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Notes
1. It is fitting that this festschrift includes Fred Cooper and Bob Shenton, historians of Africa who have also made major contributions to our understanding of ideas and practices of ‘development’. It is also gratifying that the historians of doctrines of development on whom I draw below, in addition to Bob Shenton, also produced original and significant historical research on Africa, namely Michael Cowen and Gavin Kitching who both worked on Central Province, Kenya.
2. Or, in full Comtean vein: ‘Development was the means by which progress would be subsumed by order’ (Cowen and Shenton Citation1995:34).
3. In fact, Thomas Citation(2000) structures the argument of his thoughtful essay on the condition of Development Studies today around Cowen and Shenton's distinction between immanent and intentional development.
4. ‘Development doctrine’ thus sometimes seems close to what was called ‘the social problem’ in Britain and mainland western Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely how ‘to remove the hostility of the working classes towards private property or to overcome the antagonism between labour and capital’ through some form of amelioration of the ‘social misery’ that Cowen and Shenton point to (Stedman Jones 2004:224, and Ch 6 ‘Resolving “The Social Problem”’).
5. See the masterly synthesis and interpretation of Kennedy (1989), especially chapter 4 on ‘Industrialization and the Shifting Global Balances, 1815–85’, the key period of the examples noted here. My colleague Chris Cramer (personal communication) points out the absence of military factors and concerns in Ha-Joon Chang's otherwise illuminating historical survey (2002) of the centrality of state action to the economic development of the industrial capitalist powers.
6. Albeit traced and analysed by them in far greater depth and detail, and with far greater benefit, than can be adequately conveyed here; the value of their argument in reminding us of the centrality of questions of order to doctrines of development (in however implicit a fashion) is difficult to overstate (see note 18 below).
7. I have argued elsewhere that the agrarian question of classic Marxism, and debates among Marxist historians on the original transition(s) to agrarian capitalism in north-western Europe, employ an ‘internalist’ framework, the effects of which are especially problematic when that understanding of the agrarian question is deployed to analyse development in the contemporary ‘South’ (Bernstein Citation1996; also 2004).
8. A theme continued with even more overt provocation in Gavin Kitching's book on development and (through?) globalization (2001), which is a kind of sequel to his earlier book cited here.
9. Condorcet after he dropped the ‘de’.
10. On which see Stedman Jones' article ‘A history of ending poverty’ in The Guardian (London) of 2 July 2005, where he addresses the ‘Making Poverty History’ campaign and its topical dramatisations of sub-Saharan Africa by emphasising the radical insistence of Paine and Condorcet on entitlement as opposed to charity. Seers Citation(1969) is a classic statement of a social democratic ‘meaning of development’ in what I call below the founding moment of development studies.
11. Although the conception of ‘development studies’ extends beyond academic entities that bear the name. Its establishment and profile as a distinct academic field in the South may have been patchy because ‘national development’, and how best to achieve it, was the principal preoccupation across social science departments and institutes in Asian and African universities following political independence, as to a large extent in Latin America. At one time to be an economist, say, in India or Tanzania or Chile was, in effect, to be a development economist.
12. My view of the intellectual range of vision and vitality of the founding moment of development studies is more positive than that of Colin Leys in the magisterial title essay of his Rise and Fall of Development Theory (1996). Dudley Seers (see note 11) had a key institutional as well as intellectual role in Britain as the founding director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.
13. In my own experience of development studies in Britain the characteristic, and defensive, stance of most such colonial veterans, former District Officers and the like, was an ideology of ‘practicality’ and anti-intellectualism.
14. What needed replacement included the contributions of the Bank and other donors to the debris of that period, produced inter alia by the incoherence of aid policies and practices and the frustrations and tensions generated by their results.
15. Including the latest ambitions of its theorists to subsume much of the agenda of sociological and political inquiry within the paradigm of neo-classical economics (Fine Citation2002).
