Democratization and Science: The Theory and Practice of Technical Assistance at MIT

麻省理工学院提供了一个不寻常的机会来研究现代化的理论和实践是如何在冷战的背景下相互影响的。在20世纪五六十年代，麻省理工学院的社会科学家、自然科学家和工程师制定了一种重要的新方法，将科学技术作为美国外交政策的工具。这些关于现代化和民主化的思想对肯尼迪政府的宏观层面产生了相当大的影响。在微观层面上，麻省理工学院试图通过协助第三世界国家（例如印度和韩国）的一些大学建立技术学院，培训为现代民主国家服务的工程师，从而实现这种新方法中提出的一些想法。在这项资助下，dr。莱斯利和卡根正在关注麻省理工学院的发展及其对美国政策的影响。未来的研究将审查麻省理工学院如何执行这些项目，为这些第三世界机构提供建议。麻省理工学院的现代化版本使科学技术成为促进美国海外利益不可或缺的工具。实际上，技术援助并不总是如其推动者所期望的那样促进独立的经济发展或政治民主。尽管如此，通过重新定义经济和政治在美国外交政策中的各自作用，现代化理论代表了军事遏制的重要替代方案，并对发展中国家的政治和经济文化产生了持久的影响。特别令人感兴趣的是，现代化理论是如何在麻省理工学院国际研究中心（CENIS）由经济学家马克斯·米利根和沃尔特·罗斯托、政治学家卢西安·派伊和伊希尔·普尔以及人类学家克利福德·格尔茨开创和使用的。麻省理工学院的社会科学家从未充分认识到，他们自己对科学、经济发展和政治文化的假设——简而言之，现代化理论本身的原则——在多大程度上受到了冷战时期政治和经济优先事项的影响。麻省理工学院的工程师们并不总是意识到，他们为第三世界提供的技术教育和区域发展模式，在很大程度上受到了同样的优先事项的影响。Drs。莱斯利和卡根在这项资助下正在研究CENIS提出的关于科学、技术和发展之间关系的理论，特别关注它们对第三世界民主化的假定影响。他们还通过研究麻省理工学院参与建立技术学院的历史，来调查麻省理工学院是如何实现这些想法的。他们有其他的支持，看看这些计划是如何在韩国具体实施的。未来的研究将把这项工作扩展到麻省理工学院在印度的计划的实际实施，以及印度理工学院是如何根据麻省理工学院的蓝图和印度人的感受发展起来的。

MIT offers an unusual opportunity to study how the theory and practice of modernization shaped one another within the context of the Cold War. In the 1950's and 1960's, MIT social scientists, natural scientists and engineers formulated an important new approach toward the uses of science and technology as tools of American foreign policy. These ideas about modernization and democratization had considerable influence on the macro-level in the Kennedy administration. On the micro-level, MIT tried to carry out some of the ideas presented in this new approach by assisting a number of universities in Third World countries (India and Korea, for example) develop technological institutes for training of engineers to serve in modern democracies. Under this grant, Drs. Leslie and Kargon are concentrating on the developments at MIT and their influence on US policy. Future studies will examine how these projects were carried out by MIT in advice to these Third World institutions. MIT's version of modernization gave a new prominence to science and technology as indispensable tools for furthering American interests abroad. In practice, technical assistance did not always promote either independent economic development or political democracy, as its promoters expected. Nonetheless, by redefining the respective roles of economics and politics in American foreign policy, modernization theory represented an important alternative to military containment and had lasting implications for political and economic culture in the developing world. Of particular interest is how the theory of modernization was pioneered and used at MIT's Center for International Studies (CENIS) by economists Max Millikan and Walt Rostow, political scientists Lucian Pye and Ithiel Pool and anthropologist Clifford Geertz. MIT's social scientists never fully appreciated how much their own assumptions about science, economic development and political culture--in short, the very tenets of modernization theory itself--had been sh aped by the political and economic priorities of the Cold War. Not did MIT's engineers always recognize how much the models of technical education and regional development they were offering the Third World had been influenced by the same priorities. Drs. Leslie and Kargon are investigating under this grant the theories advanced at CENIS concerning the relationship among science, technology, and development, with particular attention to their presumed effects on democratization in the Third World. They are also investigating how MIT tried to implement these ideas by examining the history of MIT's involvement in the founding of technological institutes. They have other support to see how these plans were specifically carried out in Korea. Future studies will extend this work to the actual implementation of MIT's plans in India and how the Indian Institute of Technology actually developed as an adaptation of MIT's blueprints and Indian sensibilities.