Changes in family structure, together with attendant changes in the very structure of personality—including a new "empathy," a "cosmopolitan outlook," and a desire for "achievement"—made it possible for "newly mobile persons to operate efficiently in a changing world," in Lerner's words. For Lerner, the functional interdependence of economic life, family and personality structure, ideology, and politics meant that "the model of modernization follows an autonomous historical logic— that each phase tends to generate the next phase by some mechanism which operates independently of cultural or doctrinal variations." The process reached its "highest phase," the "end of the road," when everyone was "well fed, well educated, and well provided with consumer goods, medical care, and social security," as Black put it. Black warned that "it will be well into the twenty-first century before a majority of the world's societies will have completed the main tasks of economic and social transformation" and entered that happy state in which "there will be nothing more to be done." Like other modernization theorists, however, he entertained no doubt about the eventual outcome. "The problem of poverty is only acute in the short run," according to Ernest Gellner: "... in the long run, ... we shall all be affluent." Heavily indebted to nineteenth-century sociology for its categories and concepts, modernization theory retained nothing of the nineteenth century's ambivalence about progress. Bendix attributed the "invidious personification of modernity and tradition" to the intellectual's snobbish disdain for democracy and his "romantic utopia" of a lost golden age of unalienated labor and artistic creativity. Alex Inkeles ridiculed the idea, propagated by "social philosophers," that "industrialization was a kind of plague which disrupts social organization, destroys cultural cohesion, and uniformly produces personal demoralization and even disintegration." On the contrary, "modernizing institutions, per se, do not lead to greater psychic stress."

It is easy to see why the study of broad social changes appeared to require such a concept as modernization, one that took account of the interrelationship of social, political, and cultural developments without giving causal priority to any one set of determinants. To treat modern society merely as the triumph of capitalism appeared to address only one aspect of a more general change; even "industrialism" seemed to give undue weight to the economic side of the equation. But the "constant search for more inclusive conceptualizations," as Tipps called it, sacri

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