ABSTRACT
Marx and Weber founded the classical universalistic theory of modernization, which postulates that processes of modernization will become a global phenomenon as a result of the universal distribution of industrial capitalism. Marx, as is well known, explained this process as the result of the development of the forces of production as the driving factor of the emergence of bourgeois societies. Weber described the same process as being that of secularization and rationalization. He did not deny the important role of the forces of production, but he assumed a more complex process, i.e. a interdependency between the basis and the superstructure of societies (cf. for example his analysis of the influence of Protestantism on modern capitalism in his famous work The Protestant ethics). Despite the theoretical differences between these viewpoints, they and their followers held a common assumption, namely that the processes are universal, i.e. they will assimilate all other non-Western societies into the same evolutionary pattern.
