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5 The Rise and Fall of Development Theory

Colin Leys

[ . . . ] What is at stake is or rather was, since the practical ambitions of development theory have been progressively reduced over the years nothing less than whether human beings can act, collectively, to improve their lot, or whether they must once again accept that it is ineluctably determined by forces nowadays world market forces over which they have, in general, little or no control (and least of all those who need it most). Unfortunately, in spite of the importance of the question, development theory has returned only partial and conflicting answers to it.

The First Theories of Development

To see why, it is useful to begin with an owls eye view of human history over the past 10,000 years or so since settled agriculture first began to replace hunting and gathering. Agriculture required, but also made possible, an increased specialization of labour, and the development of state apparatuses capable of organizing the defence of cultivated land against outside aggressors and of assuring stability in the increasingly complex social and economic relations on which an agricultural society gradually came to depend. With the establishment of agriculture, then, the process of social evolution greatly accelerated relative to that which had occurred during the preceding 1.8 million years of human life on earth; but for a long time (we may suppose) the process was still sufficiently gradual, and sufficiently precarious at any given place and time, for it not to be felt as an acceleration by the people living through it. The advent of capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, and above all

the advent of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century, forced the fact of human economic, social, political and cultural development on peoples attention. Various thinkers, from Condorcet to Kant, began to conceive of a universal history which would disclose the cumulative pattern and meaning of it all, and its ultimate destination; but the decisive innovators were, of course, Hegel and Marx. [ . . . ] What makes Hegel and Marx true originators of development theory is that they recognized that it was the sudden acceleration in the rate of change that the establishment of capitalist production and bourgeois society had generated that made it necessary and possible to think of history in this way. Bourgeois society had to be understood historically if it was to be made rational (Hegels idea), or superseded (Marxs); but this understanding, both of them realized, in which capitalist society was seen as the outcome of an evolutionary process stretching back into the mists of time, should also make possible an adequate understanding of earlier societies. Between them they inspired a vast subsequent output of theory-inspired historiography and historically based social science concerned with understanding the evolution of human life on earth as a structured totality.

The Emergence of Development Theory

But this tradition of thought about development is not what most people have meant by the term development theory, which emerged in the 1950s to deal with a far narrower issue: namely, how the economies of the colonies of Britain, France, Portugal and other European powers, colonies comprising some 28% of the worlds

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population, might be transformed and made more productive as decolonization approached, in the context of the still semi-colonial condition of the former colonies of Latin America (accounting for a further 7%).1 Understanding this unprecedented event, and gearing policy to these aims, unquestionably called for new theoretical work. But it is striking how little of this work drew on, or even related itself to, the existing body of theory about development that had been prompted by the original advent of capitalism itself. There were three main reasons for this. First of all, the new development theory had a very strong practical orientation: its aim was to provide grounds for immediate action. Even academic theorists as opposed to those directly working for development agencies of one sort or another were drawn to the field by a desire to do something for the peoples of the ex-colonies, and had an even higher degree of conscious commitment to intervention than is usual in most other branches of social science. This militated against philosophical dispassion and reflective self-criticism. Secondly, the new nations were a prime stake in the Cold War, so that theories of their development were unavoidably contaminated by this. Of course, most development theorists saw their work as science, not propaganda: few were interested in following the example of W.W. Rostow by subtitling any of their works A Non-Communist Manifesto. But, whereas the early theorists of rising capitalism thought it essential to locate it in a broad conception of history, most Western theorists of development in the post-war years (and most of them were Westerners) avoided doing so because it meant, unavoidably, taking seriously the work of Marx, which at the height of the Cold War was not merely considered unscientific, but in the USA could easily cost you your job. As a result development studies tended to be conducted, at least until the mid-1960s, as if they had no significant historical or philosophical roots or presuppositions; and while development theorists were usually glad to affirm their strong normative reasons for being concerned with development, they rarely acknowledged the extent to which their thinking reflected their own political commitments.2 A third crucial conditioning factor in the birth of development theory was the Bretton Woods financial and trading regime. These arrangements were designed to permit national governments to manage their economies so as to maximize growth and employment. Capital was not allowed to cross frontiers without government approval, which

permitted governments to determine domestic interest rates, fix the exchange rate of the national currency, and tax and spend as they saw fit to secure national economic objectives. National economic planning was seen as a natural extension of this thinking, as were domestic and international arrangements to stabilize commodity prices. It is not a great oversimplification to say that development theory was originally just theory about the best way for colonial, and then ex-colonial, states to accelerate national economic growth in this international environment. The goal of development was growth; the agent of development was the state and the means of development were these macroeconomic policy instruments. These were taken-for-granted presuppositions of development theory as it evolved from the 1950s onwards. For over ten years (i.e. from 1955 to the late 1960s) development theory so conceived progressed with only modest excitement. Then, partly due to disappointment with the results of policies based on development theory (especially in Latin America and India), and partly to the general reaction of the 1960s against all official values and ideas, the theoretical temperature rose. The ahistorical, unself-critical and politically partisan nature of development theory was put in question by critics on the left; and one way to understand the heady debates that followed throughout most of the 1970s is as a struggle between those who tried to keep development theory within its original parameters, and critics who were trying to extend them and place the issues back into the framework of the historically orientated and ethical tradition of general development theory founded by Hegel and Marx. The full implications of doing this were, however, obscured for a long time by the fact that most of the critics also subscribed to a very practical, short-term, state-orientated conception of development (and in many cases were also influenced by Cold War partisanship). But the work of finally demonstrating the limitations of mainstream development theory was not left to be accomplished by criticism alone. By the mid-1980s the real world on which development theory had been premissed had also disappeared. Above all, national and international controls over capital movements had been removed, drastically curtailing the power of any state wishing to promote national development, while the international development community threw itself into the task of strengthening market forces (i.e. capital) at the expense of states everywhere, but especially in the

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Third World. As a result most states could no longer be the prime movers of development that development theory had hitherto always presupposed, and none of the alternative candidates (such as social movements or communities) proposed by development theorists as the field unravelled were very convincing. [...]

Development Theories: Science and Discourses

The first formulations of development theory were the work of economists, all strongly influenced by the ideas of Keynes and the wartime and post-war practices of state intervention in the economy, including the perceived success of the Marshall Plan, which was in many ways a model for later ideas about aid. They shared the broadly socialdemocratic ethos of the period, including its commitment to planning and its conviction that economic problems would yield to the actions of benevolent states endowed with sufficient supplies of capital and armed with good economic analysis. They produced what P.W. Preston has aptly called development theorys positivist orthodoxy.3 They wrote development plans for both newly independent countries and the not yet independent colonies of Africa, based on the idea of raising rural productivity and transferring underutilized labour out of agriculture into industry. By the end of the 1950s, however, the original optimism that this approach would yield rapid results had begun to evaporate, and the limitations of development economics as a theory of development were beginning to be exposed. The failure of the Indian economy, in particular, to respond rapidly to this approach was attributed in part to the softness of the Indian state, which seemed to lack the capacity to live up to the social-democratic ideal of a rational, firmly benevolent enforcer of the national interest and impose the necessary discipline on everyone from businessmen and landlords to small peasants. But this famous judgement, coming from Gunnar Myrdal and his associates (notably Paul Streeten, and later Dudley Seers), representing the left (and most historically and sociologically sensitive) wing of development economics, signalled the existence of complex problems which lay beyond the conceptual and empirical scope of mainstream i.e. neo-classical economics. Marx had long ago grasped that states were, as he put it, but the official re sume s of civil society. In the first phase of development economics this had been forgotten. What was it

