“Inclusive Growth”: A Lacanian Reading

Abstract

Until the 1970s, mainstream development theory and the practice of international economic organizations put total faith in a trickle-down approach, refusing to conceive any special policy for those excluded from the gains of modern development. Gradually, both theory and practice are veering toward the mainstream’s “inclusive growth.” The authors of World of the Third and Global Capitalism conceptualize exclusion and subsequent inclusion as two sides of the same coin that can be theorized through the Lacanian couple of foreclosure/foregrounding. The authors propose a practice of counterhegemony grounded in ethical principles born of the encounter of the working class of the first world and the modes of being and producing of the third world, which are excluded from hegemonic discourse. Many powerful insights are provided by this Lacanian reading of exclusion/inclusion in development theory and practice, but this reading cannot accommodate the role of lived experience and may generate another “end of history.”

Key Words:

• Displacement
• Ethics
• Foreclosure
• Foregrounding
• Postdevelopment

Notes

1. A school of historiography that emerged from India in the early 1980s, which critiqued most history writing, including class- (as noun-) based Marxist history, as elitist. This school instead proposed the need to rewrite history from the perspective of subalterns, or those whose position had been excluded from elitist history or had been included from an instrumentalist position. Most of their essays have been published in the ten volumes of Subaltern Studies.