.

Bellah’s conceptualization of group or political community (kokutai) social organization formations suggests that Japanese modernization patterns take cues from tradition, rather than acting to eradicate and act completely in contrast to it and that Japanese cultural values are at once particularistic and universalistic which has allowed for the survival of different ideological frameworks. Bellah also states that a merging of the sacred with the state through Confucianism allowed for a stronger allegiance to the both state and religious rule but maintains that the group is the primary concern and a source of allegiance for people.

I’m wondering how issues of gender and race complicate both Bellah and Gilman’s conceptualizations of modernity and modernization, in particular regimes? Feminist and postcolonial critiques and uses of modernization theory have been incredibly important and contested in scholarship and economic and public policy; I’m trying to think about how these conversations might add to and diverge from both Bellah and Gilman.