[ Development theory: Who's Who? Part 43 ]

Walt Whitman Rostow (1916-2003)
An non-Communist manifesto

I. Biographical outline

Walt Whitman Rostow was born in New York on October 7, 1916 to Russian immigrant parents. He graduated from high school in New Haven in 1932, aged 15, and was awarded a scholarship to study economics and history at Yale. In 1936 the highly-gifted Rostow won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent his first stay in Europe at Oxford from 1936 to 1938. Following his return to the USA he wrote his PhD thesis on British Trade Fluctuations, 1868-1896 and graduated from Yale in 1940.

Having worked for a short while as an instructor in economics at Columbia University, New York, Rostow was called up for military service when the USA entered the Second World War. He served from 1941 to 1945 in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, in London. His task was to analyse aerial photographs for the planning of strategic bombing targets. In 1946 he took over a chair of economic history at Harvard, but as early as 1947 decided to go back to political work. This time, he became Assistant to Gunnar Myrdal, head of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, based in Geneva. But not even the highly-prestigious UN job could hold him for long. He resigned in 1949 and became Visiting Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge (England). It was not until 1950, when he was appointed to the chair of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA (aged only 33), which he held until 1961, that he more or less settled down.

These are, for Rostow, the decisive academic years, marked especially by the founding of the Center of International Studies (CENIS) at MIT in 1951. Its head is Max Millikan, whom he knows from his Yale days. With the Korean War raging, CENIS is to develop strategies against the spread of Communism. The circle of colleagues in Cambridge MA and Boston, with the two universities MIT and Harvard separated only by the Charles River, include such highly acclaimed people as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Everett Hagen, Charles Kindleberger, Benjamin Higgins, Wilfred Malenbaum, Lucian Pye, Robert Baldwin, Richard Eckaus and Daniel Lerner. They are an illustrious collection of early development economists, sociologists and political scientists, all of whom would deserve inclusion in a 'Who's Who' of development theory. In 1952, Rostow published his first work on growth theory, The Process of Economic Growth. At CENIS, he collaborates in two projects on the Soviet Union and China, which he sums up in 1955 in the essay Marx Was a City Boy, or Why Communism May Fail. Even more important is the book he publishes with Millikan in 1957, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy, which presents the perception that development policy can be a political instrument in the East-West conflict. From 1956 to1958, Rostow did the groundwork for his most famous book, Stages of Economic Growth, subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto, which is based on a series of lectures he gave in Cambridge in the autumn of 1958. The book is published in 1960. Rostow reaches his academic peak when his theses are discussed at a conference of the International Economic Association in Constance.

The third stage of Rostow's life begins in 1960 with his appointment to the election campaign team of John F. Kennedy. He takes leave of absence from MIT, and after Kennedy's election is named in January 1961 as deputy special assistant to the President for national security affairs. The following autumn he becomes chairman of the Policy Planning Council at the State Department. Together with Schlesinger, Galbraith and his brother Eugene, Rostow forms the Charles River clique, Kennedy's liberal brain trust. During this time Rostow writes many memoranda in which development policy is conceived as a new field of US foreign policy.

After the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963, Rostow continues to work for President Lyndon B. Johnson in the same functions. Im May 1964 he becomes the US member of the Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress. At the beginning of 1966 Rostow returns to the White House as National Security Adviser, and holds this office until January 1969, thus at the height of the Vietnam War. Nixon's election as President ends Rostow's political career, which has brought him increasing criticism from the liberal public because he is seen as one of the Administration officials mainly responsible for the escalation of the war.

Rostow's old faculty at MIT refuses to let him return to his chair, and an attempt to win an appointment at Harvard also fails. But in February 1969 he is appointed to a chair created especially for him as 'Jr. Professor Emeritus for Political Economy' at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, in Austin, where he ends the fourth and now purely academic stage of his life. He drops out of the public eye and writes a great number of academic books. He dies in Austin on February 13, 2003, aged 86.


