The Three Worlds, or The Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950-1975

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950-1975
Author(s): Carl E. Pletsch

Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History , Oct., 1981, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct.,
1981), pp. 565-590
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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The Three Worlds, or the Division of
Social Scientific Labor, circa
1950-1975
CARL E. PLETSCH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
II faut avant tout dresser le catalogue le plus grand possible de cat

de toutes celles dont on peut savoir que les hommes se sont servis
y a eu et qu'il a encore bien des lunes mortes, ou pales, ou obscure
la raison.
Marcel Mauss
I INTRODUCTION: AN INSTANCE OF PRIMITIVE CLASSIFICATION
Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their

scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of mo
This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habi
thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorien
in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the n
globe into three conceptual "worlds" in response to t
particular scheme of dividing the world into three also h
quences for the allocation of social scientific labor throu
1960s, and continues to do so in some degree even in 1981
rudimentary system of classification, however, and certa
necessary one. With the possible exception of the politic
and right, the scheme of three worlds is perhaps the most
classification in our social scientific discourse. One wonders now how it could
have assumed such authority.
In a fascinating chapter in his study of America, Alexis de Tocqueville
noted that "the Diety does not regard the human race collectively," but
"surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom mankind is
composed; and he discerns in each man the resemblances that assimilate him
to all his fellows, and the differences that distinguish him from them." By
An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the meetings of the American Historical Associa-
tion, December 1979, and at the Toronto Semiotic Circle in March 1980. Special thanks to my
friends Jon Anderson, Richard Eaton, and Gertrude Lenzer for their comments on that draft.
'For a general survey and critique of Western teleological views of history, sensitive to the
fact that modernization theory is one of them, see Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).
0010-4175/81/4305-1310 $2.00 ( 1981 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
565

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566 CARL E. PLETSCH
contrast, men are forced to rely upon categories of thought which enable them
to group together superficially similar individuals, call them by a common
name, and treat them alike. These categories he calls "general ideas," and
notes that they are "no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of
the human intellect."
It seemed to de Tocqueville that democratic nations have a greater pro-

pensity for general ideas than do aristocratic ones. For when men abandoned
the "natural" categories of the prerevolutionary ancien regime, they were left
to reinvent the world, as it were, and the language for describing it, in each
new generation. In his words,
When I repudiate the traditions of rank, professions, and birth, when I escape from the
authority of example to seek out, by the single effort of my reason, the path to be
followed, I am inclined to derive the motives of my opinions from human nature itself,
and this leads me necessarily, and almost unconsciously, to adopt a great number of
very general notions.
But it is not merely the lack of natural categories of rank and birth that leads
the citizens of democratic nations to their addiction to general ideas, but also
the peculiar way in which their traffic in ideas is conducted. As early as 1830
de Tocqueville could see that capitalism would debilitate public discourse
about every serious matter. Ideas and information about the social world were
already becoming consumer commodities. The conclusion of this chapter is
worth quoting in its entirety, for I believe that de Tocqueville's is a most
prescient diagnosis of this characteristic of our thinking that infects our studies
of the socialist societies of, for example, Eastern Europe, to such a degree that
they become almost pure fantasies.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic period is the taste that all men
then have for easy success and present enjoyment. This occurs in the pursuits of the
intellect as well as in all others. Most of those who live in a time of equality are full of
an ambition equally alert and indolent: they want to obtain great success immediately,
but they would prefer to avoid great effort. These conflicting tendencies lead straight to
the search for general ideas, by the aid of which they flatter themselves that they can
delineate vast objects with little pains and draw the attention of the public without
much trouble. And I do not know that they are wrong in thinking so. For their readers
are as much averse to investigating anything to the bottom as they are; and what is
generally sought in the products of mind is easy pleasure and information without
labor. If aristocratic nations do not make sufficient use of general ideas, and frequently
treat them with inconsiderate disdain, it is true, on the other hand, that a democratic
people is always ready to carry ideas of this kind to excess and to espouse them with
injudicious warmth.
De Tocqueville did not use the word "capitalism," to be sure, but his
explanation of the power of general ideas is clearly a proto-Marxist one. He
suggests that when ideas become consumer commodities, thorough analysis is
nearly impossible, and that the simplistic analyses that are undertaken are
governed by the interests and the prejudices of the consumers thereof. The

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THE THREE WORLDS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 567
application to communism research, to take the same example, is easy to see:

Since 1945 the interests and prejudices of government and general public alike
have been to define Western civilization in simplistic opposition to the Soviet
Union and other socialist societies. And these interests have been well served
by the division of the globe into three conceptual worlds.
We have few if any ideas or social categories more general than the
taxonomic idea of three worlds that we use to divide up the globe and its
inhabitants for study in various ways by the various categories of social
scientists. Even our strange taxonomy of social sciences-the belief that there
exist such distinguishable things as politics, economics, and society, and that
there should be a separate group of social scientists to study each-has been
subordinated in the last three decades to the idea of three worlds. And few
general ideas have been espoused with such (injudicious?) warmth by the
democratic peoples of the capitalist world. Thus de Tocqueville has provided
us with a very advantageous perspective on the way in which we have or-
ganized social scientific labor.2
II THE GENESIS OF THE THREE WORLDS CONCEPT
To do justice to this particular complex of general ideas, w

in the context in which it arose, that of academic studies o
concept first appeared with the term "third world" or tier
used, of course, to refer to the "underdeveloped" countr
as we shall see, even the original use of the term and the
expressed arose from Western anxiety about the emer
world of socialist nations in Eastern Europe. The Soviet U
concern that governed Western thinking about the underd
the start.
Scholarly research on the socialist societies of Eastern Eu

in earnest until thirty years after the Bolshevik revolutio
emerge, it was as a part of a relatively new type of orga
promoted by government agencies, particularly the diplom
intelligence services. The people who visited the Soviet U
War II were diplomats, journalists, private scholars, a
socialists, none of which groups constituted, separately o
community of investigators.3 During the war itself som
done, but not published, on the military potential of the
ally, but those studies had an extremely short range and e
ends in view. Only when the Nazi threat receded and the
2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, tra

Francis Bowen, and further corrected by Phillips Bradley) (New York
1945), II, 14-18.
3 For an exhaustive account of the American discourse at least, see Peter G. Filene, Americans
and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

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568 CARL E. PLETSCH
diplomatic, and intelligence services began to fantasize their next assignments

did the Soviet Union loom as a prime candidate for academic research. The
victorious Soviet armies had occupied an enormous new area of influence at
the end of the war, and this was almost universally understood as a provoca-
tion of her Western allies. But thus provoked, the Western governments were
also confronted with their own ignorance of the Soviet Union and its style of
hegemony. The USSR was not the only candidate for research, of course. The
presumed imperial ambitions of the Soviet Union, together with the prospect
of decolonization and the transfer of responsibility for much of the former
British Empire to the United States, led to the creation of other academic
specialities. All the branches of area studies-not merely communism
research-were sketched in the minds of the leaders of the Western intelli-
gence communities at the end of World War II. And subsequently research on
the Soviet Union and other Eastern European socialist societies came to be
financed by the same government agencies and foundations that would also
support the several other branches of area studies, e.g., African Studies, Latin
American Studies, South Asian Studies, and so forth.4
Only conceptually was communism research marked off from the other area
studies. This distinction was the work of the three worlds scheme, which
emerged simultaneously with communism research, area studies, and gov-
ernment contract social science. Needless to say, all these developments
coincided with the emergence of the policy of containment and the outbreak of
the Cold War. All of these developments stand in intimate structural relation.
One could begin the analysis of this relationship at any point in the structure.
As a linguistic phenomenon, however, the genesis of the term "third world"
offers the straightest avenue into the meaning and significance of this struc-
ture.
Genetically, the three worlds scheme emerged with the appearance of the
term, perhaps first in France. In his book, The Discovery of the Third World,
Ignacy Sachs suggests that the term originated around 1955.5 Georges Balan-
dier, a French anthropologist of Africa who published extensively on prob-
lems of development in the 1950s, is said to have taken credit for its creation.6
4 The difference that the Cold War made in area studies can be calculated by comparing Robert
Hall, Area Studies with Special Reference to Their Application for Research in the Social
Sciences (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1947), and Wendell Bennett, Area
Studies in American Universities (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1951), with more
recent surveys like Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review (Philadelphia:
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973), sponsored by the Social Science
Research Council.
5 The Discovery of the Third World (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P
1976); see also Sidney Mintz, "On the Concept of a Third World," Dialectical Anthropo
1:4 (1976), 377-82.
6 A personal communication from Alessandro Pizzorno. I have not found Balandier using the
term prior to his contribution to Le "tiers monde" (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1956). A look at Balandier's Sociologie actuelle de I'Afrique noire (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1955) seems to indicate that he was using the concept without the name in 1953-54.

