Abstract

This dissertation explores two paradigms of modernization popular in Mexico in the 1940s. It argues that careful discussion of those paradigms is necessary to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the transition to an "institutionalized" revolution, and also of the possible ways modernization can be imagined. ;The two paradigms are distinguished with the aid of Karl Mannheim's dichotomy of "utopia" versus "ideology." The "utopian" approach to modernization was influenced by European historicism, which was popularized in Mexico through the works of Jose Ortega y Gasset and the arrival of Spanish refugee intellectuals. Historicism mixed freely with discussions of modernization in the early 1940s, particularly in the university classrooms of Jesus Silva Herzog and Luis Recasens Siches, and it helped Mexicans reconcile "planned" modernization to their liberal and humanist traditions. The "ideological" approach to modernization was influenced by the "scientific management" movement in the United States, where several students from the National Autonomous University's National School of Economics studied public administration. That younger generation was determined to revive the Mexican Revolution through enlightened "management." The dissertation hypothesizes that their attempted synthesis of the "utopian" and "ideological" paradigms was conducive to political stability, but not to the renewal of the Revolution