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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
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to Comparative Studies in Society and History
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
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
" 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.
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
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."
many ways the expression "underdeveloped" is even more cruel than its
with its scientific pretention and its implication of superiority.
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
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.
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.
22 See, for example, Francis L. K. Hsu, "The Cultural Problem of the Anthropologist," The
American Anthropologist, 81:3 (1979), 517-32.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
32 Ibid., 2.
33 Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deut
Philosophie, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), XXI, 273.