Project Duration: January 2025 – December 2029
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Matthias Leanza
PhD Position: Open (Applications Ongoing – Apply Here: https://www.unibas.ch/de/Arbeiten-an-der-Universitaet-Basel/Offene-Stellen.html)
Student Assistant Positions:To Be Filled
Contact: matthias.leanza@clutterunibas.ch

The decolonization that followed World War II led to a profound crisis of empire as a framework for global order. This period witnessed not just the collapse of individual empires—something that has occurred throughout history—but a broader shift in the understanding of political legitimacy that called imperial rule as a whole into question. In response to this crisis, scholars and anticolonial intellectuals proposed various theories addressing the situation. Their ideas had significant implications for how policymakers would come to envision a postcolonial world.

This project focuses on one specific response to the erosion of imperial modes of governance: modernization theory. According to the standard narrative, modernization theory emerged in the United States in the 1950s and enjoyed its heyday in the early to mid-1960s. For a time, it was the dominant paradigm in sociology and related disciplines, providing a conceptual framework for understanding how societies evolve as they move from “tradition” to “modernity.” However, the origins of modernization theory were far more global than has been commonly acknowledged. Key proponents developed their ideas through extensive field research in the decolonizing world and were driven by a profound concern about how humanity could arrive at a new global order after the impending demise of empires. Modernization theory addressed this challenge by proposing a program of regional decoupling and internal development along national lines. Independent, self-sustaining nation-states were to replace the colonial empires of the past, which were viewed as relics of an earlier stage of social evolution.

This vision lay at the heart of what I term “liberal worldmaking.” In essence, it represented the ultimate form of assimilation insofar as all countries would converge on the same structural model; that is, assimilation without empire. My project will conduct the first combined field and discourse analysis of modernization theory, covering the period from the early 1950s to the late 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, my team and I will trace the community of scholars that coalesced around this intellectual project and chart the discursive landscape they collectively shaped. This will encompass the creation of a prosopographic database and an annotated inventory of all the relevant publications from the period in question. We will also examine how modernization theory interacted with intellectual traditions from the Global South, moving beyond a diffusionist model of knowledge circulation. In this way, the project seeks to uncover how the social sciences contributed to the formation of our global order.