Modernization From The Perspective Of History

In a historic way, this article attempts to answer the question what modernization really is, from the perspective of history. At the beginning, by using the history-featured method, the paper is going to simply comb through various theories and viewpoints of modernization, studies the rights and wrongs of each view and analyzes different understandings of modernization of different ages and different people, with the origin and the basic connotation of the academic terminology modernization, thus to gain general theoretical knowledge. In this part, this article takes time as the longitude and content or location as the latitude and divides the various theories of modernization into 3 kinds. First it discusses the Chinese scholars' viewpoints of modernization in 1930's. Then it moves to the overseas social scientific circles'understandings of modernization, includes the classics modernization theory that emerged in 50's and the later-emerged dependence theory appearing as the voice of the Third World, and slightly extends to the world-system theory and the new comparative political economy study that emerged since 70's. Finally, it will analyze the Marxist modernization, especially the ideas of CPC towards modernization. At the second step, with the general knowledge of modernization, this article will study the human historical course, in order to discovered and seek the real modernization with the help of the evolution of history and historical truths. Meanwhile, the original theory will be revised again and again. In this part, dividing the human history since 1500 into 4 ages, the paper will describe the development of modernization from local to the world, study the modernization experiences of several key countries in the world, and show the intrinsic uniformity of modernization and the human history course from region to world. At the third step, in dual carefully study the theory and the history, reflecting the history with the theory and examining the theory with the history, thus to obtain a viewpoint of modernization from the vision of history in the above interactions. In fact, the last step is already contained in first step and second step. This article finally tells in brief some ponder of the Chinese modernization.