Bernstein Development Stuides

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Studying development/development

studiesHenry Bernstein

a

aUniversity of London

Published online: 18 Aug 2006.

To cite this article:Henry Bernstein (2006) Studying development/development studies, African

Studies, 65:1, 45-62, DOI: 10.1080/00020180600771733

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same again and, if one adds for better or worse, then this is probably as near to

commanding a measure of general agreement as any observation of comparable

world-historical scope. Of course, agreement does not bestow innocence.

Indeed, the association of modernity with world-historical processes initiated inthe North (or West or First World in the terminology current not long ago)

and thereafter spreading globally, not least by imposition and coercion, remains

one of the definitive philosophical and political tensions at the core of debate

about development today (Sutcliffe 1999). This is communicated especially

well by a famous (infamous?) dictum that The country that is more developed

industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future

(Marx 1976/1867:91), which neatly rolls together inevitability and desirability,prediction and progress (however painful a dialectic of destruction and creation

getting there might entail).

In short, development in this encompassing sense the material foundation of

modernity is the master theme or grand narrative of the formation of

modern social science, whether centred on the dynamics of accumulation and

its social and institutional conditions (from Locke, say, through Smith and classi-

cal political economy to Marx and then Weber) or on the problems of social order

generated by such revolutionary (bourgeois) transformations of relations of prop-

erty, production and power (from Hobbes, say, to Comte and Durkheim and, once

more, Weber). And social science of Northern/Western provenance, both pro-duced by and preoccupied with the processes of modern development, becomes an

intellectual and ideological battleground on which the appropriateness and validity

of its knowledge (and modes of producing knowledge), and the desirability of pre-

scriptions derived from them, are fiercely contested, not least in relation to the

troubled histories and uncertain futures of development in other parts of the

world (the Third World or South, and now the once Second World too).

A range of theoretical approaches to, and models of, development emerged within

the processes of the development of capitalism and its different times and places,

from the great achievements of eighteenth-century Scottish political economy

(culminating in Adam Smith) on the cusp of industrialisation, through those

who experienced and reflected on the full force of industrial capitalism at first

hand (pre-eminently Marx), to those who contemplated the effects of such com-

prehensive social change for normative order in the newly industrial societies of

Europe (Durkheim, for example); from those in then less developed parts of

Europe who saw capitalist industry as the path to national sovereignty and

power (of whom Friedrich List is emblematic) or socialist primary accumulation

and industrialisation as an alternative to capitalism (Lenin, Preobrazhensky), to

their successors in independent Asia, Latin America and Africa (Nehru, Vargas,

Nkrumah, say, as well as intellectual pioneers of development strategy like

Mahalanobis and Raul Prebisch). These brief examples illustrate varioussources and presuppose interconnections of an intellectually expansive tra-

dition of confronting development as social transformation, generated by what

46 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006


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may be considered its heroic moments and instances, for example, conjunctures of

intensified inter-imperialist and anti-imperialist struggles from the late nineteenth

century. Heroic ideas about the sources and means of development connected,

more and less programmatically (and plausibly), with a range of aspirations andpromises bourgeois authoritarian and liberal, social democratic, socialist

and communist and in ever more highly charged ways as they combined

variously with nationalism as ideology, basis of internal political mobilisation

and external stance.

In unpacking some issues for consideration I draw on two fine, if very different,

attempts to establish a long history of ideas/ideologies and experiences of devel-opment, and their antinomies, in order to illuminate todays debates. Of the

various motifs that make up the encompassing discursive universe of develop-

ment, the first and most fundamental is accumulation as central to economicgrowth, which in turn requiredindustrialisationin the world created by Britains

pioneering economic revolution. This is nicely encapsulated as the old

orthodoxy of classical political economy in Gavin Kitchings Development and

Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective (1982). Kitching also maintained

that the logic of the old orthodoxy is inescapable for those who aspire to

develop, now as then; the historical and logical necessity of (typically brutal)

primary accumulation is thus the source of original sin, as it were, at the core of

the moral dramas of development and, in Kitchings account, the forms of

(populist) denial they continue to generate throughout the history of moderncapitalism.

The waywardly brilliant work by the late Michael Cowen and Bob Shenton on

Doctrines of Development (1996) centres on the problem of order disclosed by

the disruptions and upheavals of early industrial capitalism and the dangerous

classes it generated, especially in relation to labour markets, employment and

unemployment; how that problem was constituted as an object of social theory

and solutions to it theorised and applied in doctrines of development that

prescribe harmonious development under state trusteeship, hence intentional

versus immanent development in their terms; and the intrinsic contradictionsof such doctrines in both theory and practice, from their early manifestations in

Britain and its colonies (including mid nineteenth-century Australia and

Canada) to todays universe of development discourses and interventions.

