The Fate of Personal Adjustment in the Process of Modernization
Abstract
The Fate of Personal Adjustment in the Process of Modernization SAGE Publications, Inc.1970DOI: 10.1177/002071527001100201 Alex Inkeles Harvard University, Cambridge, U.S.A. David H.Smith Boston College, Boston, U.S.A. and FEW IDEAS have had wider currency among prominent commentators on social life than the belief that the city and its attendant industrial civilization are alien to "natural" man and inevitably breed social disorganization and personal confusion." Thomas Jefferson could see some good even in yellow fever since, as he said, "it will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man."2 A century later Henry Adams saw in New York City a cylinder which had exploded to throw great masses of stone and steam against the sky, creating an air of "movement and hysteria" in which "prosperity never before imagined, power never yet willed by men, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable, and afraid."3 Such images of urban life and industrial civilization were not limited to philosophers and artists, but were also held by leaders of the burgeoning social sciences in the twentieth century.