16. Where NGO activity concentrates and the jargon of ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’, ‘stakeholders’ and the like is most pervasive, along with tendencies to celebrate the ‘local’ and ‘indigenous’: the Gemeinschaftlichkeit (‘community-ness’) of the ‘natives’ once more?
17. Indeed, it can be argued that notions of development strategy of any substantive content are largely absent from the intellectual framework of neo-liberal ‘policy science’. What has been largely abandoned from the founding moment of development studies is that central attention to issues of economic planning, public investment and accumulation, together with the expansive conceptions of public goods with which they were then associated. In effect, there is now no intellectually legitimate basis for a development economics, only a universal economics of maximising behaviour. Ha-Joon Chang is among the most prolific and incisive champions today of reviving and reinstating development economics (Chang Citation2003).
18. Those who fail to play by the rules are criminalised by the discourse, in effect; rent-seekers, for example, are associated with corruption, while social actors and practices that disturb the social and political order of an emergent global bourgeois civilisation exemplify criminal violence. A recent addition to the concerns of development studies – stimulated, funded and steered by aid donors – is the area of state collapse, crisis states, and so on. In a provocative book, Duffield Citation(2001) explores the connections between development doctrine and global order/security.
19. Bill Freund (Citation1996:128) has observed that economic history is ‘probably more capable’ (than other branches of history) ‘of explaining the constraints and limitations, the range of the possible that development has taken’, a proposition that is explored and illustrated in the overview his article provides.
20. Fred Cooper and Randall Packard (Citation1997:3) suggest that ‘The ultramodernist [by which they mean neo-liberal] and the postmodernist critiques have a lot in common, especially their abstractions from the institutions and structures in which economic action takes place and which shape a power-knowledge regime. The ultramodernists see power only as a removable distortion to an otherwise self-regulating market. The postmodernists locate the power-knowledge regime in a vaguely defined “West” or in the alleged claims of European social science to have found universal categories for understanding and manipulating social life everywhere’.
21. The other side of this coin is his question: ‘How can you sustain a “discipline” teaching stuff like poverty alleviation or an introduction to current buzzwords or survey techniques?’ (same source). Indeed, but if there's buoyant demand for professional staff from aid agencies with an expanded agenda of interventions (illustrated above), and a plentiful supply of recruits who want to make careers in development, hence need to know how to alleviate poverty (!) as well as how to use the latest buzzwords fluently (talk the talk)…? For advanced buzzword capacity see the portrait of Jim ‘Fingers’ Adams, spin doctor to World Bank president Hardwick Hardwicke, in Michael Holman's contemporary satire (2005).
22. In the context of this festschrift, it is sobering to note that there remains only one department of economic history at a British university (at the London School of Economics); on the fortunes of economic history as an academic discipline in Britain, see Negley Harte's cameo account of ‘The Economic History Society, 1926–2001’ on the Society's website (www.ehs.org.uk); also Peter Wardley's review of The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Economic History in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 29 October 2004 (‘Outlook poor for a once rich group’).
23. This is not to say that SODS (where some of my best friends…) is dominated by a rampant neo-liberal agenda, but it does confront ‘global’ dilemmas in a broadly similar manner to sociology in South Africa as indicated by Burawoy (above). Those dilemmas in part stem from having to negotiate with official agencies (both national and international) that define current development doctrine in ways that shape how it is taught in academic development studies. ‘Non-applied theoretical, political, sociological and historical aspect(s)’ of the intellectually serious study of development are not priorities in that curriculum – and indeed may be seen as obstructive of the proper training of development professionals who will be judged (ostensibly) on their ability to ‘deliver’.
24. On the analogy of a Wolpe Institute of Social Theory imagined by Michael Burawoy in his 2004 lecture ‘From Liberation to Reconstruction: Theory and Practice in the Life of Harold Wolpe’, the full text of which can be found on the website of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust (www.wolpetrust.org.za).