about these societies that made them unresponsive to the positivist orthodoxy? Modernization theory was an American response to this question. It was constructed by sociologists and political scientists involved in the rapidly expanding research and teaching programmes established by the US government to equip the country with the regional expertise it needed to exercise its new role as a superpower. These experts none the less found themselves largely excluded from policy-making roles in the US Agency for International Development (USAID) or the World Bank, the two most important aid agencies in the world, both headquartered in Washington; and modernization theory can be understood in part as their explanation of why the plans of development economists who monopolized these organizations so seldom worked. (They believed that in the transition from traditional to modern forms of social organization, already completed in the industrialized West, the complex interactions between social change and economic development, mediated by politics, could be traced with some precision, using structural-functional analysis and a typology of social structures derived from Weber by Talcott Parsons.) [ . . . ] Practically, the modernization theorists envisaged modern values being diffused through education and technology transfer to the e lites of the periphery. Some attention was paid to this idea in aid policies, especially through technical assistance and scholarship programmes, but on the whole its influence on policy was minor. The modernization school had a bigger impact on academic research, although this owed more to the important topics they opened up by their well-funded fieldwork topics such as political parties, social movements and the dynamics of social change, whose study had not been encouraged by the former colonial authorities than to their methodology. And, although the influence of Max Weber on their work was transmitted in the schematized form of Talcott Parsonss pattern variables, it had some valuable consequences; for example, some modernization research took seriously the persistence of precapitalist social relations and their cultural practices, issues that were largely neglected by the modernization schools critics in the 1970s. But modernization theory suffered from defects closely connected with its leading exponents place in the scheme of things. As Irene Gendzier has pointed out, they were mostly closely connected to the American state and accepted its purposes, including its intense preoccupation with

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combating communism.4 Some modernization theorists were serious cold warriors Gabriel Almond, Edward Shils, Lucien Pye and Samuel Huntington, for example others merely accepted the Cold War and were content to see themselves as the liberal wing of American development studies, believing that modernization would in any case bring democracy as well as economic growth. Very few at that time publicly questioned the identification of modernization studies with the aims of US foreign policy. In the 1950s and early 1960s the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) regularly debriefed US scholars returning from Third World fieldwork and the State Department frequently sought their advice. This situation also led to a symptomatic silence about the social character of development, a silence cloaked, perhaps, by the doctrine of value-freedom. It was implicit that the development under discussion was not socialist, but its capitalist character was not acknowledged either; it was just development, and was certainly not seen as prone to generate class formation and conflict, or as inherently uneven or crisis-ridden. The shortcomings of modernization theory were first attacked where they were most plainly apparent in Latin America, which had enjoyed formal independence for more than a century, but had still to enjoy the fruits that according to modernization theory ought long since to have flowed from it. Or, rather, they were attacked from within Latin America by the German-American Andre Gunder Frank, arriving in Chile from the USA in 1962, using the concepts of dependency and underdevelopment. [ . . . ] Even before the na ve optimism of much early modernization theory had been exposed by the end of the post-war boom and the deepening US involvement in Vietnam and other anticommunist ventures, Franks polemical assaults, coinciding with the student revolt of the 1960s, had effectively demolished its pretensions to scientificity. The early 1970s thus became briefly an era of dependency theory. Or, to be more accurate, in intellectual circles, especially among students in Europe and in ThirdWorld countries, dependency theory held the initiative; and eventually even the international development community felt obliged to accommodate some of its perspectives: for instance, the International Labour Offices 1972 call for redistribution with growth and the World Banks adoption in 1973 of the principle of meeting basic needs were both influenced by the (unacknowledged) impact of dependency thinking.

Dependency theory inverted many of the assumptions of modernization theory. It saw metropolitan policy as maleficent, not beneficent; inflows of foreign investment were seen as giving rise to much greater interest and profit outflows; modernizing e lites were really compradores, or lumpen-bourgeoisies, serving their own and foreign interests, not those of the people; world trade perpetuated structures of underdevelopment, rather than acting as a solvent of them. Capitalist development (development now had a label, at least for left dependency theorists) offered nothing to the periphery; the solution lay in reducing links to the metropoles and bringing about autocentric national economic growth. [ . . . ] [Dependency theorists] critique of official development thinking rested fundamentally on a pulling away from the short-term, ahistorical and uncritical perspectives of Western-produced, state-orientated development discourse, towards the perspective of a universal history. But they themselves also believed that the countries of the periphery could somehow, through better theory and different political leadership, jump over the barriers placed in their way by history, and this gave rise to some key ambiguities in their thought: above all, their tendency to assume the availability of some unspecified alternative development path, more equitable and less painful, which was not in the absence of stronger and more mobilized social forces at the periphery, and more sympathetic support from abroad really available. This problem persisted, even when Franks early version of dependency theory, according to which development was always systematically blocked at the periphery, had been generally abandoned in favour of the idea that, while it was always necessarily difficult, dependent on external forces and distorted (Cardosos famous associated dependent development), development might none the less sometimes be possible.5 In sub-Saharan Africa, dependency theory was broadly accepted by many foreign Africanists and many, perhaps most, African social scientists, not to mention educated people in general, and especially the youth; but there was a further problem, that outside the Republic of South Africa the level of development in few countries had yet produced either a local national capitalist class or a local labour movement (or indeed any other modern social movement) that had the capacity to lead national development along any alternative development path, even if such a path could be plaus-

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ibly specified. As a moral critique of existing policy in Africa, dependency theory played a significant role. But, except in Nyereres Tanzania, dependency thinking was not adopted as an explicit basis for policy, and the problems of Tanzanian socialism had many sources besides the inherent shortcomings of dependency theory. In any case, it was not shortcomings revealed in practice that led to the most significant critiques of dependency theory. Critics from the right generally failed to make the effort needed to understand the Marxian proble matique from which many of dependency theorys key ideas were drawn, so as to be able to make effective attacks on it (this was particularly evident in the attempts to use crossnational statistical data to prove, for example, that periphery country growth rates were not inversely related to trade links with the countries of the core). The most damaging criticism came rather from the classical Marxist left. These critics were, ironically enough, probably the nearest thing we now have to traditional intellectuals, in Gramscis sense of the term (i.e. a category of intellectuals not linked to either of the main contesting classes). [ . . . ] Writers like Geoffrey Kay, Giovanni Arrighi, Arghiri Emmanuel, Michael Cowen and Bill Warren often seemed to display the attachment of the political exile (in their case, exile from the academic and policymaking mainstream) to theory as such. While this had its disadvantages, it did enable them to make a trenchant critique of the eclecticism, populism and practical ambiguity of dependency theory: now for the first time development theory of the post-war variety was squarely confronted from the perspective of the historical tradition of development theory derived from Hegel and Marx. [...] [The classical Marxist] argument that capitalist development of the periphery was a necessary prelude to socialism [was] not a political stance that appealed to many people on the left, inside or outside the Third World, who in any case did not believe it would happen. [ . . . ] Marxist development theorists were also frequently attacked for being Eurocentric, especially for applying to backward societies categories like that of the working class, which did not apply there, and neglecting phenomena like ethnicity, which did. On the whole, this was a canard. The real issue was how far capitalist development was forming classes, and how far this cut across ethnic and other precapitalist solidarities. In practice, the empirical studies con-

