Currently, consideration of change is centred on the process of modernization. Interest of academics, administrators, politicians and others in the newly developed countries of the post-war period has spread to other underdeveloped territories and the interest has been sustained by the concern of modernized countries to provide aid, from altruistic or other motives.
To modernize such places means exploiting natural resources, altering flora and fauna, eliminating or at least decreasing disease, increasing electrification, both in the rural and urban areas, improving administration and so on. But the difficulty involved in the process is where best to start, on how wide a front and what are the likely consequences in one field of activity in another.
More mechanised and efficient farming may involve discouraging small units which may even entail their elimination and, thus, villages being superseded by estate housing and changed attitudes to authority and self-help.
Image Source: education.uw.edu
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If education is held back, the subsequent teachers and admmistrators come from outside, introducing new sub-cultures which in turn will have economic and other consequences. If education advances speedily it will aid communication internally and externally, increase political activity and increase aspirations, making for instability and endangering progress in other sectors.
The maintenance of political stability is essential if modernization is to take place and in many territories going through the process the stability has been won at the price of free institutions.
Authoritarianism in developing countries may prove a passing phase, disappearing when modernization has reached a stage which allows freedom with stability. In many economically developed countries there are stable political systems embodying free institutions.
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It, however, “remains to be seen whether these are the outcome of a unique combination of circumstances, or whether the social and political consequences of development, by their nature, tend in that direction.”