SOURCE: A review of Social Change and History, in Commonweal, Vol. XC, No. 20, September 5, 1969, pp. 546-47.

In the following review of Social Change and History, Mazlish praises Nisbet for revealing the notion that universal laws of economic and political development is culturally biased.

Our age, among other things, is an age of “undeveloped” nations that, hopefully, are also “developing” nations. A synonym for the development process through which they are expected to pass is “modernization.” Modernization theorists tend to assume that there are stages through which all nations both must and should pass; thus they claim not merely to offer a description of the way some nations have, in fact, developed, but also a prescription for how all societies are to develop. Modernization, then, sounds suspiciously like a summary of Western experience, idealized and trimmed to an ideal type.

In earlier days, we used to speak about the...