The normative and scientific justifications for development theory

Abstract

This article argues that liberal and structuralist versions of development theory do provide a scientific basis for the management of emancipatory social change by answering its positivistic and cultural relativistic critics. It shows that positivism depends on methodological individualism, that this principle does not hold in societies where market systems and free individuals have yet to be created. It then shows that liberal development theory does provide a scientific basis for creating such institutions, and therefore for the necessary changes in individual behaviour that it must entail. Second, it shows that individualism is an inadequate basis for understanding and managing the complex and hierarchical institutions of late capitalist society, and therefore the need to use the scientific insights provided by modern institutional theory in order to do so. Then, third, it shows that imposing these principles threatens many of the values and understandings that governed societies that have been based on ethnic exclusivism, theocracy, patriarchy or commandism. It shows that development necessarily generates social conflict, but also that local values and understandings cannot simply be repressed because they do provide people with the basis on which they live their lives. It argues that practitioners must respect these traditions where they can, but find ways of adapting their insights to local needs, values and capacities.

Acknowledgements

This article summarises the central arguments that I am developing in a forthcoming book Reconstructing Development Theory: Responding to the Crisis of Global Equality, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. The arguments have emerged out of extended discussions with students and colleagues in the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics, and its Crisis States Programme, and also with those in the Development Studies Programme and Sociology of Work Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand. Much of the work and research was supported by the Crisis States Programme and funded by the British Department for International Development. I am very grateful for all of this support, and in particular to the help provided by James Putzel and Jo Beall at the LSE, and Belinda Bozzoli, Eddie Webster, Tom Lodge, Shireen Hassim and Stephen Louw at Wits.

Notes

1. This is MacIntyre's term. See in particular ‘Moral Relativism, Truth and Justification’ in Knight (1998, p. 202ff).

2. My understanding of the relationship between ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ is mainly derived from Hegel (1967).

3. In Marx's (1972c, p. 797) view, ‘all science would be superfluous if the manifest form and the essence of things directly coincided’.

4. According to Margaret Thatcher, ‘there is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families’ (cited in Slater and Tonkiss, 2001, p. 32).

5. An obvious contemporary example would be the Iraq war.

6. Bhaskar himself does not accept this view.

7. For a powerful critique of this view, see Barry (2001).

8. Poor people would be less poor if their indigenous knowledge was already adequate to their needs. For a more extensive review of the problems associated with this view, see Brett (2003).

9. For the seminal justification of the notion of social citizenship, see Marshall (1964).

10. According to Hegel, ‘When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. The habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 282). People in most South African cities do not enjoy this illusion because the collapse of state capacity and of a sense of social obligation has turned crime into an anomic form of civil war.

11. This insight that was apparently lost on Al Quaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

12. For an extension of this argument, see Brett (1969, pp. 52–56).

13. As Milton Friedman (1962, p. 34) says, ‘The consistent liberal is not an anarchist’.

14. Much of the coercion involved in this process occurs in childhood when the desire to resist is very powerful, but the power to do so is generally (but decreasingly, if my youngest grandson is in any way typical) much lower.

15. Dawkins (1989, esp. chs 10–12) provides a convincing explanation of how systems dominated by ‘reciprocal altruists’ can evolve in animal and human communities despite tendencies to defection or free-riding.

16. The reality and contradictory nature of this problem are illustrated every day in images from Iraq, and in equally damaging violence in many other less publicised cases.

17. Given the large and unproductive nature of the costs of enforcement, the success of a social system can be measured by the extent to which this process of internalisation of the ethical order has been completed. This is one dimension of what we understand as social capital.

18. The argument is based on Arendt's understanding of the modern state (cf. Fine, 2001, pp. 127–128).

19. Foucault (1970, p. 119).

20. Wolin (1960, chs 9–10) provides a seminal review of the tension between liberal and organisational theory in western philosophy.

21. As Marx (1972a, p. 17) said, ‘the period in which [the illusory liberal] view of the isolated individual becomes prevalent is the very one in which the interrelation of society (general from this point of view) has reached the highest stage of development’.

22. Here Williamson (1985) provides the classical formulation, in the market theory tradition, of the way in which the need for large-scale organisation and future-oriented contracting requires a transition from ‘spot market’ contracting to the hierarchical authority structures characteristic of the modern firm.

23. Hayek (1960, p. 49) himself argues that ‘the rapidity with which rich societies here have become static, if not stagnant societies through egalitarian policies, while impoverished but highly competitive countries have become very dynamic and progressive, has been one of the most conspicuous features of the post-war period’.

24. See, for example, McLellan (1977), Hegel (1967), Durkheim (1964), Weber (1968), Parsons (1964), North (1990), Williamson (1985), Olson (1965), and Ostrom (1990).

25. Hodgson provides a rigorously argued account of the long-term structural implications for individual freedom of the late capitalist transition of the emergence of a knowledge-based economy (1999).

26. However, he also claims that practices ‘must not be confused with institutions’, although they are closely connected to but not identical to them. Institutions are created to obtain and distribute ‘external goods’—money, material goods, power and status—and therefore depend on an intimate relationship to practices since they ‘cannot survive for any length of time unsustained by institutions’, so ‘institutions and practices characteristically form a single causal order’ (MacIntyre, 1998, p. 87).

27. I owe this example to Suzette Heald.

28. I owe this point to discussions with James Putzel.

29. This notion has much in common with Hayek's conception of progress through spontaneous interactions.

30. I agree with Landes (1998, p. 177) when he dismisses the fact that ‘most historians today … look upon the Weber thesis as implausible and unacceptable’.

31. These quotations and those that follow come from Weber (1983, pp. 115–117). For a complementary analysis, see Sen (1999, pp. 121–123).

32. Liberal democratic theory therefore functioned as development theory in the advanced countries until they had completed their democratic capitalist revolutions. Marx's radical critique of liberal political economy was not only designed to challenge the limitations of the capitalist system then operating in England, but to demonstrate that it was the most advanced example of a system that must be replicated elsewhere because ‘the country that is more developed … shows to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx, 1972b).

33. Pareto optimality is impossible in developmental transformations.

34. This is the basis of Cowan and Shenton's (1996, p. 7) important insight that the origins of development theory in the early 19th century lay in a recognition of the need to find ways to ‘ameliorate the disordered faults of progress’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

E. A. Brett

formerly Visiting Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Witwatersand University