ABSTRACT
Robert heilbroner's essay, "Counterrevolutionary America", is the most intelligent and forceful statement of a point of view that is widely held by writers on economic development in the Third World. Democratic institutions such as parliamentary government, elementary civil liberties, and the rule of law, though not—except in the United States—universal suffrage, preceded economic development in the Western bourgeois democracies. The new states must create an overriding sense of national purpose and national identity transcending parochial group loyalties if they are to carry out effective economic development programs. Most experts on economic development concede that the state must assume the entrepreneurial function in the majority of the nations of the Third World and that these nations are therefore likely to adopt some form of collectivism or "state socialism". The masses in the Third World are not going to leap at once into the political arena to make shortsighted and selfish immediate group demands.