ducted by Marxist researchers were no more Eurocentric than those of their critics. No, the real problem of the Marxists contribution to development theory was not so much that their analysis was wrong; in many ways they appear in retrospect to have maintained a rather objective stance, relative to the various other schools, helped by the broad historical perspective and understanding of capitalist dynamics that they drew from Marx. Their crucial problem was rather that there were too few people in the Third World and virtually none in tropical Africa for whom the political and moral standpoint of their analysis (i.e. that people should struggle against capitalist development, while not expecting to transcend it until it had first been accomplished) made sense. Their perspective was, to say the least, very long-term, and offered no plausible line of immediate political action to improve matters. The fact that mainstream development theory had consistently failed to produce results did not make the Marxist view any better in this respect.6 A more plausible political position was, of course, that of the neo-liberals, who did not believe that capitalism would give way to socialism and were only interested in accelerating its advance in the Third World.7 They believed that what was blocking or retarding this was none of the things highlighted by all the theories so far discussed, but rather the whole idea of bringing about development through state intervention in the economy in the first place. This was the standpoint of P.T. (later Lord) Bauer, Deepak Lal, Bela Balassa, Ian Little and others, who represented in development theory the neo-liberal revolution that was taking place in the metropoles at the end of the 1970s, and who offered an intellectual justification for a new wave of market-orientated intervention by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The older representatives of this current belonged to a small group of economists who opposed the post-war social-democratic consensus and who were, as a result, almost as exiled from the mainstream as the Marxists. [ . . . ] They argued that development was blocked by inflated public sectors, distorting economic controls and overemphasis on capital formation.8 Governments were part of the problem, not part of the solution; they were inefficient and often corrupt and hence parasitic, not stimulators of growth. The solution was to privatize the public sector, reduce the scale and scope of government spending and give up all policies, from exchange rate controls to subsidies and redistributive taxation, that altered any prices

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that would otherwise be set by the impersonal forces of the market. As John Toye pointed out, the neo-liberals success in relation to the Third World owed a good deal to the fact that they were ready to say openly what others in the development community knew perfectly well but had (unlike the dependency theorists) been unwilling to say, out of an anxiety not to jeopardize relations between Third World governments and the development agencies for which they worked: namely, that these governments were never exclusively concerned to promote the development goals they were ostensibly committed to, and quite often were not committed to them at all. There was also a strong core of justification for their criticisms of the public sector and of government practices in most Third World countries. But, as Toye has also shown, this common-sense criticism did not add up to a theoretical justification for the neo-liberals claims about the benefits that would flow from an unrestricted market. These claims were very poorly supported with evidence, and were often prima facie implausible; they sprang rather from a deep ideological hostility to government in general, and especially to the legitimacy which the doctrine of state intervention gave to socialists or even social-democrats in office. In any case it was not the shortcomings of the principal existing schools of development theory, serious as they were, that made possible the ascendancy of neo-liberalism (whose shortcomings were quickly revealed as no less serious). What made possible the triumph of neo-liberalism in mainstream development thinking was material, not ideal: the radical transformation in both the structure and the management of the world economy that had begun in the 1960s, and which finally seemed to offer the possibility of creating for the first time in history a truly unified global capitalist economy and one regulated, if at all, only by institutions reflecting the interests of transnational capital. Neo-liberalism articulated the goals and beliefs of the dominant forces that stood to benefit from this process, and pushed it forward. Social-democratic parties and labour movements tried to resist it, but the new right succeeded in neutralizing this resistance and initiating its own market-orientated project in one industrial country after another.9 The development community, which was either part of the state apparatuses of these countries or depended critically on them for funding, was bound to come into line.10

But, although the develoment community was loath to acknowledge it, the new global economic regime thoroughly undermined the foundations of development theory as it had hitherto been conceived.

The Real World of Development

The world in which Keynesian policy-making and its offshoots, development economics and development theory made sense had changed fundamentally. It is true that in some respects the world economy at the end of the 1980s was less integrated than it had been at the beginning of the century, and there were significant tendencies towards protectionism, offsetting those towards a single worldwide market. But, relative to the situation that existed between 1945 and the late 1960s, the changes were fundamental. World trade as a share of world output had returned to the general level of 1913 (i.e. up from 7% of total gross domestic product (GDP) in 1945 to 15% in 1988); foreign direct investment had risen to account for significant shares of total investment (510% of capital stock) in most major economies, and about a third of all trade between countries had come to consist of the movement of goods between different national branches of one or another multinational company. The mutual dependence of national economies implied by these facts was significant (obviously, it is not necessary for half of a countrys capital assets to be foreign owned for decisions taken in foreign countries to have a major impact on its fortunes); but even more striking was the internationalization of capital flows. Instead of merely financing world trade, by the end of the 1980s banks and non-bank financial institutions were dealing in currency exchanges, currency and commodity futures and so-called derivatives of all sorts on a scale that not only dwarfed the conventional transactions needed for trade and investment, but made it impossible for the governments of even large economies to influence the value of their currency by intervening in the currency markets. But in the meantime control of capital movements had in any case also been abandoned as a deliberate policy decision, promoted, above all, by the USA. As competition with other industrial countries intensified, the USA borrowed abroad and became the worlds largest debtor nation. [ . . . ] In 1973, the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates was abandoned altogether. This opened up new opportunities for international

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currency speculation and led to a new period of extreme instability in currency values and commodity prices, including the oil price increases of the 1970s and 1980s; these in turn led to vast new dollar balances being accumulated by the oilexporting countries, and correspondingly vast expansions of borrowing, which drove up the total of international debt to previously unheard-of levels. The abandonment of the post-war international trading regime was followed in 1979-80 by the abandonment of Keynesian economic policy in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, led by the UK and the USA. Deregulation in the USA and deregulation and privatization in the UK were accompanied by high interest rates. The governments of the other European industrial countries followed suit, either willingly or (in the case of France) because keeping interest rates significantly below those of other countries led to capital outflows that could no longer be prevented Keynesianism in one country was no longer practicable. Capital exports were formally deregulated in the UK in 1979 and de facto everywhere else by the mid-1980s. Then, at the end of 1993, the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations inaugurated a further extension of global free trade, including the formerly sacrosanct agricultural sector, while further reductions in the regulatory powers of most industrial country governments were imposed by the European Unions Single Market and Maastricht Treaties and the North American Free Trade Agreement. These changes did not succeed in restoring growth rates to the levels achieved after the Second World War. From the late 1960s the average rate of growth of the OECD countries fell from the post-war level of 34% to around 2%. The developing countries inevitably followed suit, except that there was now a growing polarization among them. Besides the four East Asian newly industrialized countries (NICs) (which accounted for half of the entire Third Worlds exports of manufactures), in the 1980s China and, to a lesser extent, India began to grow faster, while the other developing countries slowed down in the recession that began in the late 1970s their average growth rate declined and in 1983 even became negative. Lower growth rates in the OECD countries and intensified competition also adversely affected the Third World countries terms of trade and interest rates. [ . . . ]