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Hoyt Purvis has written a fairly exhaustive discussion of the early usage of the
term in French and English and credits the French demographer Alfred Sauvy
with having invented it, using it first in an article published in L'Observateur
of 14 August 1952.7 I have found an even earlier (but apparently not seminal)
use of the term in English by Robert Redfield in a 1951 article on "World
Government as Seen by a Social Scientist."8 Of course identification of the
first use of the term is quite unimportant, but the very difficulty of assigning
the credit for inventing it illustrates something significant: A great variety of
social scientists and even journalists from several different nations, diverse
ideological perspectives, and academic disciplines suddenly found the idea of
a third world useful for organizing their thinking about the international order
that had emerged from the settlements (and unsettlements) attending the con-
clusion of World War II. And understanding the new order, they could place
the significanc of their own particular research in the grand enterprise of
understanding social phenomena in general. It seems to have been one of
those terms that arises spontaneously to fill a conceptual void.9
Alfred Sauvy's early use of the term tiers monde in L'Observateur and his
later comments on its significance are quite revealing. Sauvy was not only
particularly articulate in his usage and explication. Since his first article
makes it very clear that his own interests as a social scientist-he was a
demographer-were involved, his use of "tiers monde" also illustrates how
the new term could make sense of the activities of particular social scientists.
What makes his early use of the term still more interesting is that, even though
he was one of its inventors and found it useful for thinking, he was extremely
critical of the world situation to which he applied it.
In 1952, in an article entitled 'Three Worlds, One Planet," Sauvy wrote
that "we speak readily of two worlds in confrontation, of their possible war,
of their coexistence, etc., forgetting all too often that there is a third-the
most important and, in fact, the first world in the chronological sense." He
suggested that the third world was the very raison d'etre of the Cold War.
'What interests each of the two [developed] worlds, is to conquer the third, or
at least to have it on its side. And from that proceed all the troubles of
coexistence." Without explaining precisely why both were interested in hav-
ing the countries of the third world on their side, he suggested that the two
opposing blocs of communist and capitalist countries needed each other. For
7 Hoyt Purvis, The Third World and International Symbolism, Working Paper no. 5, Lyndon
B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin (1976), especially pp. 7-8.
8 Federalist Opinion, 1:8 (June 1951), 15.
9On the general phenomenon of terms of social scientific discourse devised since 1950, see
Ithiel de Sola Pool, 'The Language of Politics: General Trends in Content," in Propaganda and
Communication in World History, Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Hans Speier, eds. (Hon-
olulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980), III, 171-90. De Sola Pool is unfortunately interested
only in the quantity of new terminology, not the relative importance of the different terms, and in
their frequency of use, not their meaning or significance.

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570 CARL E. PLETSCH
all their ideological differences, they had a great deal in com

the same interest in military power and only minimal inter
problems of the third world.
Preparation for war being the first concern (souci n 1) [of the gover
West], secondary cares such as the hunger of the world may only occ
to the degree sufficient to avoid an explosion, or, more precisely, to
ing the first objective.
Extremely critical of the cynicism he ascribed to the Cold Wa

the Soviet bloc and the capitalist democracies,10 Sauvy expla
were not only preventing anything serious from being done
lems of the third world, but they had even arrested the gradual
of European and American societies. The monies and energie
fense obviously could not be used for schools or other socia
the American leaders of the Western camp-neophytes at
mystic believers in free enterprise for its own sake, he call
only very modest hopes.
Sauvy proposed that we adopt the point of view of the cap
troupe) of the third world who could see two forward positio
out ahead of them-communist and democratic capitalist. Wh
they follow? Sauvy assumed, we may note, that the leaders of
had to choose to follow one of the two. They had to moderniz
two modes. As a demographer he was painfully aware that t
begun to modernize in a limited but disastrous sense. He wr
countries have our mortality rates of 1914 and our birth ra
century." The underdeveloped countries of the third world ha
path of modernization determined by the most easily acquir
moder civilization. Insecticides and basic medicines were che
a mere 68 francs per person, Sauvy calculated, to alter p
demographic balance in the world and create indescribab
hunger. The remedies would be far dearer, but neither the fir
world had much more than 68 francs per person to spare to r
problems of the third world, locked as they were in a milit
consumed all their resources. Under these circumstances, Sa
foreboding, "the underdeveloped countries of the feudal type
more easily to communist regimes than to democratic capit
What would be the outcome? Sauvy was somewhat pessimi
third world demographer and latter-day scion of the dismal
terms of his foreboding are illuminating. The pressure of p
10 However one refers to the differences between what might also

"west," one betrays one's biases and assumptions. When writing in my own
terms "the Soviet bloc" and "the capitalist democracies" not only for their g
and direct referential value, but also because they reveal my assumptions im

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THE THREE WORLDS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 57I
building, he wrote, to the point where the vacationers on the C

could fairly hear the cries of misery emanating from the shor
Africa. There existed one "sovereign remedy" for the situa
appears-Sauvy is not explicit on this-that he thought the prepa
war being made in East and West would find their expression in
in the third world. This might suit the leaders of the first two wor
they could wage their wars on foreign terrain and reduce the pop
third world simultaneously. This grisly vision was, to a degree, p
Sauvy phrased his longer-range forecast in the terms of an earli
optimistic discussion of the clash of interests of three worl
Sieyes's tract, What is the Third Estate?11 Perhaps, Sauvy muse
world would awaken to a sense of human solidarity and "not re
ble to the slow and irresistible thrust, humble and ferocious, [i
world] towards life. Because that third world, ignored, exploite
like the Third Estate, it too wants to be something."
Sauvy's vision was necessarily idiosyncratic in some ways.
scientists who came to use the term tiers monde were much
partisans of that part of the world's population, although many s
interest in the fundamental unity of the globe. And few who w
cialists were so disaffected from the policy of containment and
and economic attempts to counter Soviet expansionism; most felt th
else would have been appeasement. But Sauvy was representative in his
assumption that the countries of the third world must inevitably modernize. It
is now fashionable to ridicule modernization theory,12 but in the 1950s and
1960s nearly everyone was affected by it. And if the truth were known, it
would be clear that very few social scientists have found real alternatives to
modernization theory even now. As we shall see, modernization theory is
almost inextricable from the idea of three worlds. Sauvy was also representa-
tive of bourgeois social scientists in his reluctance to analyze the motives and
sources of the exploitation of the third world by the modem nations of the first
and second worlds. In his outrage and his hope that moral sympathy with third
world nations would persuade the capitalist nations of the first world to divert
from their defense budgets some funds for feeding the peoples of the third
" Joseph Emmanuel Siey&s, Qu'est-ce que le tiers etat? (Paris: n.p., 1789), 3: "What is the
Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it
ask? To become something." Sauvy clearly thought that one might substitute Third World for
Third Estate in these powerful sentences.
12 This has become fashionable only since the publication of Dean Tipps's "Modernization
Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective," Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 15:2 (1973), 199-226. It must be remembered, however, that even though
ridiculing modernization theory has been popular for several years now, certainly no alternative
has replaced it, and its old popularizers have not abandoned it either. In view of the fact that no
generally acceptable alternative has emerged, the burgeoning literature attacking modernization
theory poses itself as an interesting subject of research in its own right. In this paper, unfortu-
nately, I have not room even to list the relevant authors, much less analyze the genre.

