摘要：This text is intended for undergraduate sociology students in international devclopment. 1ts purpose is to expose the novice to a critical perspective on the value-Iaden assumptions hidden within various theoretical understandings of development. A central theme throughout the volume concerns the uncertainties of development. By examining devcIopment in many different contexts, Barnett shows how the meaning of the concept varies among people and places. The book has three parts. Part 1 is a very good primer on the historical devclopment of sociological theories about development. It traces the origins of modernization theory from the works of Comte, Durkheim, and Weber. It then considers neo-Marxian reactions as represented by the dependency approach and world systems theory. An important theme underlying this section-and indeed the whole book-is that theories must be treated as "more or less useful languages". Thus, according to Barnett, "By virtue of their inclusion or exclusion of different kinds of information, theories dcfine problems and, to a degree, determine how knowledge is divided into different academic disciplines" (32).