Most Third World countries, then, found themselves more vulnerable than at any time since they were first colonized. Their economies were least well placed to prosper in the new global market place. Primary commodity exports, other than oil, became steadily less significant as manufacturing became less commodity-intensive, and the overall share of the Third World in world trade fell dramatically. Faced with stagnating economies, and with per capita incomes declining from levels at which many people could barely survive already, they responded by increased borrowing abroad until servicing the debt led to balance of payments difficulties so acute that they were forced to turn to the IMF. As a condition of further support the IMF and the World Bank then forced them to cut back government intervention in their economies, leaving these instead to be revived by the freer play of market forces. This did not, of course, produce the anticipated results. Per capita incomes fell still further in all the affected countries (in sub-Saharan Africa, by over a quarter), while the debtservice burden (the proportion of export earnings spent on capital repayments and interest) of the low-income countries (excluding China and India) rose from 11.8% in 1980 to 24.5% in 1992.11 The overall effects are well summed up by Glyn and Sutcliffe:
The share of Africa, Asia and Latin America in world trade is now substantially lower than before 1913. This reflects a major decline in the relative importance of tropical raw materials in world trade . . . This long-term structural reason for the decline . . . has been joined in the period since 1973 by a major short-term crisis in many poorer countries . . . [ . . . ]. The picture for international investment is rather similar. Between 1950 and 1980 the share of all foreign investment going to the Third World held roughly constant at about 25 percent. But after 1984 the share fell sharply to well under 20 percent . . . [and] is very unequally distributed. It goes in significant quantities to only a few resource-rich countries and the newly industrialising countries (including China) while the so-called least developed countries are increasingly excluded. In the second half of the 1980s this group received only 0.1 percent of all foreign investment . . . Once again Africa and most of Latin America and some Asian countries are failing to participate in the growing globalisation of the rest of the world . . . they are increasingly marginalised within the system of which they form a part.12

The story of the world economy under liberalization can, of course, be given a rosy gloss, as in

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the following excerpt from a Washington Post editorial:

The rise of wealth in the late 20th century has been more sustained and more widespread than ever before in history. . . Economic growth is measured in dollars, but it translates into other and much more important things better health and longer lives, less harsh physical labor, greater economic security. There are drawbacks, like developments threats to the environment and the dismaying tendency of governments to spend too much of their new wealth on weapons. But it is hardly Pollyannaish to say that the balance remains strongly in favor of the essential human values.13

Admittedly, to take this line involves overlooking the implications of many of the data reviewed in the last few paragraphs, not to mention the serious risk of conflicts within or between countries of the former First or Second Worlds as the impact of global competition drives whole districts, regions or even countries into permanent poverty, while others prosper. But for present purposes it does not really matter: even on the most optimistic view this picture leaves little or no room for development theory as it used to be conceived. The era of national economies and national economic strategies is past for the time being, at least. With capital free to move where it wishes, no state (and least of all a small poor one) can pursue any economic policy that the owners of capital seriously dislike. Economic planning, welfare systems and fiscal and monetary policies all became subject to control, in effect, by the capital markets, signalled, in the case of Third World countries, by the conditions attached to IMF/ World Bank lending precisely the situation the Bretton Woods system was designed to prevent.14 And in the Third World the whole thrust of recent IMF/World Bank policy, imposed through the conditions attached to almost two hundred structuraladjustment lending programmes and reinforced by bilateral lending consortia, has been to reduce still further the power of national governments to act as prime movers of development. Instead of reforming inefficient agencies, structural adjustment policies have tended to emasculate or eliminate them. Parastatals have been privatized, without thereby becoming more effective. It is hardly too much to say that by the end of the 1980s the only development policy that was officially approved was not to have one to leave it to the market to allocate resources, not the state. In

the World Banks own ingenuous language, New ideas stress prices as signals; trade and competition as links to technical progress; and effective government as a scarce resource, to be employed sparingly and only where most needed.15 Individual national governments especially in the smaller underdeveloped countries, with which development theory used to be above all concerned thus no longer have the tools at their disposal to manage their domestic economies so as to accelerate growth, foster industrialization and catch up, as development theory originally envisaged, and theories premissed on their existence become irrelevant; for most of them Gunder Franks comment was painfully accurate: Now neo-liberalism, post-Keynesianism, and neo-structuralism have . . . become totally irrelevant and bankrupt for development policy. In the real world, the order of the day has become only economic or debt crisis management. Most observers accept that significant parts of the former Third World, including most of subSaharan Africa, are more likely to regress than to advance in the new global economy; it is in the nature of an unregulated competitive system that this will happen. Not every country has the capacity to compete in the market; a few will succeed, while others will decline and some will collapse into civil war or anarchy. [ . . . ] [...] We can now see that the 1950s and 1960s were not normal times but, on the contrary, a special interlude in the history of the worldwide expansion of capitalism in which development theory could be born, but outside which it could not survive. This is not to say that theorizing development is no longer possible or necessary; we need theoretical maps of our increasingly integrated world. But we can no longer assume, as all the principal varieties of development theory have up to now, who the agents of collective action for change will be, or that means exist for them to accomplish anything. Perhaps states, acting singly or in groups, will rediscover the means, but this too must be part of the task of theory to establish. In the meantime, we must recognize that an era is closed, that development theory must return to its classical roots and that the relation between theory and practice that has been assumed hitherto (i.e. theory in the service of this or that existing or imagined coalition of political forces in control of a state) has been put radically in question.

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Development Theory Faced with tre the End of its Raison DE

The authors of the World Banks annual World Development Reports have dealt with the problem by ploughing ahead with an increasingly incoherent discourse of opposites: the state is needed, after all, but not too much, and only when the market doesnt work well; democracy is important but not if it leads to inappropriate demands for redistribution; and so on. Academic development theorists could hardly follow suit, but what could they do instead? It was not until towards the end of the 1980s that the full significance of the changed environment began to be registered in the theoretical literature, although the drastic reduction in the official goals of development propounded by the World Bank and other agencies over the years had signalled it clearly enough. By the early 1970s the vision of catching up (culminating, in Rostows 1960 version, in a high mass-consumption society, which implicitly included equity and democracy) had already given way to more modest ambitions: redistribution with growth i.e. some reduction in inequality, but financed out of growth so that the better off in the developing countries might be less unwilling to agree to it in a word, fewer illusions about democracy. And by the end of the 1970s redistribution had given way to just trying to meet the basic needs of the poor, who, it seemed, would always be with us after all; the goal of equity had disappeared. Then came structural adjustment; to get growth, under-developed societies were to adjust themselves to the procrustean bed allocated to them by the market, and for this purpose even basic needs must be sacrificed. By then, however, everyone was aware that things had radically changed and that development theory was in deep trouble. Apart from neo-liberalism itself, five main lines of theoretical response can be identified. One has been to see the problem as essentially one of theory itself: there is a theoretical impasse, which must be overcome by better concepts and research. A second response might be called eclecticism as usual in the development community. A third consists of further evolutions of dependency theory. A fourth response is to return to the unfinished agenda of Myrdal and the neo-institutionalists of the 1960s i.e., how to add social and political dimensions on to the analyses of development economics but

this time by analysing these dimensions in terms of rational choice theory. A fifth response, and the last to be considered here, is to renounce any commitment to development, seeking (often in the name of post-structuralism) merely to understand what goes on. Let us look briefly at these. [ . . . ]

Development Studies as a Substitute for Development Theory?

