ABSTRACT
Development as aspiration, ideology, and field of study became an issue of urgent priority following the end of the Second World War in the context of internal events in the colonial countries and the economic and political realities of a changing international situation. For Lerner modernization is 'the social process of which development is the economic component'; while Apter sees development, modernization and industrialization as terms of decreasing conceptual generality. Given that development or modernization denotes a particular kind of social change in the contemporary context, it was necessary to find a heuristic designation of the beginning and end points of the process. The question of ethnocentrism becomes central when it is asked from which historical source the paradigm of modernization is abstracted and universalized. Thus the nature of the relationships between the developed and underdeveloped countries becomes a primary consideration in any macro-level discussion of development.