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572 CARL E. PLETSCH
world, he was naively reminiscent of J. A. Hobson.'3 And finally, in h

to infuse his own field of demography with new urgency and impo
Sauvy was also representative of countless Western social scientists w
the three worlds concept to sell their services to precisely those W
governments pursuing policies of containment.
I emphatically do not mean to suggest that Sauvy or others like h
out. In later works on population, Sauvy continued to maintain that t
War mentality frustrated every solution to the problem of overpopu
the third world.'4 He believed that solutions could be discovered
scientific investigation conducted by relatively detached observers lik
self. But he also believed that the capitalist nations of the first wor
more likely to promote such scientific solutions than were the nation
Soviet bloc. With these convictions Sauvy's actions were perfectly con
Sauvy and others of like mind continued to believe that their constitu
the population of the third world and that their professional work
scientists would ultimately benefit that world. The charge that suc
Sauvy, Balandier, and Redfield were co-opted by the first world gove
is simply not plausible. We must rather ask ourselves how the very th
three worlds on one planet constrained even those who were opponen
Cold War or partisans of the third world to do work that contributed
the strategies of containment and to the exploitation of the third wo
To answer this question we must go beyond individual investigato
Alfred Sauvy, and even beyond the realm of international realpolit
tainment, and the Cold War. The way in which the concept of thre
helps us organize our thinking about the competition between the c
and communist blocs is self-evident. And I hope that I have suggest
Sauvy located his own professional activity in the interstices of this
This takes us but a short way, however. Sauvy was not simply emplo
cynical and exploitative government to study the population of the
world-he tried to make himself a spokesman for the third world's pr
In that respect he was typical of many of the social scientists who
themselves to the study of the societies of the third world. How do
general paradoxes arise? This is not a question that can be answ
examining individual social scientists, no matter how many or how
they may be. The focus must rather be on how the three worlds schem
13 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, a Study (London: James Nisbet, 1902). Hobson's repu

imperialism as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century rested on his belief that t
was economically unprofitable, and a conviction that some other and principally ethica
tion in the non-European world was necessary.
14 See the contributions of Sauvy in Institut national d'etudes demographiques,
Monde," sous-dcveloppment et developpement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Fra
the 1961 edition of the same work with new introduction by Sauvy; and his books De
Mao Tse-Toung (Paris: Deno, 1958) and Theorie generale de la population (Paris
Universitaires de France, 1966).

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to organize the work of the whole community of Western social scient

to relate the work of each to that of every other.
III THE DEEP-STRUCTURE OF THE THREE WORLDS CONCEPT
Ultimately we want to be able to describe a relationship

rather than genetic, and one which exists among social sci
among the three worlds themselves. In order to get at that
ship, however, we must take still another preliminary tac
assumptions lying beneath the surface of the conceptual di
three worlds.
On the surface, as we have seen, the division of the planet into three worlds
is merely a description of the international rivalry between the allied capitalist
nations on the one hand, and the Soviet bloc on the other. On this level, the
third world is no more than a residual category of unaligned objects of the
competing imperialistic policies of the first two worlds. Of course it does
serve to group together conceptually those nations and societies that could not
be included in either the emerging Soviet bloc or the Western European/
American bloc of capitalist nations bound together by NATO and the various
mutual economic assistance pacts beginning with the Marshall Plan. Then too
the Bandung conference and the rhetoric used there gave a certain plausibility
to the idea that the societies falling outside of the two opposed blocs of
capitalist and socialist nations had some important things in common. The
American policy of containment drew the lines of demarcation even more
clearly. But all of this common knowledge only illuminates the relatively
superficial phenomenon of the emergence of a vague identity for the un-
aligned nations.15 It says nothing about the genuinely metaphysical assump-
tions underlying that identity and the three worlds idea generally.
One barely has to look beneath this surface of supposed realpolitik, how-
ever, to see that the division of the planet into three worlds is based on a pair
of very abstract and hardly precise binary distinctions. First the world has
been divided into its "traditional" and "modem" parts. Then the modem
portion has been subdivided into its "communist" (or "socialist") and
"free" parts. These four terms underlying the idea of three worlds may be
thought of as an extremely general social semantics.16 They are terms which
1' This is perhaps more illustrative of the fact that the peoples of the third world are dependent
upon the first world even for the categories in which they organize to defend themselves from
exploitation than it is significant of any truth-value that the concept of the third world might
possess. For an interesting case study (in brief) of such conceptual dependence, see Edward W.
Said, "Islam through Western Eyes," The Nation (26 April 1980), 488-92.
16 This pair of binary distinctions that yields three social categories is not unlike the pair of
distinctions underlying the idea of three estates common in European social discourse until the
eighteenth century. By dividing the world into sacred and profane and noble and common, one
can derive the first estate of the clergy (sacred), the second estate of the nobility (profane but
noble), and the residual third estate of the commoners. This obviously reinforces the relevance of

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574 CARL E. PLETSCH
derive their meanings from their mutual opposition rather than

inherent relationship to the things described. They have very com
tations and we do not always or even usually use these terms in
course. The traditional world is more often the third world or the underde-
veloped world, for example. But making explicit the concept of tradition that
underlies these other terms permits us to tease out all the other implications
contained in the idea of the third world and locate them in a structural relation-
ship with the implications of the other worlds. The third world is the world of
tradition, culture, religion, irrationality, underdevelopment, overpopulation,
political chaos, and so on. The second world is modem, technologically
sophisticated, rational to a degree, but authoritarian (or totalitarian) and re-
pressive, and ultimately inefficient and impoverished by contamination with
ideological preconceptions and burdened with an ideologically motivated so-
cialist elite. The first world is purely modem, a haven of science and utilita-
rian decision making, technological, efficient, democratic, free-in short, a
natural17 society unfettered by religion or ideology.
Objections of many sorts can be made to these underlying distinctions that
act as semantic oppositions (and objections have been made in the critiques of
modernization theory). But the first thing we should note is the astonishing
simple-mindedness of the scheme. As Alfred Sauvy himself noted in respect
to the term "underdevelopment,"
People have spoken, at various times, of barbarians, infidels, savages, natives, col-
oured men, etc., and less pejoratively, of countries with different cultures. ... In
Sauvy's association of the third world with the third estate. On the social vocabulary of the ancien
regime in terms of estates, see William H. Sewell, Jr. "Etat, Corps, and Ordre: Some Notes on
the Social Vocabulary of the French Old Regime," Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschriftifuer Hans
Rosenberg (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, 1974).
It is striking that Western culture is pervaded by such sets of three social categories based on
pairs of binary distinctions. The French anthropologist Georges Dumezil has spent nearly his
entire career studying this substratum of indo-european categorization. See especially his short
book, L'Ideologie tri-partite des indo-europeens (Brussels: Latomus, 1958).
17 The word "natural" is problematic in any comparative discussion of societies, and I do not
introduce it without trepidation. It is especially problematic here, since there is another sense of
the word precisely opposite the one which I invoke here and will characterize in greater detail
further on in the paper. What I am suggesting with the use of the word here is that the social
scientists whose work is governed by the three worlds concept assume that the first world of
modern capitalist democracies is natural in the sense of being unconstrained and self-regulating.
This is primarily an eighteenth century use of the word that we are likely to remember best in
relation to Adam Smith and discussions of free market economics; it was, however, used com-
monly by nearly all the Enlightenment critics of eighteenth century society. We seldom use the
term in this sense now, I think, largely because its normative dimension gradually became
superfluous after the industrial revolution and the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth
century. It is, however, still implicit in our thinking about the first world. It is the very basis of
whatever degree of scientificity we accord the social sciences. When I use the word "natural"
here then, I emphatically do not mean it in the sense of simple, primitive, or close to nature as
some have done in reference to exotic societies ever since Montaigne's essay, "On Cannibals."