In 1991 a group of left-inclined development theorists collaborated to produce an excellent volume, edited by Frans Schuurman, called Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory.16 The idea of an impasse in critical development theory had been canvassed in various articles of the mid-1980s, including one by David Booth;17 by 1991, however, Booth, in a leading contribution to the Schuurman volume, saw signs that the impasse was being overcome. In his view (strongly endorsed by Schuurman) empirical research had emancipated itself from the excessive generality, necessitarianism, teleology, class reductionism, dogmatism and other short-comings of Marxist-influenced development theory, and in doing so had begun to show a potential for fresh theoretical initiatives. New theory would be sensitive to the great diversity of situations in the Third World, would refuse to reduce complex and locally specific gender and other relations to relations of class, and would allow for the possibility of room for manoeuvre at the micro and meso levels of action, as well as the macro level, which had been the focus of previous development theory without, however, abandoning the inherited agenda of political economy. It might also, Booth hoped, succeed in combining the study of the cultural meanings subjectively attributed to things by people with the study of those same things from an external or objective standpoint, in a way not achieved before: and it would try to be relevant to the concerns of those engaged in practical development work.18 Booths starting-point the enormous expansion of field research under the aegis of development studies was, of course, valid; and if we add to this the no less impressive accumulation of social research not necessarily conceived of as development studies including social and economic history and gender studies in Third World countries both the volume and the quality have clearly outstripped what went before, frequently revealing the somewhat shaky empirical

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foundations of previous grand theory as well. And Booths characterization of this work as mostly free from some of the vices of earlier development thinking reductionism, excessive generality and the rest and as being much more varied in its interests, was also accurate. Women, locallevel activity, ethnicity, religion and culture, for example, which all tended to be secondary in the earlier literature, are often foregrounded in more recent work, which also tends to show more concern for detail, sets higher standards of proof and is in many ways intellectually refreshing.19 But Booths idea that new development theory will emerge autogenetically from the accumulating volume and density of all this work, through some spontaneous fusion with the concerns of previous political economy, is a different matter. On the one hand, these mini-narratives (if one may so call them, in contrast to the old big metanarratives which it is now fashionable to disclaim) have implicit higher-level theoretical presuppositions that need to be made explicit (microfoundations imply macrostructures, as much as the other way round), and it would be surprising if these were found to constitute, so to speak spontaneously, a new and better theory of development. And, even more crucially, the construction of a new theory of development is necessarily a political task, involving political choices about whom (what social forces) the theory is for, to accomplish what ends and in what contexts. Conflicting political commitments were, after all, what ultimately inspired the powerful theoretical debates within development theory in the 1970s, and any worthwhile renewal of development theory now depends on a renewed clarification of political presuppositions and purposes as well. To put it another way, what is striking about the way Booth and his colleagues conceive of the impasse and its transcendence is that it is so idealist, i.e. the origins and the solution of the problem seem to lie in theory itself. With the exception of a page in Schuurmans Introduction, little reference is made in the book to the changes in the real world that have undercut the original development project. [. . . . The authors] do not confront the thought that, so long as collective socio-economic interests are supposed to be the products of the action of market forces rather than goals of strategic state action, the domain of development theory is radically changed, if not abolished; that what is left is simply a world economy whose effects are overwhelmingly determined by very powerful states and market actors, with at most minor modifications or delays brought about by

the actions of lesser states, social movements, communities or whatever, which do not have significant military or market power. Certainly, this thought may be mistaken, or at least exaggerated; but in that case a new theory of development must at least begin by showing why. [ . . . ] Theory needs both a subject and an object, and the prerequisite of any new development theory that aims to be practical must surely be the analysis of the now deregulated global market and the social forces that dominate it, and then a definition of alternative social forces whose developmental needs cannot be met within this system, and which can be expected to struggle against it. Simply abjuring the alleged short-comings of the theories that were constructed in the period of the collectively regulated world economy of legally sovereign states, and accumulating ever more detailed and subtle empirical analyses of local and particular experiences, will not of itself answer this need; for that world economy is, as Hegel put it, a form of life that has become old, and which theory cannot rejuvenate but only understand.

Eclecticism as Usual in the Development Community?

The term development community refers here to the network of people professionally concerned with development the staff of donor and recipient country development ministries, of multilateral aid agencies, financial institutions and nongovernment organizations, and academic and non-academic consultants. It implies no disrespect to say that this community also constitutes an interest which has to adapt as best it can to constantly changing circumstances, rather like civil servants at the national level. There is a broad consensus about aims and possibilities, founded on development economics but honed by experience and the perspectives of other disciplines into a somewhat eclectic mixture capable of absorbing sometimes quite drastic changes in fashion or politics (witness, for example, the World Banks successive accommodations, first to a mild touch of dependency, and then, within a decade, to neoliberalism); and then, when the need passes, reverting back to a more centrist stance. How has the development community responded to the new situation? As an example we may take John Toyes widely acclaimed study, Dilemmas of Development, which I have already cited. Toyes book is well known as a trenchant critique of the neo-liberal

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dogma which gained ascendancy in the World Bank and IMF in the 1980s, but it is also quite a revealing statement of his own position. For, besides criticizing the neo-liberals, Toye also criticizes the old political economy (left wing, in his terminology) to which neo-liberalism was a reaction. Toye treats left-wing political economists in rather general terms, and even lumps them together as the exponents of what he calls the standard left view (for example, of the state (pp. 121 22)), even though it is sometimes hard to think of any individual theorist who has actually subscribed to the view he describes; but what is interesting is that Toye seems to be at least as hostile towards them as to the neoliberals, and this draws attention to the fact that the ground Toye sees himself occupying is the sensible, reasonable, middle ground, in between these untenable extremes. What is the nature of this terrain? The answer is not immediately obvious. Toye is a careful and penetrating critic of other theories, but the standpoint from which his criticism is made is not so clear. For instance, he explicitly subscribes to the following views, among others: global modernization is inherently conflictual because it is a human directed historical process (p. 6); what is practicable and desirable is managed capitalism (p. 10); in seeking to promote development we must avoid bringing preconceptions from outside, and see things through the eyes of poor people in the countries concerned (p. 40); and the recent economic retrogression in so much of the Third World appears to be a short-period interruption to a long period of buoyant growth (p. 34). Now, none of these ideas is self-evident. Why should human-directed historical processes be considered inherently conflictual, rather than inherently collaborative? What theory of history or human nature is involved here? On what grounds does it make sense to believe in managed capitalism as an ideal, given capitals dramatically successful escape from management into the realm of the self-regulating global market since the 1970s? On what grounds and in what circumstances are the perceptions of poor people to be respected, relative to other kinds of understanding? (What makes their thinking about economics important or valid, but not, for example, their ideas about the supernatural?) And from what theoretical stand-point does the retrogression of the last decade or more appear as a short-period interruption to growth, rather than as a long term, if not permanent, reversal? Toye undoubtedly has answers to such questions. What is interesting is that he does not seem

to feel the need to offer them; he does not defend his assumptions, eclectic and open to challenge as they are. [ . . . ] [ . . . ] It is also worth reflecting on what Toye puts in place of the single desired social state (another straw man who on the right or the left has really advocated this?) that he rejects as a teleological approach to development: what most people would say mattered ultimately, he suggests, is the ending of large-scale poverty. . . sickness, ignorance and premature death, not to mention the violence, ugliness and despair of daily life (p. 36). Apart from the fact that this seems no less teleological than any other goal of development, where do these values come from? Who are these most people whose authority is being appealed to here, and who no longer care about equality or democracy? Is this common sense, in whose name theory, left and right, is attacked, anything other than the tradition of Western charity?

