Narrative Reason and Cold War Economic Diplomacy in W. W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth

Narrative Reason and Cold War Economic Diplomacy in W. W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth Kimber Charles Pearce In the end,... a rude pragmatism shapes the content of intellectual life, and, in turn, the behavior of practical men is governed by the abstractions which men of ideas have created in an effort to give a degree of order to the world of human beings and things about them.1 Walt Whitman Rostow Questions concerning relations of social scientific discourse and public policy have been myriad and complex. Studies of the role of social scientific research in policymaking have focused on relationships of knowledge and power,2 the ways in which social scientists have gained access to policy communities,3 and histories of national conditions that have created demands for social scientific research in the policy process.4 Within the interdisciplinary rhetoric of inquiry movement that has arisen from the "linguistic turn" in social scientific and humanistic research, social scientists have been studied as advocates in the political process along with politicians , bureaucrats, media figures, interest groups, and other participants in public policy debates.5 Economists have contributed to public policy longer and in greater numbers than many of their colleagues in other disciplines. D. N. McCloskey's studies of the rhetoric of economics have demonstrated how economic theorists fuse fact and logic with the humanistic tropes of metaphor and narrative to make economic models persuasive to both general and expert audiences.6 Among eminent twentieth -century economists, American economic historian and presidential adviser Walt Whitman Rostow is one theorist who has exhibited convincingly the rhetorical skills of storytelling, metaphor-making, and model-building, yet his discourse has received scant notice in the literature of the rhetoric of economics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Rostow narrated and applied to the advocacy of Cold War foreign policy his theory of the five "stages of economic growth" as "an alternative to Karl Marx's theory of modern history."7 His model of economic Kimber Charles Pearce is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Communication Certificate Program at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999, pp. 395-414 ISSN 1094-8392 396 Rhetoric & Public Affairs development inspired a conceptual revolt in macroeconomics during the early 1950s against the dominant neoclassical paradigm, which held that short-period factors were the appropriate units for the statistical analysis of economic growth trends. In contrast to the mathematical imperative of the neoclassicists, such as Simon Kuznets,8 Rostow used narrative to reconstruct historical patterns and predict future trends in long-term economic growth.9 Beyond the academy, Rostow's promotion of his "stages of economic growth" narrative as a counter-theory to Marxism won the attention of policy makers in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, who used it as a blueprint to deploy foreign aid programs to contain Soviet expansionism in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. In his role as a co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies (CENIS)—a forum he established with economist Max F. Millikan in 1951 to advance developmental theory and U.S. foreign aid policy10—Rostow was called upon to assist the efforts of foreign aid advocates in the Eisenhower administration." After a decade of lobbying in the Congress and elsewhere on behalf of U.S. development aid programs, he was appointed Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs under President John F. Kennedy in 1961.12 In 1968, Rostow ended his career in government service as President Lyndon B. Johnson's National Security Adviser during the Vietnam conflict. Rostow's dual role as a leading architect of U.S. economic development programs and U.S. military escalation in South Vietnam made him a key figure both in the history of developmental economic theory and U.S. diplomacy during the Cold War. For this reason, and because of his enduring influence on postCold War policy discussions concerning regionalism and globalism, his economic discourse is singularly significant as a subject of analysis in the rhetoric of inquiry.13 Rostow's magnum opus and best known book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist...