Robert Bellah came of age intellectually at a historical moment in which ideas about modernity and the good society were particularly fraught. The framework of “modernization” served as a normative guide and formed the theoretical foundations for social scientific studies of developing societies. Theories of modernization linked the course of economic development (urbanization, nonfactory work, mass education) to the good society: the triumph of democracy, secularism and the emergence of individual selfdetermination from the constraints of traditional institutions. These theories drew on Durkheim, Weber and Maine, through the schematic framework offered by Talcott Parsons, to see in modernity a shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft relationships in which the unconditional obligations of small, “face- to- face” collectivities such as kin groups and village communities gave way to identification with larger, more anonymous, interest- based groups. The introduction to a 1965 Princeton University Press volume analyzing the modernization process in Japan listed the following qualities as characteristics of “social modernization”:

Modernity was celebrated in American social thought in the mid- twentieth century as the emergence of a postfeudal, postpatriarchal, post- European world. Social and economic development would bring about the emergence of the individual from the confinement of traditional social institutions. And in the context of the defeat of fascism after World War II and the emergence of the United States as a global hegemon, the theory seemed to celebrate and to naturalize the growth of capitalism and liberal democracy, advancing American interests throughout the newly decolonized world (Cumings 1999; Dower 1975; Escobar 1995).