Dependency Theory in the 1990s

Dependency theory in its early sense of a general theory that sought to explain underdevelopment at the periphery as almost wholly the insuperably self-perpetuating effect of metropolitan capital probably has few remaining adherents. The NICs showed that structures of dependence might sometimes be overcome, while growing interdependence among even industrialized economies has made all dependence relative. However, dependency theorys focus on the many forms of acute dependence of small, open, ex-colonial economies on the powerful economic interests and states that dominate the financial and commodity markets in which they operate (concrete situations of dependency) remains indisputably valid. [ . . . ] [ . . . ] It is interesting to see how the changes that have occurred in the real world have been seen by one of dependency theorys most famous Western exponents, Andre Gunder Frank, who has described the changes in his own thinking in an autobiographical essay published in 1991.20 [...] As the 1970s progressed, Frank [ . . . ] became convinced that not only was dependency theory devoid of any convincing alternative conception of development, but the whole idea of national development, which had been the raison de tre of development theory, was no longer tenable in the emerging conditions of a worldwide market. His historical work on the emergence of the capitalist world system led him to see all dreams of alternative development paths pursued by particular

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countries or regions delinked from that system as illusory [ . . . ], while his work on the crisis into which the world capitalist system had entered in the 1970s convinced him that for most of the Third World development within the system was also impossible. In particular, so long as Third World countries were paying on average about 6.5% of their gross national product (GNP) to service their debt, as he estimated was the case through much of the 1980s, there could only be development of underdevelopment, with disinvestment in productive infrastructure and human capital and with the loss of competitiveness on the world market. The theoretical position to which this led Frank was that the only useful object of study is world development, which sets the limits to whatever normative goals it makes sense to try to pursue, and that the only useful agents capable of pursuing such goals are particular groups or classes (p. 54). Such goals, even if they can be achieved by such groups or classes, will be relative to the way world development currently affects the part of the globe they live in, a development that has been going on throughout recorded history:
I now find the same continuing world system, including its center-periphery structure, hegemonyrivalry competition, and cyclical ups and downs has been evolving (developing?) for five thousand years at least . . . In this world system, sectors, regions and peoples temporarily and cyclically assume leading and hegemonic central (core) positions of social and technological development. They then have to cede their pride of place to new ones who replace them. Usually this happens after a long interregnum of crisis in the system. During this time of crisis, there is intense competition for leadership and hegemony. The central core has moved around the globe in a predominantly westerly direction. With some zig-zags, the central core has passed through Asia, East (China), Central (Mongolia), South (India) and West (Iran, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Turkey) . . . Then the core passed on to Southern and Western Europe and Britain, via the Atlantic to North America, and now across it and the Pacific towards Japan. Who knows, perhaps one day it will pass all the way around the world to China. (pp. 5657)

technological development. The significance of the words if not to guide is not made clear: perhaps Frank is still faintly agnostic on the possibility of some form of world government emerging? [...] Most development for one group . . . comes at the expense of anti-development for others. They are condemned to dualistic marginalisation and/or to underdevelopment of development. That is what real world development really means (pp. 5860). And, since all existing models of development are inadequate, Frank pins his hopes only on radical democratization, based on the emerging strength of the hitherto neglected social groups, and especially women. [...] [ . . . ] At one time the success [of the NICs] was attributed by neo-liberals to the virtues of laissez faire, until the work of Hamilton, White, Amsden, Wade and others showed incontrovertibly that, if anything, the NICs experience demonstrated the precise opposite, i.e. the necessity for forceful, systematic and sustained economic intervention by a strong, centralized state pursuing a coherent long-term development strategy.21 This conclusion has now been swallowed, albeit with some difficulty, by the World Bank,22 but its implications for development theory have still to be fully digested in mainstream circles. [...]

Rational Choice and Development

One of the most influential reactions at least in the USA to the end of development theorys raison de tre has been to try to build a new political economy of development in which the key to economic performance is seen as institutions that can be analysed in terms of rational choice theory. This response makes sense in several ways. First, it involves going back to the problem raised by Myrdal and his colleagues in the 1960s how to incorporate the obstacles posed by political and social phenomena into the analysis of economic development but this time in a way that explicitly tries to stay within the assumptions of neoclassical or marginalist economics, that is unlike the neo-Weberians of the modernization school (not to mention Marxists or neo-Marxists), the new institutionalism is supposed to rest on the assumption of rational individuals maximizing their utilities and nothing more, and should (in its most optimistic version, at least) be capable of being integrated with economics and modelled

Development theory based on any idea of autonomous national development, on any conception of de-linking, is, therefore, an illusion (p. 58). What is needed is a more rounded, dynamic and allencompassing supply and demand side economics to analyse, if not to guide, world economic and

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mathematically. Given the recent ascendancy of neo-classical economics in the development community, this has an air of political realism about it (and maybe some people evidently hope it can also endow political science with some of the economists famous rigour). Second, it holds out the prospect of dispensing with the Marxist phenomenology of classes and relations of production and other unclean entities, whose relevance to the problems of development cannot always be denied; in the choice-theoretic discourse all of these are reducible to special cases of a very small stock of extremely general concepts, such as institutions, organizations and their principals and agents. [...] The central idea of the new institutionalism or new political economy is that what makes for an efficient economy is a set of institutions that permit individuals to benefit personally from doing what will also serve the (material) interests of society as a whole. Thus, for instance, a system of land tenure that allows tenants to keep for themselves a significant part of any expanded output they produce through allocating extra resources of capital or effort to its production is more economically efficient than one which does not. This reasoning can be applied to taxation, the organization of central or local government, education, banking, marketing in effect, to any social arrangements (even marriage law and custom). Conversely it is often possible to see, retrospectively, that the institutional structure has provided incentives for individuals to do things which were inimical to development; while prospectively it is often possible to imagine or even design institutional arrangements that will improve the social returns to the economic activity of individuals (which is, roughly, what management consultants are supposed to be concerned with when they are hired by the state). But [ . . . ] we cannot explain in terms of the paradigm how any particular set of institutions that existed in the past or exist today in a given country came into existence. For that we have to resort to a much wider, looser theory of social change of precisely the kind that most exponents of public choice theory are trying to dispense with. [ . . . ] [ . . . ] So much of the problem of understanding social change is understanding what motivates collective action, and the results of centuries of study and reflection suggest very strongly that there are not going to be any general, or any simple,

