I'm shelving Mandarins of the Future next to my Vietnam War books because this is the intellectual history behind why the best and the brightest went into a small Southeast Asian country and lost everything.

The end of the Second World War, with its victory over fascism and the next struggle against international Communism, offered a great opportunity for American academics. 1950s America, prosperous, tranquil, and democratic, clearly stood at the endpoint of history. All that needed to done was to prove this was true, and then export the American system to the newly liberated Third World before the pernicious virus of Communism got there first. This project was one of "modernization", first a universal social science to describe the trajectory of nations from a traditional past to an industrialized, democratic, scientific and stable modernity, and then a set of overarching policy projects in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, to make this vision a reality.

The three cases studies on academic units and their leaders: Talcott Parsons at Harvard, Edward Shils and Gabriel Almond at Princeton, and Walt Rostow at MIT, provide a thorough accounting of modernization theory, and its troubled and multifaceted links to American history and Marxism. In promoting an America System of modernity, these thinkers espoused a vision of 'conflict-less' progress and expansion of wealth in America that ignored the very real evils of genocide against Native Americans, slavery and the Civil War, or the struggle between labor and capitalist robber barons in the late 19th century. They conceived of the social scientist as a kind of collective psychoanalyst, a specialist that could help elites display democratic virtues without the chaotic hurly-burly of mass political participation. Abroad, modernizers conceived of a project of state-directed development that required a firm, national hand. In the absence of a robust civil society, the military could do this just fine, and there were no contradictions between modernization and authoritarian regimes.

As Gilman recounts in the final chapters, modernization theory collapsed comprehensively with the failure of liberal policy in the 60s and 70s, as the Kennedy/Jackson initiatives around the Vietnam War and the Great Society failed to produce victory at great expense, and the economy stagnated. Modernization theory, having been so close to the apex of the military-industrial-academic-complex, became an easy target from critics across the political spectrum. A resurgent Right, from old-guard segregationists to neoliberal deregulators, dismantled the modernist project of active government intervention. The counter-culture, from street-fighting youths to post-modern intellectuals, railed against the closed totalizing vision of modernity, finding solace in individual and subjective identities.

Mandarins of the Future matters, because for all that they got wrong, the conception of modernity developed by the subjects of this book remains a durable default. The welfare state, elite deliberatve democracy, and a basic optimism about technology and the future, are at the core of left-central politics today. Modernization theory was dusted off and used to justify the non-military aspects of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the Global War on Terror. For all the battering that these political ideologies and ideals have taken in recent years, modernization is at least a productive theory, unlike the intellectual cynicism and nihilism of the various flavors of post-modernist thought, or the Darwinian accelerationism that seems to be the end-state of global capitalism.

Perhaps modernity is, to rephrase Churchill, the least bad of all our ways of existing in the 20th century. If so, it is important to understand it as an idea with a particularly genesis and background, and not an automatic endpoint of history. This book serves as important intellectual stepping stone between Marx and Weber, and the conditions of life in the 21st century.