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many ways the expression "underdeveloped" is even more cruel than its
with its scientific pretention and its implication of superiority.
But, he also noted, he had to use it because it was the current e

The same thing was true, oddly enough, of the expression "third
he invented or helped invent: Since it expressed the current preju
natives of Western civilization, it had to be invented and used. But what
preposterous simplification is entailed. Not even the Christian missionaries of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so naive as to lump together the
masters of the Inca empire and the tribes of hunters and gatherers. The distinc-
tion between traditional and moder that has generated the third world is
hardly more sophisticated than the nineteenth century distinction between the
civilized and uncivilized worlds, or the Chinese view of themselves as oc-
cupying the "middle kingdom."
How are we to explain the sudden ubiquity of this terminology? Substitu-
tions like that of the word "traditional" for "primitive" were part of a
general Western tendency to clean up the language of government, jour-
nalism, and social science in reference to the rest of the world. Terms evoking
ethnocentrism, condescension, imperialism, and aggression were systemati-
cally replaced by apparently neutral and scientific terms-euphemisms. Not
only did former colonies become "developing nations" and primitive tribes
become "traditional peoples," the War and Navy Departments of the United
States Government were transformed into the "Defense" Department. This
was also the time when "the end of ideology" was announced by Daniel
Bell.'9 But the simplicity of the categories-as distinguished from the
euphemistic character of the new terminology-evinces the propensity for
general ideas noted by de Tocqueville. It would have been simply impossible
to explain the need for foreign aid and vast military expenditures in a time of
peace with categories any more differentiated than those marshalled under the
three worlds umbrella.
In the general reaction against the oversimplifications involved in

categories such as "traditional culture" and "third world," it has seldom
been noted that the delineation of the "second world" is even less clear. In
fact, liberal critics of modernization theory since Dean C. Tipps's article of
1973, and even Marxist critics of development theory from Andre Gunder
Frank to John C. Taylor assume the coherence of the concept of a second
world while systematically attacking that of a third world.20 Of course the
18 Alfred Sauvy, Fertility and Survival (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 7-8.
19 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960).
20 Andre Gunder Frank's "The Development of Underdevelopment," Monthly Review 18:4
(1966), 17-31, was one of the first Marxist critiques of modernization theory; John C. Taylor,
From Modernization to Modes of Production (New York: Macmillan, 1979), esp. 3-98, is
perhaps the most recent and extended critique.
It may be of passing interest that right-wing thinking about the third world has been more

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576 CARL E. PLETSCH
Sino-Soviet rift has been commented upon ad infinitum, but even with the
People's Republic of China transferred to the third world or to a world of its
own, the disparity in degree of modernity between such countries as the
German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia on the one hand, and Bul-
garia and large parts of the Soviet Union on the other, is immense. What is
more interesting, there is no consensus about the locus and meaning of the
ideological impediment to rationality there: Is it a property of the whole
population or merely of an elite? Is it an integral part of the system or merely a
propagandistic excuse for the hegemony of a cynical minority interested only
in power? It is of course altogether appropriate that the term "second world"
should be the least used of the three, and that of the three worlds it should be
the least clearly defined. The socialist world is, after all, the dangerous and
inscrutible enemy that motivated the very invention of the three worlds con-
cept. It is the subtext and raison d'etre of the third world. And vis-a-vis the
first world, it is the "other" in the most profound sense. It is, in short, one of
those "lunes mortes, ou pales, ou obscures, au firmament de la raison. "
The governing distinctions underlying the three worlds scheme-
traditional/modern and ideological/free-not only allocate the most diverse
societies and cultures to the same categories, they also imply a pseudo-
chronological or historical relationship among the categories themselves. The
traditional societies are all destined to become modem ones, according to this
scheme, somehow and to some degree. Of course this judgment is not thoroughly
articulated in the governing distinctions themselves. Some social scientists
think modernizing is good, others think it bad; some think it will be very
difficult to bring the underdeveloped societies of the third world into the
modern world; still others think we are simply obliged by our competition
with the Soviet bloc to assist these societies in modernizing. But all social
scientists agree that there is a historical trajectory of development that leads
from tradition to modernity. Thus we see that modernization theory is not
merely some adventitious appendage of the idea of three worlds, it is con-
stituent to the structural relationship among the underlying semantic terms.
We see also that the three worlds concept is thoroughly teleological, and not
much different from earlier speculative philosophies of history.
There are all sorts of problems with this faith in modernization, but perhaps
critical of this notion, but for obviously venal motives. See, for example, Max Beloff, 'The
Third World and the Conflict of Ideologies," in The Third World: Premises of U.S. Policy, W.
Scott Thompson, ed. (San Francisco: The Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1978), 12-13:
The Third World can be regarded as simply a residue: what is left when one has subtracted from the world as
a whole the industrialized West-mostly living under a system of capitalist or mixed economies-and the
communist empires of Russia, China, and their satellites. But that residue contains countries of very different
degrees of economic advancement and with a vast number of different types of social and governmental
organization. One could, therefore, argue that the phrase "the Third World" itself is a kind of abbreviated
ideology. Those who use it in the Third World do so to justify claims for assistance in moving towards a higher
degree of economic organization and greater material wealth; those who use it in the West implicitly concede
these claims.

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the most basic is that modernity is as indefinable as tradition. The thr

scheme locates the end of history in societies that are very much in f
arrogance of modernization theorists, locating the end of history in t
problematic societies, is particularly reminiscent of Hegel and his phi
of history.
The pseudohistorical relationship of the first and second worlds implied in
these governing distinctions is even more complex and obscure, but is worthy
of notice for just that reason. As noted earlier, the socialist world is taken to
be modern, but contaminated with an admixture of ideology that prevents it
from being altogether efficient or natural. The free world, on the other hand,
is taken to be natural in that things are presumed to follow their own
course-guided by invisible hands, as it were-without ideological prescrip-
tion or management. Therefore, since the free world is presumed to be more
natural, it appears to be implied in the governing distinctions that the socialist
world should slowly but surely approximate the free world. In fact, most
Western social scientists who have studied the socialist world seem to assume
this. On the other hand, many students of the third world seem to believe that
the socialist world, with its appeal to social justice, has some advantage in the
competition for influence in the third world. This view in turn suggests that
the path of modernization leads from tradition through an ideological stage
into truly modern and utilitarian conditions. But since this is precisely what is
at issue in the realpolitikal competition for influence in the third world-
whether third world nations will follow a capitalist or a socialist path of
development-it is appropriate that this should be the most ambiguous part of
the picture implied in the assumptions underlying the concept of the three
worlds.
We have delved deeply enough to appreciate how this very primitive

scheme of classification can guide the efforts of very disparate
investigators-how cold warriors and partisans of the third world can both
work within the three worlds concept, in other words. But we must note one
more peculiarity of the assumptions underlying this scheme before going on to
consider the allocation of social scientific labor among the three worlds. The
governing distinctions-traditional/modern and ideological/free-themselves
work on two levels. On the one hand, they serve to discriminate among
degrees of economic and technological development. And on the other hand,
they discriminate among kinds of mentality. That is to say, the distinctions are
infected with the recurring opposition of spirit and matter, nature and culture,
real and ideal, infrastructural and superstructural. The traditional, for example,
is marked both by a presumed absence of technology and the presence of a
nonscientific mentality, religion, or culture. The free world, remarkably, is
characterized by a science and technology supposedly unfettered by any men-
tality at all! The ideological world is marked by the combined presence of
advanced technology and a restrictive mentality. Several anomalies appear

