Una utopía secular. La teoría de la modernización y la política exterior estadounidense en la Guerra Fría

Abstract

This article analyses the influence of the theory of modernization on the formulation and justification of the US foreign policy between the 1950s and 1960s. Such a paradigm constituted the scientific frame from which the American foreign machinery understood the social global change. It also worked as an ideological instrument, which guided the US policy towards the underdeveloped countries and the new independent nations in the Cold War context. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this theory dominated American social scientific thought, found its way into the government's policy-making process and played an important political role in international relations. For these reasons it seems to be relevant to study the political and intellectual climate in which the modernization ideas expanded as an American secular utopia.