Rethinking the “miracle”—economic growth and political struggles in South Korea

Abstract

Modernization theory, long vilified as reactionary and wrong, regained respectability in the 1980s. The social and political causes of its resurgence are plain: the ascendance of the radical Right and the coeval retrenchment of the Left. Its intellectual merit, however, remains as suspect as when dependency and neo-Marxist theorists seemingly buried it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, the Third World remains racked by poverty and pestilence, exploited by domestic and transnational corporations, and convulsed by coups and imperialist interventions.