Further Perspectives on Modernization and Aging

It is wholly appropriate that this article should follow Professor Hendricks’s, for historians’ perspectives on modernization theory generally build on the insights of social scientists. Although its intellectual foundations were laid by social philosophers and critics such as Adam Smith, Malthus, and Condorcet at the end of the eighteenth century, the main lines of modernization theory were formulated in earnest after World War II by economists, political scientists, and sociologists concerned with “developing nations” outside the Western world (Levy, 1966). Historians, in contrast, only began to join serious discussions during the past fifteen years. Our involvement in gerontology—the study of old age and aging—is of even more recent vintage. Whereas social scientists were exploring the “modernization of (old) age” during the 1950s and 1960s, few social science historians or humanists have investigated how the process of modernization affected the meanings and experiences of growing old(er) over time and across geopolitical boundaries (Maddox and Wiley, 1976; Achenbaum, forthcoming).