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578 CARL E. PLETSCH
Population of the World
The Modern World The Third World

Technologically advanced, but Underdeveloped economically and
ideologically ambiguous. technologically, with traditional
mentality obscuring access to
science and utilitarian thinking.
The First World The Second World

Technologically advanced, Technologically advanced, but
free of ideological impediments burdened with an ideological elite
to utilitarian thinking, and thus blocking free access to science
natural. and utilitarian thinking.
Figure T Th Three Worlds as Social Categories
here-the view that the population of

mentality is as odd as the thought that t
ogy. But we have now dredged up enoug
three worlds scheme is based to be able
which the scheme has dictated the appo
The diagram in Figure 1 summarizes the
the three worlds. (My intention in the
definitive critique or deconstruction of
how it works.)
IV THE APPORTIONMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC LABOR AMONG
THE THREE WORLDS
Having examined the genesis and structure of the th

should now be relatively easy to appreciate how we in
should study the different worlds on our planet and h
shall try to explicate how each of four social scien
nomics, sociology, and political science-appropriates a
phenomena of the three worlds for study. This ex
outlining an ideal type of each of the four sciences, a
statistical study of the activities of the members of t
associations. I shall, in other words, ignore multifario
transgress the bounds of my ideal types and most of the
traditional practices and conceptions, no matter how
centrate rather on the codes and methodological norm
My argument must hinge, therefore, upon the gener
explication and the normative statements of leading
disciplines.
One preliminary question, however. Is there really an
of social scientific labor? At first glance it may ap

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thropologists are relegated to a single domain-the third world. A closer

reveals that although the rest of the labor may be divided in subtler fashio
is nonetheless clearly divided. But since the anthropologists are the stud
of the "other" in its purest form, at least in the assumption of social scien
discourse, it will reward us to pay particular attention to them.
First let us see what can be derived from the distinctions among scien
ideology, and culture. Western social scientists have reserved the concep
culture for the mentalities of traditional societies in their pristine states.
have designated the socialist societies of the second world the province o
ideology. And they have long assumed-not unanimously, to be sure-t
the modern West is the natural haven of science and utilitarian thinking
Consistent with this scheme, one clan of social scientists is set apart to st
the pristine societies of the third world-anthropologists. Other cl
economists, sociologists, and political scientists-study the third world on
insofar as the process of modernization has already begun. The true provi
of these latter social sciences is the modern world, especially the nat
societies of the West. But again, subclans of each of these sciences of
modern world are specially outfitted to make forays into the ideological
gions of the second world. Much as their fellow economists, sociologists,
political scientists who study the process of modernization in the third wo
these students of the second world are engaged in area studies. What dis
guishes their area is the danger associated with ideology, as opposed to t
now innocent otherness of traditional cultures. But the larger contrast is
tween all of these area specialists, whether of the second or third world,
the disciplinary generalists who study the natural societies of the first world
This may seem a drastic oversimplification in its own right, but I sub
that three considerations seem to justify viewing the division of social sci
tific labor in this admittedly schematic way. First, the exceptions are of
sort that confirm rules. Second, viewing matters in this way makes sen
many of the peculiar practices and attitudes of Western social scientists. A
third, social scientists themselves, at least those of my acquaintance who
served as native informants for this study recognize themselves in the sch
Consider the anthropologists. They are the only social scientists of who
genuine rite of initiation is required. They all do field work in some exo
context as a kind of precondition to calling themselves anthropologists.
work is done in as strange or as different a society as possible; and it is d
alone, or as nearly alone as possible, so that prospective anthropologists
have occasion to divest themselves of preconceptions as thoroughly as po
ble and enter fully into the life of the exotic subjects of the research. When
21 On area specialists and disciplinary generalists, see Lambert, Language and Area St
Review; and James N. Rosenau, International Studies and the Social Sciences (Beverly Hi
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1973), sponsored by the International Studies Association.

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580 CARL E. PLETSCH
anthropologist returns from the field, it is to write an ethnography. The

enthnography is an elaborate case study in which all the peculiarities of the
exotic society in question are explored and understood as parts of a system or
structure. The aim of the ethnography is to make sense (to Westerners) of a
superficially random set of instances of otherness.Ethnographies are of course
frequently written on societies chosen for their apparent capacity to decide a
theoretical issue or illustrate a preconception, but in anthropology, theory has
traditionally been secondary to the exquisite description of otherness. Thus
anthropology is a discipline that accumulates its knowledge in case studies
rather than in theoretical propositions or their elaborations. Thus anthropology
is the idiographic science par excellence, and the best anthropologists have
always been proud of the fact. In all of these ways anthropology is unique
among the social sciences, at least in its ideal typical formulation. And all of
these idiosyncracies of anthropology make sense in view of the fact that
anthropology is the science of culture, the science of the third world in its
pristine state, the science of a vast array of societies with idiosyncratic men-
talities.
There are of course exceptions-anthropologists who study the first world,

for example, but they go self-consciously against the grain and write in an
ironic mode. And what is more interesting, they are dedicated to the proposi-
tion that we, the natives of the first world, have a culture too, and one of
which we are relatively unaware, perhaps even an ideology that works best
when we are unaware of it.22
In turn, consider the other, the nomothetic, end of the social scientific
spectrum. The disciplinary generalists in economics, sociology, and political
science are thought capable of discovering natural laws of human behavior
because the phenomena they observe in the first world are natural, i.e.,
unconstrained by ideology or culture. In the economic arena, each individual
is free to maximize his or her own satisfactions in dealing with others. And
people are presumed to do this without ideological direction or cultural pro-
gramming. The invisible hand of Adam Smith has, it is well known, cast a
long shadow over the economics profession. There is considerable doubt
whether very many people, even in the modern West, behave in the ideal
typical fashion of "economic man." But the science of economics, and
particularly the practice of its generalists who study the first world, is based
upon a model of society constituted of autonomous individuals, each
motivated by the same underlying characteristic, namely selfishness. This
motivation is conceived to be natural, for the individuals in question do not
have to be taught to seek their own interests, nor do they need an ideology to
urge them on, or a culture to tell them what their interests are. And the people
22 See, for example, Francis L. K. Hsu, "The Cultural Problem of the Anthropologist," The
American Anthropologist, 81:3 (1979), 517-32.

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THE THREE WORLDS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 58I
who follow their natural inclinations are most predictable in the

Their activities, in other words, lend themselves admirably to the
of general laws of human behavior.
Likewise in sociology and political science, where the premises
made as explicit as they are in economics, individuals are pres
their own interests and pursue them freely. The only differ
economists are interested in the individual's pursuit of weal
sociologists and political scientists are interested in the pursuit of
power. Occasionally the analogy with economics and the rational
self-interest is made systematically explicit as, for example,
Downs's Economic Theory of Democracy.23 It is presumed tha
form of government would be less rational because less directly
the individual self-interests of all the individuals in the society,
economy not a free market is less rational in economics. And les
systems are by definition less easy to predict and therefore poore
formulating general laws.
Thus whatever one studies in the first world-wealth, status, or
unconstrained self-interest is the governing principle that guarant
sibility of formulating general laws of human behavior. These la
course not always perfectly descriptive of actual behavior, for even
world some people are supposed to be deluded with ideological an
prejudices that make them behave unnaturally, i.e., not in their
interests. But these are individual deviants who can be corrected f
the appropriate statistical methods. It is in the second and third
these laws apply only very imperfectly, and where they can be us
they have been adapted to the particular context by someone with
of particularistic knowledge of that context. In a traditional kin
example, where a single individual or class might conceivably mak
economic decisions of a whole society, much in the manner of A
presumptuous statesmen,24 one would have to know a great deal
king's psychology as well as about the cultural code defining the
Only within these parameters could an economist apply the natu
economics. But in the first world the practice of economics, soci
political science is supposed to correspond closely with our best id
science should be. As a consequence, disciplinary generalists in th
social sciences have a strong sense of their own superior ability to
23 (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).

