ABSTRACT
A key to understanding Marion J. Levy, Jr was his background in Texas. His background in Texas and its major university also gave Marion training ground in grass-roots American liberalism at its authentic best. Both the various institutes of area studies at Harvard and the receptivity to such worldly concerns at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton offered an environment that encouraged Marion to think big about large subjects. In his work on Asian development, Modernization and the Structure of Societies, Marion avoided reductionism of differences to some mythical meeting of East and West in some abstracted cultural realm. He uniquely appreciated the extent to which Asia's drive to modernization was a result of how deeply its societies knew that their defeats in the prior century and a half were the result of economic backwardness—not cultural differences.
