tends to be more evenly distributed." The rate of social mobility accelerated; the middle class became larger and larger. "This tendency toward the equalization of income and status ... is the inevitable result of economic development."

Modernization theory recycled all the assumptions underlying nineteenth-century sociology: that the transition from the old order to the new was a comprehensive process in which everything was related to everything else; that it originated in the internal dynamics of developing societies, not in cultural diffusion or conquest; that new patterns replaced the old ones because they worked better (in spite of some of their undesirable by-products); that the process unfolded in a sequential order, one stage giving rise to the next; and that it culminated in general affluence and equality, however "atomized." Modernization was a "multifaceted process involving changes in all areas of human thought and activity," according to Samuel P. Huntington. According to Lerner, it was a "systemic" process that repeated itself "in virtually all modernizing societies, on all continents of the world, regardless of variations in race, color, creed." It was best understood not as the Westernization of the world but as the recapitulation, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, of a series of events first played out in Europe. The example of the West might serve to stimulate a desire for change, but change came chiefly from within. Changes in one part of the social organism were functionally interconnected to changes in other parts: thus the growth of trade, the development of a labor market, and the advent of factory production coincided with changes in family structure, the extended family giving way to the nuclear or "conjugal" family. "If the family has to move about through the labor market," Neil Smelser wrote, "it cannot afford to carry all its relatives with it.... Connections with collateral kinsmen begin to erode; ... newly married couples set up homes of their own and leave the others behind.... Apprenticeship systems which require the continuous presence of father and son decline as specialized factory production arises." Large extended families, Marion J. Levy explained, are not "consistent with the development of relatively high levels of modernization." "The traditional society tends to be a familistic one," as S. N. Eisenstadt put it, "while the modern one tends to divert the family unit from most of its functions, and the family itself develops more into the direction of the small nuclear family."

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