II. Work and appraisal

Rostow was a convinced liberal with a missionary-like zeal which was expressed equally in both his commitment to development and his anti-Communism. Economic growth and the modernisation of society, according to the CENIS theory, was to prevent the spread of Communism. On account of his studies on China and the Soviet Union, Rostow was convinced that because Marxist theory neglected the issue of agriculture it could not master the problem of development. Therefore he argued that force of arms should be used to assert what he believed to be sensible: the stages of economic growth that he had outlined. Thus he shows many parallels to Marx against whom he fought so bitterly, and not only with his claim to have formulated a universally historic counter-concept to the Communist manifesto. He also derived from it his demand for political action, completely in the sense of the 11th thesis on Feuerbach ("The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”)

From Marx, however, Rostow is distinguished by one thing : the latter never possessed personal political power, but only supplied the concepts models for his successors. Rostow had power, direct access to two US Presidents, was head of planning in the State Department and National Security Adviser in the White House. That applied both to the time of the 'Pioneers in Development' on each side of the Charles River, who believed development was feasible, and to the Kennedy years. Rostow succumbed to the hubris of power; he believed he could not only define the world, but also change it.

What influenced him? At the beginning it was surely the liberal minds of his parents and the anti-Communism of his Russian immigrant family. In addition, there was the academic influence of Oxford and Cambridge, Keynesianism, and the influence of the German Historical School. Finally, the context of MIT und Harvard with their unique group of luminaries was decisive.

His ‘Stages’ theory was so influential because of its simplicity. Like Marx, he distinguished five stages through which all countries have to pass. These are: (1) the traditional society; (2) the preconditions for take-off; (3) the take-off, (4) the drive to maturity (self-sustained growth); and (5) the age of high mass consumption. The most important are stages 2–4, because they mark the transition from the traditional to the modern society. Rostow claimed that when he emphasised that economic change was the result of human will he was not formulating merely a growth theory, but one of societal development in general.

In the first stage the traditional society, only limited growth is possible because it is determined by pre-Newtonian technology and a pre-Newtonian attitude towards nature. Newton stands here for the decisive recognition that nature is subject to inherent laws which enable it to be manipulated and used for increasing productivity. Only from then on is continual economic growth possible, whereas earlier the economy was determined by natural production capacity and population growth.

In the second stage, the most critical of all, modernity begins and the preconditions for take-off are put in place. The possibilities of modern science are used for the first time, as was the case in Europe in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Science and technology are therefore an independent variable. This process ran endogenously in England, the first country to industrialise itself; in later cases it was mostly an exogenous development triggered by the penetration of superior societies. Education becomes important, new entrepreneurs establish themselves, investments are made. The first nation states are formed.

In the third stage, the take-off, a continual growth begins. This term has won the greatest popularity. The metaphor was adopted from an aircraft that has reached the required speed on the runway to become airborne. The savings and investments of a national economy rise from about 5 per cent to 10 per cent of gross national product, which crosses a 'magical' threshold. Additional capital can also be imported, as did the USA and other settler colonies. This realisation was the start for development policy. The new industries expand, and farming is also modernised. The entire stage should last about 40 years and be gone through by all countries, even if staggered in terms of time.

The fourth stage, the drive to maturity, is a long-lasting, self-sustaining growth. The investment rate is 10-20 per cent, and the per capita product rises because economic growth exceeds population growth. Maturity should be attained about 60 years after take-off. New industrial branches arise, old ones disappear, and a shifting of sectoral key areas takes place. Maturity is defined as a stage in which industry shows that due to modern technology it can produce whatever it wants to.

In the fifth stage, the age of high mass consumption, the manufacture of consumer durables and provision of services become the key sectors. On account of the high per capita income and state distribution policy, social consumption increases. The welfare state emerges. The spread of motor vehicle ownership is a decisive indicator for measuring this stage, which the USA reached as early as the 1920s (Ford introduced conveyor belt production in 1913/14).

The building blocks in Rostow's theory are the modernisation-promoting use of science and technology, the sharp increase in the savings and investment rates in order to achieve continual growth by means of a thrust to growth, the role of the innovative entrepreneur and the concept of key sectors. This is a crude synopsis of elements which can be found among prominent contemporaries: big push (Rosenstein-Rodan), spurt (Gerschenkron), linkage concept and key sectors (Hirschman), the role of the entrepreneur (Schumpeter), and stages theory (Fourastié). Rostow also attempted to categorise the world. According to him, in 1959 eight countries (in historical sequence, Britain, France, the USA, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Canada and Australia) had reached the age of mass consumption. The Soviet Union was in the maturity stage, and Rostow forecast a system change (!) for the country in its fifth stage. Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, China and India were in the take-off stage.

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