Post-Development, Developmental State and Genealogy: condemned to develop?

Abstract

This article investigates the fate of two trends in development studies—post-development and the ‘developmental state’—in order to question the critical purchase of the genealogical mode of critique in this discipline. These two trends enact a critique of the orthodox discourse of development that problematises its understanding of history, self-perception and practical implications and is akin to a genealogical form of critique. Yet the success of these trends in the discipline of development has been relatively minimal, compared to the insights it has generated in other academic disciplines. This outcome raises questions as to the problem-space of development and the structure of the arguments in this discipline. More specifically, the article argues that the prescriptive bent of this discipline imposes specific requirements on critical discourse, requirements that make it less amenable to this form of genealogical critique. The article concludes on the potential insights of this form of critique when filtered through the prescriptive bias of this field.

Notes

I would like to thank Sana Tannoury for her valuable assistance in this research.

1 D Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, p 15.

2 D Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, p 29.

3 W Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p 1.

4 The notion of ‘strategic criticism’ aims to determin which conceptual moves yield the most critical purchase in a specific conjuncture, or ‘problem-space’: ‘criticism must understand itself self-consciously’, Scott writes, ‘as a practice of entering an historically constituted field of ongoing moral argument, of gauging that argument's tenor, of calculating the stakes … of ascertaining the potential allies and possible adversaries, of determining the lines and play of forces … and so on’. Scott, Refashioning Futures, p 7.

5 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, p 4.

6 Such a move had an important impact on other fields of studies, redefining oppositional discourses and often the terms of the debate themselves. For an overview of the use of Foucault in various fields, see SJ Ball, Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, New York: Routledge, 2010; A Barry, T Osborne & N Rose, Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996; NJ Fox, ‘Foucault, Foucauldians and sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, 49(3), 1998, pp 415–433; M Gane & T Johnson, Foucault's New Domains, London: Routledge, 1993; and M Lloyd & A Thacker, The Impact of Michel Foucault on the Social Sciences and Humanities, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.

7 The ‘developmental state’ literature is used as a broad umbrella to refer to various authors who took the East Asian developmental experience as their starting point for questioning the orthodox account, as well as the various theoretical perspectives that coalesced around the academic rediscovery of the state. For more details, see H Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, London: Anthem Press, 2002; A Leftwich, States of Development: On the Primacy of Politics in Development, London: Polity Press, 2000; M Moore, ‘Declining to learn from the East? The World Bank on “governance and development”’, ids Bulletin, 24(1), 1993, pp 39–50; R Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990; and M Woo-Cumings, The Developmental State, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999.

8 See J Gledhill, ‘Neoliberalism’, in D Nugent & J Vincent, A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004; D Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; C Kingfisher & J Maskovsky, ‘The limits of neoliberalism’, Critique of Anthropology, 28(2), 2008, pp 115–126; A Saad-Filho & D Johnston (eds), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, London: Pluto Press, 2005; and JA Scholte, ‘The sources of neoliberal globalization’, unrisd Papers, 8, 2005.

9 A Tickell & J Peck, ‘Neoliberalizing space’, Antipode, 34(3), 2002, p 384. For a similar argument, see C Hay, ‘The normalizing role of rationalist assumptions in the institutional embedding of neoliberalism’, Economy and Society, 33(4), pp 500–527.

10 M Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979, Paris: Hautes Etudes, Gallimard Seuil, 2004; and Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, Paris: Hautes Etudes, Gallimard Seuil, 2004. For a review of these lectures, see M Dean, Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage Publications, 1999; C Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’, in G Burchell, C Gordon & P Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp 1–51; and T Lemke, ‘“The birth of bio-politics”: Michel Foucault's lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality’, Economy and Society, 30(2), 2001, pp 190–207.

11 In economics this radical repetition of the past took the form of a return to the laissez-faire of Smith. In sociology it is the extension of the commodity form to the whole of society, Marx being the representative of this trend. And in politics it is the generalised administrative control by the state of society, with Solzhenitsyn as the exemplar of this view. Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique, p 136.