24 The Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan, ed. (1904; rpt. Chicago: Universi
Press, 1976), I, 478. "The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in
they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most
attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no sin
to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in
man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."

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582 CARL E. PLETSCH
the world in comparison with the idiographic anthropologist or the area

studies specialist.
Area studies are neither idiographic like anthropology in the third world nor
nomothetic like the social sciences practiced in the first world. They are a
compromise, adaptations of first world social science to particularistic second
and third world context. Area studies specialists require knowledge of lan-
guages, history, customs, and even biographies of individuals, as well as at
least a rudimentary competence in one of the social scientific disciplines. The
area studies specialist must thus be a polymath. Disciplinary generalists espe-
cially have expressed doubts about whether the area studies specialist, if he
learns all the particularistic things he needs to know about his area, can really
stay current and competent in his discipline. This has given rise not only to a
debate over the relative competencies of disciplinary generalists and area
studies specialists, but also to a struggle for funds between the two camps.
The contest for funds is most crucial in area studies, of course, since these are
the academic specialities created during the Cold War to supply governments
with advice about policy making. There is a great deal of soft money to win or
lose.25 During the 1950s and 1960s the balance seemed to favor the area
specialists, but since the early 1970s it appears to have shifted in the direction
of the disciplinary generalists.26 It is interesting that this shift has been
roughly contemporaneous with detente and the growing governmental apathy
regarding social scientific defense research, as well as with the increasing
gradual eclipse of modernization theory and the three worlds concept.
The proponents of disciplinary generalism seem to have a good case, argu-
ing (1) that area studies specialists necessarily devote time to particularistic
learning that can only detract from time spent in the theory of their home
disciplines, and (2) that the information learned in area studies is not suitable
to the formation or modification of general laws, since the societies in ques-
tion are not natural. (The second argument is made less frequently, but it
remains implicit in the structure of the three worlds notion and in the division
of labor I am seeking to explicate). One answer to these criticisms suggests
that it is unfortunate to draw too firm a line between disciplinary generalists
and area studies specialists. In accusing James Rosenau of having made this
distinction too rigidly, Richard Lambert blames him for describing the disci-
plinary generalists as having
25 The competition for funds raises an interesting set of questions about the motives for doing
area studies. The core of the problem is this: whereas both anthropologists and disciplinary
generalists in economics, sociology, and political science have their motives clearly defined in
their professional associations-scientific motives-the area studies specialists are defined
largely by the sale of their research to governments. Furthermore, the underlying distinctions
governing the division of the globe into three suggests that the area studies people may have
perverse motives; otherwise they would not be studying unnatural societies.
26 Rosenau, International Studies, 30-33; and Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review,
1-6.

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superior theoretical and methodological-especially quantitative skills. Implicit in this

formulation is a negative judgment of the worthwhileness of the area-oriented in-
tellectual enterprises. One problem is that teaching, writing, and research in area
studies call for a level of pure description that Western-based scholars, having grown
up in the culture they study, can take for granted. Another is that the criteria usually
come from those disciplines and segments of disciplines which are most behavioral,
quantitative, ahistorical, and acultural, while the largest proportion of area specialists
are in history, anthropology, language and literature, and the particularistic segments
of political science. Aside from these factors, however, it is difficult to understand
why scholars become less "disciplinary" when they add a competence with respect to
another area of the world and concentrate their research and teaching there.27
Interestingly, it falls here to the area studies specialist to point out that social
scientists who study the first world have and depend upon particularistic
knowledge of their own societies. This suggests that the idea of nomothetic
social science is problematic even in the first world. Of course it is not my
intention to settle this debate, or even to express an opinion in it. My interest
here is simply to point out that this disagreement is an artifact of the three
worlds system and of the way in which we allocate social scientific labor. (I
plan to describe in another paper the consequences that the fissure in our
thinking about the social sciences has had in studies of the socialist world.)
The difficulty derives ultimately from the fact that the nomothetic social
sciences are not themselves outfitted to take systematic account of mentalities
of any kind. This is congruent with the image of the first world as a world of
technology and utilitarian thinking. The conflicting claims to authority of the
area specialists and disciplinary generalists were not a problem in studies of
exotic societies so long as the nomothetic social sciences had not yet de-
veloped (intellectual) hegemonic pretentions, nor was the conflict clearly
statable until these sciences began to be employed as adjuncts of the world
hegemonic pretentions of the United States and her allies. As long as the
exotic world was the object of merely ethnographic research, and as long as
imperialism was a relatively simple matter of European domination, area
studies did not exist, and the debate between disciplinary generalists and, say,
orientalists was unthinkable. Even such knowledge as Orientalism, which was
certainly implicated in British and French imperialism, had a more generally
cultural and less assertively nomothetic character until about 1945. In his
book, Orientalism, Edward Said notes the change:
Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some
branch of the Orient, or some aspect of its life, as a specialist in "area studies," we
have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was
considered to be a generalist (with a great deal of specific knowledge, of course) who
had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational
statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about
Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood (and would
27 Lambert, Language and Area Studies, 3.

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584 CARL E. PLETSCH
understand himself) as also making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby
summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also
confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was
commonly believed that the whole Orient hung together in some profoundly organic
way, it made perfectly good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard
the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of
such things as the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.28
As much as I approve of Said's general argument, it seems to me that espe-

cially in his consideration of this last phase of Orientalism (i.e., since World
War II) he has neglected the transforming role of modernization theory and
the three worlds concept. Modernization theory (and the three worlds scheme)
has introduced the fragmentation of wealth, status, and power (and the corre-
sponding social sciences) into Orientalism, displaced the older cultural em-
phasis, and made possible the encroachment of economists, political scien-
tists, and sociologists with their different theoretical preoccupations. In spite
of its long tradition as esoteric knowledge, Orientalism has thus become one
of a number of area studies specialties and enjoys all of the ambiguities of the
genre, the most important being its use as a battlefield for area experts and
disciplinary generalists.
In the documents of the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Founda-
tion, and other agencies, area studies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
are differentiated from other branches of area studies like Middle Eastern
studies (the heir of Orientalism) only by geography. In the broad context, t

is not very misleading, since most of the scholarly work done on Eastern
Europe under this rubric is in fact done by historians, literary schola
musicologists, etc.-humanists in short-working primarily on prerevo
lutionary topics. But for the modern branch of Eastern European area stud
that interests us here, there is an important distinction to be made. Com
munism research, as it is often called, is focused exclusively upon question
about the Soviet Union from 1917 on and about the rest of Eastern Europ
since 1945. What distinguishes communism research from other sorts of ar
studies lies beneath the idea of a second world-a modem (i.e., technolo
cal) but ideological region. We should be prepared to pay particular attent
to the way in which social scientific labor is and has been allocated to this
second world, since it was the sudden appearance of the Soviet bloc in
Western strategic calculations that gave rise to the three worlds schem
modernization theory, and the systematic division of social scientific labo
have been describing. Although much more critical energy has been devot
to attacking modernization theory and developmental questions related to t
third world, the kind of social scientific work that has been generated on t
second world is the real acid test of the three worlds scheme and the division
of labor that it has dictated.
28 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 255.

