TPP Revision

Week 2

Cowen and Shenton (1995) The Invention of Development

The meaning of development seems to follow the views and policies of those in
positions of authority.
“Development thus defies definition.

Distinction between development as an action and development as a goal of

action.
 Example: the development of capitalism is taken to be an immanent
and objective process. But when talking about a state policy to achieve
sustainable development, is is understood as a subjective course of action.

Staudt (1991) assumes that development can happen as the result of decision
and choice. Because development is both means and goals, the final outcome is
routinely assumed to be present at the onset of the process of development.
Arg: the goal of development is to enlarge choice. However, in order for choice to
be exercised, there must be desire and capacity to choose as well as knowledge
of possible choices.

19th century: those who saw themselves as developed believed that they could
act to determine the process of development for others deemed less-developed.
The development problem was thus resolved by the doctrine of ‘trusteeship’
(project of European Empire). However, nowadays, development as trusteeship
is taken to have no meaning for Third World countries.

The period of development is now routinely assumed to be the span of imperial

and post-colonial history since 1954. The subject of development is the imperial
state, its objective is the colonial and Third World peoples.
‘Underdevelopment’ began on 20 January 1949 with Truman’s address.

Argument: Development is a state practice rooted in the nineteenth

century, which emerged as a counterpoint to ‘progress’. Development
emerged to ameliorate the perceived chaos caused by progress.
=> Development is an intentional action; progress an immanent process, a
historical movement.

The modern idea of development is necessarily Eurocentric because it was in

Europe that development was first meant to create order out of the social
disorder of rapid urbanization, poverty and unemployment. The story is of
development failure.

The European Setting

Machiavelli, linked development to periods of state building. Classical theory
(17th century).
 Positive, constructive change emerged from negative moments of
destruction and decay. Purposive human intervention could ameliorate and
forestall but not prevent the destruction which was intrinsic to an ordered,
determined and inevitable cyclical process.

18th century: Writers at the time are supposed to have come up with the first
theory of development in their idea of human economic activity evolving through
a series of stages, commencing with hunting and fishing, progressing through
pastoralism and settled agriculture and culminating in commerce and
manufacturing. Embodying the idea of some natural or normal movement
through a succession of different modes of subsistence.

Smith and Locked: concerned with the Hobbesian problem of how social and
political order might be maintained. Smith held out for the possibility of
progress as a linear unfolding of the universal potential of human improvement
which need not be recurrent, finite or reversible. Rejecting the classical view, he
could see the possibility of progress both for rich and poor countries offered by a
system of natural liberty in foreign trade.
However, challenged by contemporaries who observed the political
disorder that followed the French Revolution and the social disorder that
accompanied the birth of industrial capitalism. Criticised the idea of boundless
human improvement.

Thomas Matlhus (1798): Theory of population growth to argue against the

possibility of limitless social perfectibility. He challenged the idea that increases
in society’s wealth would necessarily bring improvement or happiness to every
part of it. Focused on instances where the wealth of a society may increase
without having any tendency to increase the comforts of the labouring parts of it.
Increase in wealth would lead to growth of the population, which was the great
obstacle to improvements.

Hobsbawm (1968): 1830s/40s Britain – much of the tensions of the period was
the result of the working class despairing because they genuinely believed that
the prevailing political and fiscal arrangements were slowly throttling the
economy. They also gave rise to development.

“The modern meaning of development emerged to confront the hideous sore.

This new meaning was in direct opposition to the idea of progress as a natural
process without intentionality.”

The Design of Development

Saint Simonians: Progressive development demanded a progressive

amelioration of the moral, physical and intellectual condition of the human race.
By this process everyone would realise that individual prosperity was
inseparable from the prosperity and growth of all.
‘The new basis of human association would be industrialism guided by intellect
and governed by sympathy.’ The Saint Simonians applauded industrialisation but
argued that egoism produced irrational and destructive industrial practices.
 No longer was development something that occurred during a period of
history, it was the means whereby the present epoch might be transformed into
another superior order through the actions of those who were entrusted with
the future of society.

A Theory of Trusteeship

For the Saint Simonians, the solution lied with those who had the capacity to
utilise land, labour and capital in the interest of society as a whole. Property was
the major obstacle to this programme. Property, they argued, should be placed in
the hands of trustees, chosen on the basis of their ability to decide where and
how society;s resources should be invested. These trustees were banks and
bankers.

Comte: Progress had to be made compatible with order. Development was the
means by which progress would be subsumed by order.
All this could happen once those who had the knowledge of ‘sociology’ were in a
position to guide development, and joined the Saint Simonians in thinking that
bankers should be such trustees.

Underdevelopment
New view of underdevelopment as simultaneous part of development itself.
Underdevelopment theories argue that industrial progress and the emergence of
a proletariat as the centre is the only true development. In contrast, capitalism is
seen as incapable of true development in the periphery.

Kitching (1982): Progress was telescoped through the constructive, intentional

intervention of the state. The state had to act because the unfolding of immanent
progress was impossible in a world of British commercial and industrial
supremacy.

Smith’s focus on private enterprise was, for List (1991) besotted by a

disorganised individualism. Like Saint Simonians, List argued that the self-
interested individual was feeble and destitute alone. But, unlike, the early Saint
Simonians, he redirected development doctrine to the ends of the nation-state.
List argued that the state needed to take up the task of constructive
development. Nature intended that industry, cultivation, riches and power
should not be the exclusive possession of any single nation.

List argued that nations had unequal productive potential but that through the
policy of economical development all could activate their fullest potential. Then
came the caveat: his precepts were not to be followed by that part of the human
race existing in the savage states of the torrid zone. They would progress more
rapidly in riches and civilization if they continued to exchange their agricultural
products for the manufactured goods of the temperate zone: imperial advantage.
England had shown the way by augmenting the savings of its landlords and
farmers with money profits from overseas colonization which were invested in
manufacturing in Britain.
An imperial policy would make tropical countries sink thus into dependence
upon those of the temperate zone, but dependency would be mitigated by the
competition between temperate zone nations.

Along the extension of trade would go the mission of political institutions to

civilize barbarian nationalities.

Positivism in Britain
Mill (1989) Generalised knowledge, not the genius of a secular priesthood, was
the condition for development. The necessary preconditions were increased
education and a radical extension of liberty.
For Mill, the stationary state was the condition where material progress would
cease to increase wealth and produce instead a legitimate effect – that of
abridging labour.

For Mill as for modern development theorists, development could only occur
where the conditions of development were already present. Societies in which
they were not present had to be guided by the trustees from societies where they
were. Mill argued that India needed to be governed despotically by an
incorruptible imperial cadre who exercised trusteeship in order to create the
conditions under which education, choice, individuality – development – might
occur.

Conclusion

Each theorist was a part of nineteenth-century developmental practice.

Development was not simply thought or rhetoric; it was a mid-century state
practice.

The dissemination of Eurocentric theories to the Third World is condemned by

Hettne as a form of academic imperialism whose counterpoint is the rise of the
dependency shool’s analysis of underdevelopment.