12 Different answers were provided to this dilemma, representing various brands of neoliberalism, with Foucault devoting his lectures to the German brand of neoliberalism, espoused by the Ordoliberalen, and the American brand with the Chicago School.

13 U Tellmann, ‘Foucault and the invisible economy’, Foucault Studies, 6, 2009, pp 5–6.

14 For examples of the governmentality approach applied to questions pertaining to economics or development, see W Higgins, ‘How we are governed now: globalisation, neo-liberal governmentality and the nullification of substantive policy’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, 57, 2006, pp 5–29; P Miller & N Rose, ‘Governing economic life’, in Gane & Johnson, Foucault's New Domains, pp 75–105; T Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002; KN Rankin, ‘Governing development, neoliberalism, microcredit, and rational economic woman’, Economy and Society, 30(1), 2001, pp 18–37; and OJ Sending & IB Neumann, ‘Governance to governmentality, analyzing ngos, states, and power’, International Studies Quarterly, 50, 2006, pp 651–672.

15 P O'Malley, L Weir & C Shearing, ‘Governmentality, criticism, politics’, Economy and Society, 26(4), 1997, p 509.

16 TH Hamann, ‘Neoliberalism, governmentality, and ethics’, Foucault Studies, 6, 2009, p 57.

17 For more details on the post-development trend, see A Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; J Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; D Lehmann, ‘An opportunity lost: Escobar's deconstruction of development’, Journal of Development Studies, 33(4), 1997, pp 568–578; M Rahnema & V Bawtree, The Post-Development Reader, London: Zed Books, 1997; W Sachs, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, 1999; P Tamas, ‘Misrecognitions and missed opportunities: post-structuralism and the practice of development’, Third World Quarterly, 25(4), 2004, pp 649–660; and A Ziai, ‘The ambivalence of post-development: between reactionary populism and radical democracy’, Third World Quarterly, 25(6), 2004, pp 1045–1060.

18 S Corbridge, ‘The (im)possibility of development studies’, Economy and Society, 36(2), 2007, p 180.

19 For an example of such an argument, see JN Pieterse, ‘My paradigm or yours? Alternative development, post-development, reflexive development’, Development and Change, 29(2), 1998, pp 343–373.

20 See JC Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

21 For more details on the political and economic dimension of the developmental state, see B Fine, ‘The developmental state and the political economy of development’, in B Fine & KS Jomo (eds), The New Development Economics: After the Washington Consensus, London: Zed Books, 2006, pp 101–122.

22 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, London: Penguin Classics, 1990.

23 MH Khan, G Giacaman & I Amundsen, State Formation in Palestine: Viability and Governance during a Social Transformation, London: Routledge Curzon, 2004, p 29.

24 R Wade, ‘East Asia's economic success: conflicting perspectives, partial insights, shaky evidence’, World Politics, 44(2), 1992, p 302.

25 Leftwich, States of Development: On the Primacy of Politics in Development, p 61.

26 M Castells, ‘Four Asian tigers with a dragon head: a comparative analysis of the state, economy and society in the Asian Pacific Rim’, in RP Appelbaum & J Anderson, States and Development in the Asia-Pacific Rim, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1992, p 64.

27 G Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978, p 92.

28 C Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, p 71.

29 C Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, London: Routledge Classics, 2007, p 242.

30 TJ Byres, ‘Neoliberalism and primitive accumulation in less developed countries’, in A.Saad-Filho & D Johnston (eds), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, London: Pluto Press, 2005, p 85.

31 Corbridge, ‘The (im)possibility of development studies’.

32 TJ Pempel, ‘The developmental regime in a changing world economy’, in Woo-Cumings, The Developmental State, p 3.

33 Woo-Cumings, The Developmental State.

34 C Johnson, ‘The developmental state: odyssey of a concept’, in Woo-Cumings, The Developmental State, p 40.

35 R Geuss, History and Illusions in Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p 8.

36 For a somewhat similar argument, see D Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.

37 P Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp 30–36.

38 M Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso, 1983, p 23.