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The degree to which our view of Eastern Europe is crucial is pe

apparent in the obviously pragmatic arena of foreign policy
academic research. In the only ambitious critique of Soviet studi
to date, Jerry F. Hough put it this way:
Despite the stated desire of each new administration in the United States
its attention upon Western Europe, Japan, and the Third World, compet
Soviet Union always becomes the fulcrum of foreign policy....29
In academic research the relationship is much less clear than it is

of realpolitik where every practical step in the third world involv
tion of the interests of the Soviet Union. In academic research the existence of
the Soviet bloc is conceptually primary, whereas in foreign policy the Soviet
Union is simply the first and most powerful strategic opponent. But in both
foreign policy formation and academic research, the Soviet bloc is the raison
d'etre of the three worlds scheme. And for us generally, the Soviet bloc is the
most significant "other."
The modernity and technological sophistication (especially military) of the
second world permit us to believe that this area is less foreign to us than it may
actually be. In the three worlds discourse, quite obviously, the second world
of the Soviet bloc is taken to be less foreign than the third. This has led to the
exclusive assignment of social scientists of the modern world to the study of
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union-economists, political scientists, and
sociologists rather than anthropologists. But precisely this presumed
modernity, when combined with the hostile ideology that serves to dif-
ferentiate the second world from the first, makes those societies dangerous
and lends particular urgency to our efforts to understand them.
That urgency is understandable, I think, in view of the suddenness with
which the Soviet Union seemed to assert itself in Europe after the war. And
the efforts to comprehend the thinking of the "enemy"'-not merely in terms
of monies invested in communism research, but of energies invested in recon-
ceptualizing the world-were a natural response to the challenge. But that fact
should not obscure the possibility that all this hasty effort and immediacy were
not necessarily well calculated to yield objective, reliable, or even interesting
knowledge. In fact, it is arguable that the entire movement of reconceptualiza-
tion and the financing of social scientific research that commenced with the
Cold War has yielded a much more differentiated understanding of both the
first and third worlds than of the second. Certainly the idea of a moder but
ideological world has led us to ignore or suppress the genuine foreignness of
Eastern Europe.30
29 Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1977), vii.
30 I shall take the sad state of Soviet and Eastern European studies as a given. I have no
ambition to demonstrate or analyze particular weaknesses of the field in this paper-which is
devoted to a more general problem-although I would like to do so in the future. I do not

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586 CARL E. PLETSCH
The deficiencies of social scientific research on the Soviet bloc countries

may ultimately prove to have been the most serious consequence of the
primitive system of classification here described. Even modernization
theory-with all its inherent failings-was applied in less interesting ways in
communism research than in studies of the third world. Thus it is appropriate
that the first systematic critique of communism research by an established
(and non-Marxist) scholar should have appeared several years after the first
critiques of modernization theory had become common knowledge. This was
Hough's The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory. Equally appropriate
and more revealing is the fact that Hough, as a Soviet scholar, was in a better
position to assess the sources of the biases of his field than the critics of
modernization theory were. In his introduction he noted that communist
studies had "been confined to a ghetto within the social sciences." In part, he
notes, this has been the fault of the practitioners of Soviet studies. Either
descendants of exiles or themselves exiles of the Soviet regime, or persons
interested in the Soviet Union as the most important enemy of the United
States, most Soviet scholars "have generally been happy to be trained as area
specialists, and their concern with social science theory has tended to be
limited to those modernization theories that might illuminate the course of
evolution of Soviet society." But more important, Hough also notes that
while the disciplinary generalists in the social sciences have frequently con-
demned the area studies approach and demanded that communism research be
integrated into mainline social science, these same scholars have failed to
incorporate socialist societies in their comparative research or theoretical ar-
gumentation.
In their books, comparative theorists have tended to analyze the Soviet Union in
black-and-white, ideal-type terms that emphasize the distinctive character of the Soviet
Union both empirically and normatively. They generally have used the Soviet system
for little more than a foil against which to highlight the virtues of Western political
systems or non-Communist models of development.3'
The question is, why should this be the case? Could it possibly be that no one
is really interested in a moderately sophisticated understanding of the Soviet
Union and her Eastern European allies?
The answer that Hough suggests to these questions is a simple one. Accord-
ing to him,
therefore base my judgment upon my own evaluation of the field, but upon the extended evalua-
tion that has been made by Jerry F. Hough. His authority is good, for in writing The Soviet Union
and Social Science Theory (cited in note 29) and rewriting Merle Fainsod's How Russia is Ruled
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953) under the new title, How the Soviet Union
is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), he has unquestionably pro-
vided the best extant survey of the scholarly work in this field. He has, furthermore, set his
evaluation in the context of social scientific and especially comparative scholarship generally-
something that Soviet and Eastern European scholars have been loath to do in the past.
31 Hough, Soviet Union and Society Science Theory, I.

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the ghettoization of Soviet studies has been quite convenient for everyone directly
involved. Graduate students already burdened with learning a strange culture and
language have been spared the task of mastering a vast social science literature. Social
science theorists have been spared the effort of testing their theories against the experi-
ence of one third of the world's population. And in particular, they have been spared
the task of facing up to phenomena that challenge many of their fundamental ideologi-
cal and empirical assumptions about the sources and exercise of power.
It is only our understanding of the Soviet political system and the development of
social science theory that has not benefited from the ghettoization of Soviet studies.32
This explanation has many virtues, but perhaps the most important is that it
locates the weakness of communism research in the discourse about socialist
societies, rather than in the personal failings of individual researchers. Fur-
thermore, it places the blame equally on the practitioners of communism
research (area studies), the theoretical social scientists (disciplinary
generalists), and the practitioners of comparative studies. The only failing of
the explanation is the omission of any word as to how this anomalous situation
arose and by what logic. I hope that my analysis of the three world concept
and the attendant division of social scientific labor will have provided the
missing context to complete the explanation.
For while particular features of communism research can be understood by
referring exclusively to its practitioners, the difference between communism
research and other areas of social scientific practice can be understood only by
making extensive reference to the most general criteria for the division of
social scientific labor. The segregation of communism research from the main
stream of theoretical developments in economics, political science, and
sociology, from trends in comparative studies, and from the tradition of
ethnography, is an artifact of the general division of labor prevailing since
approximately 1950. This division of labor is rooted, as I have tried to show,
in the very primitive classificatory scheme embodied in the idea of three
worlds.
The anomalous nature of communism research is only one of the paradoxes

attendant upon the three world division. But it is potentially the most disas-
trous. On the one hand, the Soviet Union's very existence seems to have
catalyzed this view of the globe and, on the other, under this conceptualiza-
tion the Soviet Union has been studied in a more provincial manner than any
other portion of the globe. But, as horrible as it is, this paradox could become
a source of insight. The realization might alienate us sufficiently from the
three worlds scheme and its underlying assumptions as to permit us not only to
criticize it but to think beyond it-as we have not yet learned to think beyond
modernization theory in spite of having criticized it! It is, after all, no less
urgently incumbent upon us to understand the world and "the other" in it now
than it was in 1950.
32 Ibid., 2.

