| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. By Nils Gilman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiv, 329 pp. $48.00, ISBN 0-8018-7399-1.)

Late in life, Dean Acheson recalled the years from 1940 to 1953 as a time of "great obscurity" in which the future was clouded by the sudden disappearance of the certainties of the imperial world order. Amid Cold War perils, Americans struggled to fashion defensive lines in this "unknown world" of new nations, poverty, and revolution (Acheson, Present at the Creation, 1969, pp. 4–5). Social scientists labored through the 1950s to fill this conceptual void, and the result more than met expectations. Modernization theory combined national self-interest, academic empire building, and exceptionalist myth making into an unbeatable nation-building strategy, just in time for the 1960s.

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