In short, the burden of development was to compensate for the negative propen-

sities of capitalism through the reconstruction of social order. To develop, then,

was to ameliorate the social misery which arose out of the immanent process of

capitalist growth (Cowen and Shenton 1996:116).2 For these two authors, the

immanent process of capitalist growth corresponds to Thomass second sense

of development with which this discussion commenced, while their notion ofdevelopment asintent, articulated indoctrines of developmentand typically prac-

tised through the agency of (state) trusteeship, connects with his third sense of

Studying Development/Development Studies 47


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deliberate efforts aimed at improvement, albeit with some qualification.3 The

qualification is that development as amelioration, itself a condition of reprodu-

cing immanent capitalist growth (accumulation) in the face of the social

misery and class struggle it generates, hardly provides any more intrinsically ormorally satisfying vision, description or measure of the state of being of a desir-

able society, Thomass first sense of development and that which pervades

todays rhetoric of ending poverty (see further below).4

Kitching and Cowen and Shenton share an initial historical reference point in early

capitalist industrialisation and an intellectual debt to the political economy it gen-

erated (in the case of Cowen and Shenton, more particularly to Marx) as well as a

profound antipathy to populist and nationalist claims on development doctrine.

For Kitching the logic of the old orthodoxy first revealed by the immanent

process of capitalist growth can be adapted to the purposes of primary accumu-lation as development strategy, exemplified in his book by China which had appro-

priated and refashioned that logic to its own historical circumstances. The case of

China served Kitchings argument in interesting ways; inter alia, he seemed to

view mass line (populist?) elements of Maoist political discourse as rhetorical

rather than inhibiting the pursuit of socialist primary accumulation on the

example of the Soviet model, and contra those who counterposed a Maoist

theory and practice not only to the experience of Stalinism but to the incomplete

break of classic Bolshevism from bourgeois ideas of development and indeed

modernity (Corrigan, Ramsay and Sayer 1978, 1979). Moreover, communist

Chinas embrace of the logic of the old orthodoxy and determined pursuit of it

served as contrast with another fashionable example of the time (if by the early

1980s an increasingly embattled one), namely Julius Nyereres strategy, or at

least ideology, ofujamaa in Tanzania, which Kitching presented as emblematic

of the disasters inherent in populist indeed people-centred development

utopias (1982:Ch 5).

In contrast, Cowen and Shentons insistence on the invention of development as an

ameliorative doctrine and set of state practices to construct social and political

order in capitalism, meant that they did not explore the inventions and doctrines

of development dedicated toachieving accumulationand economic growth. There

may be various reasons for this lacuna, including an aversion to Stalinist and

subsequent Soviet, then Maoist and subsequent Chinese, claims to socialism/socialist development, perhaps better seen in their view as authoritarian nationalist

rather than socially emancipatory projects (and in any case premature until the

fullest global development of capitalism is realised?). There is also a key, and strik-

ing, step in their historical argument: that while development was invented as a

response to (early) capitalist industrialisation and its characteristic disorder

that is, when an immanent process of accumulation and growth was given it

was then imposed on Britains vast colonial domains as a type of anticipatorysocial engineering: the engineering of growth in ways, and at rates, compatible

with social order.



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Examples of this include their account (Cowen and Shenton 1996:4256) of the

ideas and legacy of James Mill (17731836), a significant political economist,

officer of the East India Company, and one of a long line of British writers

who addressed the question of India as a codicil of the European invention ofdevelopment; and their notion of Fabian colonialism (Cowen and Shenton

1991a; see also their 1991b). This suggests how British colonialism in Africa

sought to achieve a trusteeship that could deliver economic progress without

social and political disruption, that could gradually introduce Africans to the pro-

duction and consumption of commodities as the material foundation of civilisation

while maintaining or adapting customary bases of order (rural community,

tribal identity and cohesion, patriarchal and chiefly authority). Africans were

not, therefore, to be allowed any immediate and unbridled enjoyment of such

bourgeois rights as private title in land and access to bank credit, which could

stimulate a dangerous individualism on one hand, and on the other hand collective

action by colonial subjects on the basis of class interests. No doubt Cowen and

Shenton considered that such attempts to combine progress with order in fact con-

strain progress in the sense disclosed by immanent capitalist development, and

that this constraint on accumulation is intrinsic to all policies and practices

informed by doctrines of development, after political independence as well as

during colonial rule.

