ABSTRACT
Robert Heilbroner reiterates his conviction that left-authoritarian or Communist movements "offer the best chance for a breakthrough in the backward areas". The very polycentrism of the Communist world that makes nonsense out of the anti-Communist slogans invoked by Washington to justify the Vietnam war reduces the likelihood that future national Communist regimes will be the ruthless modernizers Heilbroner expects them to be. Authoritarian revolutionaries will be able to seize power under conditions of mass famine and chaos than that they will succeed in overthrowing present governments which are maintaining some degree of order and economic progress, painfully slow though the latter may be. The chapter agrees that none of the existing regimes in the Third World, neither the formal democracies, the collectivist one-party states, nor the military dictatorships, has achieved full modernization.
