ABSTRACT
If the dream of an imminent world revolution was torn to pieces at the end of the First World War, then the dream of 'modernization', as a gradualist policy on a world scale, has been cruelly disturbed since the end of the Second World War. For sociologists the latter disillusion, rather than the former, will be a traumatic experience. Sociologists have generally not been over-concerned with revolution, but they have pinned all too many hopes on modernization. The sociologists' belief in modernization was the 'modern' version of evolutionism; the latter had become less fashionable since Berthold Laufer (1918) had declared it to be 'the most inane, sterile, and pernicious theory in the whole theory of science'. Laufer considered the theory inane because of its unilinear simplifications. I do not know to what extent he considered the theory pernicious because it had been made an article of faith by the Marxists who, at the time of his writing, had just gained power through a revolution in Russia. Lenin, for one, wrote as late as 1919 that one could rely, even in detail, on Friedrich Engels's The Origin of the Family as a scientific basis.
