Alex Inkeles

Participant Citizenship in Six Developing Countries

In this paper I will endeavor to do the following: (1) test how far certain concepts dealing with individual orientations to politics, previously used in studies of relatively advanced European societies, are appropriate to populations in developing countries; (2) ascertain how far these separate dimensions of individual political orientation cohere as a syndrome, indicating the existence of a general underlying dimension of “participant citizenship;” (3) identify elements among common orientations to politics which cannot be incorporated in this general syndrome; and (4) assess the importance of certain social experiences or forces in inculcating the qualities of participant citizenship in individuals exposed to these influences. These objectives will be better understood if they are seen in the context of the larger research program of which this report is a part, namely the Harvard Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Economic Development. The project is an investigation of the forms and sources of modernization in individuals . Its focus is on the person rather than the society or the institution, and its emphasis is socio-psychological rather than purely sociological or structural. Six countries are represented: Argentina and Chile, East Pakistan and India, Nigeria and Israel. This report will not, however, emphasize national differences, but rather treat each sample as another replication of the basic design. We assume that if something holds true for six such different countries, it must be a powerful connection indeed.

The Fate of Personal Adjustment in the Process of Modernization

FEW IDEAS have had wider currency among prominent commentators on social life than the belief that the city and its attendant industrial civilization are alien to &dquo;natural&dquo; man and inevitably breed social disorganization and personal confusion.&dquo; Thomas Jefferson could see some good even in yellow fever since, as he said, &dquo;it will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.&dquo;2 A century later Henry Adams saw in New York City a cylinder which had exploded to throw great masses of stone and steam against the sky, creating an air of &dquo;movement and hysteria&dquo; in which &dquo;prosperity never before imagined, power never yet willed by men, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable, and afraid.&dquo;3 Such images of urban life and industrial civilization were not limited to

Sociology Stanislav Andreski. The Uses of Comparative Sociology. Pp. x, 383. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965.

istration of the Social Security Act in 1936 until his retirement-unjustly and prematurely enforced-in 1953, no man had more to do with shaping this country’s social security institutions than Arthur Altmeyer. He guided the administration and the progressive evolution of the legislation with an order of skill and a dedication that marked him as one of the greatest public servants of those decades. This book is written in the first person. This will prompt some readers to criticize it as concentrating too much on the views, and often partisan views of the author. But this is simultaneously the book’s strength for it is the chronicle of one who was a full participant in every significant development during these years. He pictures the accomplishments and the failures, the squabbles within the executive branch, and the struggles with and in the Congress as he saw them.