ABSTRACT
The Great Depression and World War II proved to be a crucial moment as the cumulative crises of modernity left intellectuals both in the East and the West with grave misgivings about the viability of the modern project. Westernization was attacked vociferously, and some intellectuals even argued in favor of "overcoming modernity" altogether. But the postwar period allowed newly dominant Americans to embrace modernity. American intellectuals exaggerated their own authority by projecting their new-found influence into the past of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It became evident the Chinese were moving into modernity, but it was equally unmistakable their modernity was not based upon western models. Instead, Maoism became the new reigning ideology of China. The rejection of modernization theory by academics in the 1970s–1980s struck a great blow against modernity.