answers. Any interesting answers have always been specific to historically well-studied places and times (the French Revolution, the nineteenth century labour movement in Europe), and have involved complex long-term and short-term interactions between individuals, groups, cultural practices and institutions of specific kinds (churches, constitutions, professions, communities, armies) in short, they almost always involve the social whole. [ . . . ] A second difficulty is the projects reductionism. For instance, the idea that developmentally significant change may be understood as being the result of the interaction between existing institutions and the organizations formed to achieve whatever goals the institutional structure makes possible and attractive is, obviously, a very general statement about the sort of relationship that Marx postulated between classes and property rights. Presumably the advantage of reformulating it in these terms is that it brings out the general characteristics, which any such hypothesis needs to have, in a way that does not prejudge what it will actually state. The difficulty is, however, that whatever plausibility the general statement has comes from the particular case, not from the abstract one, which looks like a tautology. [...] Third, there is a closely related tendency [ . . . ] to argue that, because some aspect of observed reality can be modelled, that aspect is the determinative or key one. For instance, institutions are very broadly defined, in this literature, as systems of rules or norms constraining behaviour, which means that virtually all persisting social relations can be represented as institutions.23 But then the claim that institutions are the underlying determinant of the long-run performance of economies becomes an unhelpful truism i.e. the pattern of social relations determines economic performance. [ . . . ] But what about the determinative effects of all the other aspects of all the other kinds of institutions not susceptible of being modelled in this way? What about the effects of the passion aroused in religious movements, or the conservatism, loyalty, discipline, etc., embodied in cultural norms, or the reforming or revolutionary zeal generated by class or national feeling, all of which seem to have played no less crucial parts in determining economic performance at one time or another in history? They can be brought back in only by accepting that the claim that institutions are the underlying determinant is true by definition. It is

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plausible that, other things being held constant, property laws will have important effects on economic performance. But the whole difficulty of understanding development [ . . . ] is that other things do not stay constant but continually interact with property rights and all other kinds of social relations in ways that cannot be comprised within any model as simple and one-sided as those of rational choice theorizing. Thus, while rational choice undoubtedly has valuable contributions to make to specific issues in development the work of Samuel Popkin on peasant farmers behaviour is an excellent example it does not point the way towards a new development theory for our times.

Rethinking Third World Politics

Assuming, that is, that we are still concerned with development. The response of some academics has been, on the contrary, to frankly abandon it. [ . . . ] It is interesting to see what is involved in abandoning any policy concerns, including any commitment to development, by examining the work of [ . . . ] Jean-Franc ois Bayart. In his chapter entitled Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the Political Trajectory, Bayart outlines his concept of historicity, the idea that politics must always be understood as a moment in a complex and very longterm story.24 This story can be understood, Bayart suggests, in three possible ways: as the story of a civilization (in Braudels sense), as the story of a system of inequalities (caste, class, age, etc.) or as the story of a culture or as a combination of these. Out of peoples experience of this past, or these pasts pasts which, Bayart stresses, comprise external influences as well as forces endogenous to the country or region under study they have constructed various discursive genres, in terms of which politics are understood: examples he gives include such widely differing genres of discourse as the British system of government (a discourse about representation, civil liberties, etc.), Islamic thought, and the world of the invisible (the occult, witchcraft, etc.). People think in terms of these discourses, and politics are constrained by them while at the same time involving contestations between them. The analysis of politics must therefore, according to Bayart, try to link the collective work of the production of the state to the subjective interiority of its actors (p. 68) by studying both the long-term historicity of a people, through which their political institutions have evolved, and the discourses through which

these institutions are participated in and understood today. [...] In contrast, Bayart offers a longue dure e view of Africans as having over the centuries always been subordinate players in relation to the outside world, but players none the less, always engaged in a process of extraversion, in which they have sought to draw on resources or alliances available in the external environment in furtherance of their continuing internal competitions and conflicts.25 [ . . . ] What is now going on, Bayart argues, is the construction of new historic blocs, rhizomatically linked to the underlying societies (i.e. like shoots from a tuber) and clustering around the state, and actually combining elements that earlier theorists have tended to see as mutually exclusive and opposed to each other: traditional and modern e lites, local and central e lites, chiefs and civil servants, state and private-sector e lites, etc. In Bayarts view, ethnicity, class and the rest are all interlinked in a reciprocal assimilation of e lites, as the members of these e lites collaborate with each other to profit as best they can from their dealings, with the world outside. And so what earlier theorists saw as deformations or aberrations appear in Bayarts optic as more or less normal, and in truth functional. Even a deeply corrupt state can be seen as an integrative force; even military coups can be understood as modes of intervention to cool out e lite competition which has become out of control and destabilizing (p. 154); even structural adjustment programmes may be seen as removing spoils from the control of parts of the historic bloc that the president might otherwise not be able to dominate adequately (pp. 22526). [ . . . ] As for the African masses, Bayart frequently asserts that they are not passive victims of external forces, that they make their own history; but the actual role he shows them playing is circumscribed so closely by their lack of capacity to act for themselves and by their desperate struggle for survival that they much more often seem complicit in the trends he describes. [ . . . ] There is notable inconsistency in Bayarts account, in its oscillation between a sort of gruff realism about the post-colonial state and moral discomfort. For, where the modernization school expected the African e lites to be modernizing and good, Bayart expects them to be what they are, interested in power, wealth and status at more or less any cost. His standpoint might seem Hegelian: history unfolds according to the cunning of reason, so that it makes no sense to shed tears for historys

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victims. To do so is inconsistent, and furthermore empty, since there is no way to intervene. But, unlike Hegel, Bayart does not subscribe to an objective idealism. In his concept of history there is no higher purpose which peoples suffering serves. And this is what it means to try to study the Third World without any commitment. The work of those committed to development had faults, but thanks to this commitment they all had some idea however imperfect of who they were writing for, and who might act in the light of what they wrote. Bayarts intended readers, on the other hand, seem to be ultimately just Africanists, capable of getting their minds round Africas historicity, but with neither the power nor the wish to act historically. As with Toyes stance, this may have an air of being more realistic than the stance of Marxists, dependency theorists or modernizers, but what does this amount to? Bayart has evident affinities with post-structuralist discourse, according to which we can never know reality but can only make a variety of statements about it with varying degrees and kinds of usefulness. Among social scientists a frequent symptom of this idea is to lay stress on the complexity of everything and the way no one formulation ever fully captures it, a distancing effect that certainly seems to play a part in Bayarts work. But, even within that discourse, something eventually is said, a choice of statements is made, a general account emerges. And then, it is fair to ask, from what standpoint is Bayarts ultimately quietist picture drawn? And for whom is it painted, if not for the aforementioned kleptocrats, whom it does not exactly celebrate, but does not condemn either? Consistently, for someone uncommitted to any concept of development, Bayart makes a resolute separation of politics from economics and says virtually nothing about the relation between them. In his account of Africa, what matters is only how economic resources are appropriated to service the endless cycle of the reciprocal assimilation of e lites. If at the end of the twentieth century many African countries are destined to suffer desertification, famine, crime and warlordism, or to undergo recolonization as vast refugee camps, is it of great importance in the longue dure e? In practice, Bayart has been an active spokesman for African interests in French public debate. The stance outside or above the fray that he explicitly adopts in his thesis on historicity contradicts this, and it is this contradiction that repeatedly surfaces in these texts.

