Comments on the Carroll and Salazar Papers.

The article presents comments on papers on national renewal presented by University of the Philippines professor Zeus Salazar and National Secretariat for Social Action research director John J. Carroll as part of the Philippine Sociological Society's "Social Issues '72" public lecture series. The author holds that there are two competing strategies for the achievement of economic progress and modernity. One strategy sees national development as a process of departure from the traditional concerns of the village world into the modem and rational world of the elite. The policies of its adherents focus on monetary and fiscal stability, on the establishment of norms of legality and rationality in public administration and, most important, on creating a proper climate for entrepreneurship. There is nothing wrong with stability and rationality, per se The problem is that these policies are given priority over, and often at the expense of, those that would solve more basic problems in the country's economic and social structure. Because this strategy conceives of progress as movement from tradition to modernity, it accepts the division between the masses and the elite and sees it primarily in cultural and intellectual terms.