Emile Durkheim's Modernization Theory

It refers to the development or underdevelopment of countries as a model of financial and social development that explains global inequality in terms of differing levels of technological development among societies. What the theory suggests is that by introducing modern approaches to technology, agricultural production, industrialization and modern political institutions the underdeveloped countries will experience economic well-being and a general improvement of living standards. The conditions for the establishment of a Democratic State have been the subject of many debates in Comparative Politics, this paper will be discussing the Modernization Theory, Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and contrasting it with Charles Tilly’s argument on Social movement and Democratization. The idea of modernization is reasonably new. Marquis de Condorcet is a French philosopher who is involved in the roots of modernization theory with the concept that technological developments and economic changes can enable transformations in moral and cultural values. He is to be the first one to make the connection between long-term economic and social development resulting in an improvement of human

Emile Durkheim recommended that in a capitalist society with a complex partition of labor, economic regulation would be needed to sustain order. He emphasized that the major changeover from a primeval social order to a more advanced industrial society could otherwise bring crises, disorder and chaos. Durkheim used biological evolution as a similarity to social evolution. As with living organisms and species, societies progress through numerous stages, generally initiating at a simple level and evolving toward a more complex level of society. Furthermore, societies adapt to surrounding environments, but also interrelate with other societies contributing to progress and an intensification of relations in the form of trade and cultural

Modernization is considered a revolutionary process creating the contrast between modern and traditional societies, which differ in a great scale. According to Cyril Black “modernity is comparable to the changes from prehumen to human existence and from primitive to civilized societies”. Modernization is a complex procedure that involves changes in all areas from human thought to human behavior. In order to reach modernization a society must go through industrialization, urbanization, mass literacy and education, expansion of political participation and the development of the media. Modernization is considered a global process, although modernization got its roots from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century its globalizing tendencies have only emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It has become a worldwide phenomenon whereby a society, currently, cannot claim to be purely tradition because as Huntington claims “now societies are either modern or in the progression of becoming