In Conclusion: Development, or the Fate of the Ancients?

These sketches of a few selected currents in contemporary writing about development (or, in the case of [ . . . ] Bayart, in reaction against development) are, of course, subjective and partial. Their point is to raise the question of what development theory was and has become, and above all to try to clarify what seems to me to be at stake: namely, the urgent need to revive development theory, not as a branch of policy-orientated social science within the parameters of an unquestioned capitalist world order, but as a field of critical enquiry about the contemporary dynamics of that order itself, with imperative policy implications for the survival of civilized and decent life, and not just in the ex-colonial countries. Since the late 1960s, the debate about development theory has in fact been more and more clearly about the theory of global development that each one presupposed, although the participants have all too often not recognized, or not acknowledged, that this was the issue at stake. Today it has to be frankly confronted: what do the universal development of the productive forces and a truly global relation of supply and demand, which the OECD governments and the international financial institutions have been labouring for almost two decades to realize, now imply for any individual project of development? For whom, contemplating what goals and by what means, can a useful development theory be constructed? The scale on which these questions seem to oblige us to think is painfully vast, and may seem almost to threaten incoherence; but, if it was not impossible to have a theory of capitalism on a national scale, why should it be impossible to have one of capitalism on a global scale? The theories of Hegel or Marx (or Weber or Fukuyama, for that matter) are not incoherent, but just very large-scale and necessarily full of selective simpifications, speculative elements, debatable assumptions and middle-level problems of all kinds. What is really incoherent is a development theory that does not rest explicitly on as clear a general theory of world history, and of world capitalism in particular, as it is possible to have. Such a theory must, evidently, indicate what is and is not possible for various potential actors, just as the Keynesian theory of global capitalism did at the birth of development theory. On the basis of such a general theory, new development

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theories at a lower level of abstraction can then be formulated. These may be for states, for groups of states organized in regional or other organizations or for non-state agents of various kinds. The goals of development envisaged by these theories will depend on the actors for whom they are formulated and the scope for change that the theorists preferred theory of world capitalism suggests exists for them. If, as I fear, it seems that not much scope for change exists especially for small, severely underdeveloped countries without a radical resubordination of capital to democratic control, development theory will have also to be about this, and agents capable of undertaking it. This abstract conclusion seems to me preferable, in spite of its abstraction, to trying to breathe life back into any kind of development theory whose illusory appearance of concreteness and practicality depends on averting ones gaze from its lack of adequate foundations. NOTES
1 Estimated from data in Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (New York: Facts on File, 1978). Fifty years later, population growth had produced a situation where the developing countries (including China) accounted for almost four-fifths of the worlds population. 2 A striking illustration of this can be found in Gabriel Almonds contribution to the review of late modernization theory edited by Myron Wiener and Samuel P. Huntington, Understanding Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), in which he represents the modernization school as objective (governed by professional criteria of evidence and inference) and its critics as mere propagandists (pp. 44468 and especially 450 ff.). 3 P.W. Preston, Theories of Development (London: Routledge, 1982), Chapter 3, referring to the work of Harrod and Domar and their successors, exported to the soon-to-be ex-colonies. 4 Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder: Westview, 1985). [ . . . ] 5 F.H. Cardoso, Dependency and Development in Latin America, New Left Review 74, 1972, pp. 83 95. [ . . . ] 6 For an engaging discussion of the spurious and self-interested demand often made by some members of the development community, that critical theorists of development should come up with an answer to the question of what is to be done?, see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 1990), pp. 27988. Members of the development industry, he remarks, seek only the kind of advice they can take. One developer asked my advice on what his country could do to help these people. When I suggested that his government might contemplate sanctions against apartheid, he replied, with predictable irritation, No, no! I mean development! The only advice that is in question here is advice about how to do development better (p. 284). The convergence of Marxist and neo-liberal thinking in terms of their analysis of global capitalism should not have surprised anyone who appreciated their shared intellectual roots in the thought of Smith and Ricardo, as Dudley Seers pointed out in The Congruence of Marxism and Other Neo-classical Doctrines, IDS Discussion Paper No. 13 (University of Sussex: Institute of Development Studies, 1978). [ . . . ] Lord Bauer has outlined his early thinking in Remembrance of Studies Past: Retracing First Steps, in Gerald M. Meier and Dudley Seers (eds), Pioneers in Development (New York: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 2743. The general position of the neo-liberals is summarized and criticized by John Toye in Dilemmas of Development, op. cit., Chapters 3 and 4. See also Christopher Colclough, Structuralism versus Neoliberalism: An Introduction, in C. Colclough and James Manor (eds), States or Markets? Neo-liberalism and the Development Policy Debate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 125. [ . . . ] See Eric Helleiner, From Bretton Woods to Global Finance: A World Turned Upside Down, in Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey R.D. Underhill (eds), Political Economy and the Changing Global Order (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994), pp. 163 75. The dependency of international agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF on the policy preferences of their major participating states is obvious, but the pressures [are] extended to the non-government organizations (NGOs) in the development field as well. [ . . . ] Manfred Bienefeld, Rescuing the Dream of Development in the Nineties, Silver Jubilee Paper 10 (University of Sussex: Institute of Development Studies, 1991, p. 13). [ . . . ] Glyn and Sutcliffe, Global But Leaderless?, The New Capitalist Order, Socialist Register 1992 (London: Merlin Press, 1992), pp. 9091. A World Growing Richer, Washington Post editorial in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, 26 June 1994. [ . . . ] See Helleiner, From Bretton Woods to Global Finance, in Stubbs and Underhill (eds), [Link]., pp. 16465. This revealing formulation comes from the conclusions of the World Banks review of the evolution of approaches to development in its 1991 World

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Development Report under the heading The Way Forward. As the real consequences of structural adjustment became inescapably obvious towards the end of the 1980s, especially in Africa, official policy veered back towards an emphasis on the importance of the state, but without reconciling this with the continued official emphasis on the superiority of markets over state action in a word, official policy became contradictory, as any thoughtful reader of the 1991 World Development Report can see. Frans J. Schuurman (ed.), Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory (London: Zed Books, 1993). David Booth, Marxism and Development Sociology: Interpreting the Impasse, World Development 13/7, 1985, pp. 76187. [ . . . ] David Booth, Development Research: From Impasse to a New Agenda, in Schuurman (ed.), Beyond the Impasse, op. cit., pp. 4976. [ . . . ] For an exemplary review of a great deal of this work see Frederick Cooper, Florencia E. Mallon, Steve J. Stern, Allen Isaacman and William Roseberry, Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

20 Andre Gunder Frank, The Underdevelopment of Development, Special Issue of Scandinavian Journal of Development Alternatives 10/3, September 1991. 21 See Clive Hamilton, Capitalist Industrialisation in Korea (Boulder: Westview, 1986); Gordon White, Developmental States in East Asia (New York: St Martins Press, 1987); Alice Amsden, Asias Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 22 See The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993). 23 Institutions are the rules of the game in a society, or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction (North, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3). 24 In James Manor (ed.) Rethinking Third World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 5354. 25 Jean-Franc ois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London: Longman, 1993).