Book Reviews : A Federation of Southern Africa. By LEOPOLD MARQUARD. (London : Oxford Uni versity Press, 1971. Pp. 142. £2.)

• Author: Richard Dale
• DOI: 10.1177/106591297202500426
• Published date: 01 December 1972
• Date: 01 December 1972
• Subject Matter: Articles

804
The book’s first section covers the bones of modernization and points out that
the overriding difference in the world comes between the modernized and the non-
modernized, or the latecomers. At several points he remarks that this difference,
and not ideological clich6s of capitalism, communism, and so on, is the main deter-
minant of what happens in and to these societies.
In the second section, Levy sorts out the twelve patterns that he considers
peculiar to modernization. Many of these -
universal education, education for an
unknown future, radical and rapid change -
will be familiar to students of mod-
ernization. His treatment, however, may not be. What he does is to examine the
possibilities of these patterns and the constraints that they might impose. For in-
stance, in a chapter on &dquo;A Sexual Revolution,&dquo; Levy notes that ours will be the first
generation to have been reared under female supervision from birth to maturity.
He goes on to speculate that this experience might be related to high levels of aliena-
tion, crimes of violence, but surely to something. His treatment of other patterns is
stimulating, though often there is little enough on the bones of analysis to flesh
out some answers.
His third section summarizes the argument and sketches in the three major
problems for modernization. The first involves the limits to human and social
adjustment. The second reiterates that modernization, because of its mounting levels
of interdependency, requires increasing coordination and control by government.
Society will face two obstacles in this: (1) motivating people to accept more regi-
mentation, and (2) acquiring the knowledge to avoid catastrophic errors. The third
is easily the most curious. It involves the ratio between the sexes, about 1 to 1 in
all societies. What happens, he asks, when parents begin to use a technology, appar-
ently near, to determine the sex of their offspring? The result would be a generation
with 60 to 70 percent...