The world is often categorized using size of development, dividing nations into the "developed" and "developing." These are generally based off of judging a country's development, but with this we need to ask ourselves: what do we mean when we say "developed," and why have some countries attained this status of being “developed” while others have not? Since the beginning of the 20th, many brilliant academics and scholars have sought to answer this question, but in doing so, have created various models to explain this phenomenon. Among these academics, W.W Rostow, Samuel P. Huntington, Celso Furtado, and Engeman and Sokoloff are seen as being influential. In spite of the critiques to the model proposed by Engeman and Sokoloff, Rowstow’s model/theory…show more content… 1. W.W. Rostow One of the key contributors in 20th century to the field of development studies was W.W. Rostow, an American economist and government official. Before Rostow, approaches to development had been based on the assumption that "modernization" was characterized by the Western world, which were able to advance from the initial stages of underdevelopment. Therefore other “undeveloped” countries should model themselves after the West, looking towards their "modern" state of capitalism and a liberal democracy. Using these ideas, Rostow in 1960 proposed his “Stages of Economic Growth”, where he proposed 5 stages a country must follow-through to successfully develop; these 5 stages were: 1) traditional society, 2) transitional stage, 3) take-off, 4) drive to maturity, and finally 5) age of high mass consumption. Using these theory it is suggested that all countries exist at one of these stages, and progresses through each stage in…show more content… Huntington was one of the most controversial of American political theorists. His most famous article called the clash of civilisations, argued that any future conflict, won’t be ideological clashes that reigned during the Cold War, but will center on cultural differences and will likely occur along fault lines of civilizations. Huntington concludes that modernization is different from Westernization, and he proposes that the goals of development are Western-centric, and this might not coincide with another cultures on idea of a perfect society. In his book Political Order in Changing Societies, he saw the social change that was described and found it to be an unrealistic view. He also felt that the modernization theories that were around were correct that economic development would lead to great social change but also thought they were wrong to say that the changes would be small or a step forward. Societies in the throes of dramatic social transformation, he noted, tend to be unstable and even violent. Positive outcomes are likely to emerge only where healthy political institutions capable of channeling and responding to such changes exist and building such institutions is an extremely difficult and time-consuming task. Huntington saw socio-economic development and political development being very different. Order is jeopardized when the level of mobilization within a society exceeds the level of institutionalization. With this Huntington says, economic