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588 CARL E. PLETSCH
V CONCLUSION: TOWARD ONE WORLD OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
The three worlds scheme was a necessary creation of t

situation, and no opprobrium attaches to its inventors
it. It had a certain value, even to social scientists, in mak
facing researchers in the earliest phase of the Cold War. It
apparently manageable portions and suggested which s
work on what portion and how. It gave the various soci
tic grounding in the new world situation and permitted
new disciplinary matrices, which in turn translated the
traditions into approaches relevant to this world situa
various branches of area studies, including communism
obvious and dramatic evidence of this-academic special
whole cloth to correspond to the new areas of political a
being sought by the United States. But if one take
ideographic science of anthropology, or even the osten
ences of economics, sociology, and political science, on
more significant shifts in focus and emphasis in respo
challenges of the Cold War. Even in the work in econo
political science that was devoted to the problems of th
see that the Cold War provoked, and the three worlds
integration of whole new subdisciplines. Thus an imm
valuable amount of research has been done under the aeg
scheme and the social semantics that governed it. In fact
of all social science ever done in the Occident has been done under the
conceptual umbrella of the three worlds. It would be absurd simply to reje
no matter how grievously misleading it may also have been.
Our challenge is not merely to cast aside this conceptual ordering of so
scientific labor, but to criticize it. And we must understand the task of
cism in the Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist sense here. We must, in oth
words, overcome the limitations that the three worlds notion has impo
upon the social sciences as a matter of course. We must first appreciate b
the strengths and weakness of the notion, then understand how it came
being and what larger social interests it served, and finally transcend i
devising another conceptual umbrella for social science that will serve all
useful purposes that the three worlds notion served, without its obvious
fects. Well might we apply Engels's injunction, made in the context of
evaluation of Feuerbach's role in overcoming Hegelian philosophy. He w
that Hegelian philosophy remained to be overcome or aufgehoben, "in t
sense that while its form had to be annihilated through criticism, the
content which had been won through it had to be saved. "33 Or, for those
33 Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deut
Philosophie, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), XXI, 273.

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an allergy to German philosophy, the challenge can be phrased in the more

fashionable language of the history and philosophy of science: The three
worlds concept has functioned as a kind of paradigm, but numerous anomalies
have begun to appear. A "scientific revolution" seems to be in preparation.
The anomalies generated by the three worlds became apparent first in
studies of development and modernization in the third world. But the prob-
lems of modernization are not adventitious or restricted to the ways in which
social scientists have studied the so-called underdeveloped countries. These
problems are inextricably bound up with better hidden problems of social
science as it has been practiced on the first and second worlds. Uncovering the
relationship among (1) the acknowledged difficulties and confusion faced by
students of the third world in trying to understand the processes of social
transformation there, (2) the egregious carping of communism research, and
(3) the unjustified arrogance of disciplinary generalists working on the sup-
posedly natural societies of the capitalist democracies-this is the dimension
of the problem addressed in this paper. I have tried to suggest that these
various difficulties are not unrelated but linked, like the children of Noah in
their common genealogy, in the concept of three worlds. They are, in a very
important sense, complementary difficulties. Once this is recognized, it will
also be seen that they are problems that can never be overcome simply by
separate critiques or revisions in the separate areas of difficulty. Only a
systematic critique of the particular form of division of social scientific labor
that has been dictated by the conceptual division of the globe into three worlds
of research will suffice. Odd though it may seem, these are difficulties more
easily overcome in concert than individually.
The limits of space and the conventions of the academic essay prohibit
speculation on the form to be taken by the new conceptualization of the globe
that will replace the three worlds. It would be vain to hope that it will take a
unitary form. De Tocqueville's God, who, as we remember, surveys "all the
beings of whom mankind is composed; and... discerns in each man the
resemblances that assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences that
distinguish him from them," is the ultimate nominalist. Individual social
scientists are not likely to acquire such powers of perception in the near
future. Nor is there any immediate prospect of altering those basic features of
democratic capitalist societies to which de Tocqueville credited our exagger-
ated predilection for general ideas. In fact, it may be more appropriate to put
ourselves on guard against whatever new conceptual scheme may grow up to
replace the three worlds than to congratulate ourselves upon having seen
through modernization theory and the three worlds.
As problematic as the task of replacing the three worlds scheme seems to
be, however, some progress toward a more differentiated view of the world
has been made. Now that we have begun to recognize that not all the societies
of Africa, Asia, and so on, are tending in the single direction of

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590 CARL E. PLETSCH
"modernity'"-a recognition forced upon us by the vigorous argume

many critics of modernization theory-we may be acquiring a basi
eventual appreciation of the real kinship of our different, concret
developments. In respect to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
not made so much progress. But if, for example, we once recognize
is a politics in the Soviet Union-as Jerry Hough and a few others
trying to show us-even if it is a different politics from the one w
then we may at least be acquiring a basis upon which to understand
differences.
Most of all, once we begin to recognize ourselves in the distorte

we have drawn of the peoples of the so-called second and third w
will also recognize the degree to which our attempts to manipulate
the world-even conceptually-have reflected the insecurity of the
and intellectual leaders of our so-called first world. This problem,
is one of subjectivity and introspection, a problem of understandin
And this essay is merely a part of the larger attempt to understand
locus of the social scientific observer and the epistemological stat
scientific observations. But even after we have transcended the division of
social scientific labor dictated by the three worlds, we will still be faced with
the eternal problem of the subjectivity of observation. Only if we can re-
member that "the other" is never defined in intrinsic terms, but always in
terms of its difference from the observer, will we have the epistemological
basis for a differentiated understanding of the globe's societies. This under-
standing will be rooted in our understanding of the problem of observing
"others"-a problem to which we have given scarcely any attention during
the reign of the three worlds concept.
A more differentiated conceptualization of the world's social phenomena
based upon a general awareness of the paradoxes of observation will not
realize the fantasies of Redfield, Sauvy, and the others-one world govern-
ment. It may, however, be a precondition not only of any quantum leap in the
quality of social scientific scholarship, but of any improvement in relations
among the societies of the globe.

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The Three Worlds, or The Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950-1975

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The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950-1975

Author(s): Carl E. Pletsch

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/178394

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II faut avant tout dresser le catalogue le plus grand possible de cat

I INTRODUCTION: AN INSTANCE OF PRIMITIVE CLASSIFICATION

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their

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It seemed to de Tocqueville that democratic nations have a greater pro-

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application to communism research, to take the same example, is easy to see:

II THE GENESIS OF THE THREE WORLDS CONCEPT

To do justice to this particular complex of general ideas, w

Scholarly research on the socialist societies of Eastern Eu

2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, tra

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diplomatic, and intelligence services began to fantasize their next assignments

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all their ideological differences, they had a great deal in com

Extremely critical of the cynicism he ascribed to the Cold Wa

10 However one refers to the differences between what might also

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building, he wrote, to the point where the vacationers on the C

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world, he was naively reminiscent of J. A. Hobson.'3 And finally, in h

13 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, a Study (London: James Nisbet, 1902). Hobson's repu

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to organize the work of the whole community of Western social scient

III THE DEEP-STRUCTURE OF THE THREE WORLDS CONCEPT

Ultimately we want to be able to describe a relationship

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derive their meanings from their mutual opposition rather than

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But, he also noted, he had to use it because it was the current e

In the general reaction against the oversimplifications involved in

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the most basic is that modernity is as indefinable as tradition. The thr

We have delved deeply enough to appreciate how this very primitive

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Population of the World

The Modern World The Third World

The First World The Second World

Figure T Th Three Worlds as Social Categories

here-the view that the population of

IV THE APPORTIONMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC LABOR AMONG

THE THREE WORLDS

Having examined the genesis and structure of the th

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thropologists are relegated to a single domain-the third world. A closer

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anthropologist returns from the field, it is to write an ethnography. The

There are of course exceptions-anthropologists who study the first world,

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who follow their natural inclinations are most predictable in the

23 (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).

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the world in comparison with the idiographic anthropologist or the area

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superior theoretical and methodological-especially quantitative skills. Implicit in this

27 Lambert, Language and Area Studies, 3.