As implied above, the effect of this stance is to displace any consideration by

Cowen and Shenton of developmental states committed to driving a programme

of accumulation, industrialisation and economic growth rather than, or above, any

other goal(s). A recent article by Pablo Idahosa and Bob Shenton seems to expand

the historical frame of reference of the invention of development/doctrines ofdevelopment in an overview of attempt(s) to forestall European domination

through a self-conscious project of national development that entailed state

modernisation in nineteenth-century Africa: Egypt, Ethiopia, Tunisia, the

Merina kingdom of Madagascar, Asante, and South Africa before the mineral

revolution (Idahosa and Shenton 2004:76, and 7281 passim). However, all the

cases surveyed, except that of South Africa, were abortive attempts at national

development ended by colonial conquest and rule (ibid:78 9), and theauthors more general scepticism about developmental states is evident.

The point I wish to make is quite simple but has a broad historical resonance. It is

that a self-conscious project of national development pursued by various would-

be modernising regimes in the conditions of an internationalising economic and

political system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could, and did, generate

other forms of development doctrine centred, quite explicitly, on building the sover-

eignty and power of states. This included a growing recognition that, in an era of

industrialisation, international political and military strength rested on the absolute

and relative economic strength commanded by states and their ability to acquireadvanced weaponry (preferably by establishing the capacity to design and manu-

facture it).5 It is striking in how many cases the primary reference of such aspirations



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to modernisation from Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century to the

nineteenth-century African examples adduced by Idahosa and Shenton or the

Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman rulers was the acquisition of (modern,

Western) education and knowledge, and especially the scientific and technicalknowledge manifested in military engineering. The most compelling of

nineteenth-century instances, of course, is that of Meiji Japan the first undeniably

successful developmental state of the era of industrial capitalism, surely, and one

with scant regard for any doctrine of development centred on amelioration?

What I take from Kitchings, and Cowen and Shentons, valuable long histories

of ideas about development is the various ways in which the centrality of accumu-

lation to modern economic growth has been perceived and acted on including

resisted both ideologically and practically in the various times and places,

moments and sites, of the formation of the modern world over, say, the last 250years. This dynamic has generated various doctrines of development from the

late eighteenth century rather than, I suggest, the single genus identified by

Cowen and Shenton.6 That centrality of accumulation, with all its ramified con-

ditions and consequences, and its manifestations in the socially and spatially

combined and uneven development of capitalism, remains the starting point

for studying development. Paths of accumulation, their successes and failures,

are inextricably bound up with contradictory social relations of class, of gender,

of town and countryside, of ethnicity and nationality, of all the characteristic

dimensions of capitalist divisions of labour; with the struggles those divisions

and contradictions generate over property and power, production and productivity,

livelihood, social justice and dignity; and with the forms of social agency and col-

lective action, and their effectiveness, that those struggles pit against each other,

create and transform.

Two further points deserve emphasis because of their salience to more recent and

current preoccupations in development as both doctrine and field of study, which

I turn to next. One is to suggest that the original sources of the great tradition in

classical political economy conceptualised processes of modern economic growth

qua accumulation, the development of markets (commodification) and of social

and technical divisions of labour, and so on above all as the growth (and

indeed formation) of national economies: Adam Smiths wealth of nations,

Marxs country that is more developed industrially (cited above), and Lenins

Development of Capitalism in Russia (1964/1899) the fullest study in classicMarxism of contemporary processes of capitalist development in a backward

country that proceeds with virtually no reference to the international capitalist

economyin which late Tsarist Russia was located (and by which in effect its back-

wardness was defined) nor to its effects for capitalist development in Russia

(Bernstein 2004:202, n22).7 Of course, Marx was profoundly aware of the

world historical character of capital, and of the growing importance of inter-national trade when he wrote, but he left little theorisation of capitalism as

world system or international division of labour. And Lenin, to meet the political



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imperative of addressing the causes of the First World War, famously theorised

imperialism and the centrality to it of a finance capital now much evolved institu-

tionally since Marxs time. Lenins Imperialism(1964/1917) arguably generated

more ideological heat for anti-imperialist struggles than it cast analytical light onthe functioning of the capitalist world economy and the prospects of development

in its vast colonial and quasi-colonial peripheries. The consideration of those

prospects became much more explicitly international in the period after the

Second World War in the context of, first, decolonisation in Asia and Africa

and superpower rivalry, and then in the context of globalisation (see below).

The other point is the absence so far in this exposition of any convincing example

of Alan Thomass first sense of development as vision, description or measure of

the state of being of a desirable society (see below). This is partly an effect of my

selection of Kitching and Cowen and Shenton as guides to the long history ofdevelopment ideas, with their shared emphasis on typically painful processes of

primary accumulation, whether immanent or intentional, required to provide

the material foundations for a desirable society. Moreover, visions of a desirable

society whether populist, nationalist, or self-styled socialist that seek to

circumvent the compelling disciplines of accumulation and to deliver the fruits

of development before their material basis is assured are, in the view of these

authors, utopian and destructive of prospects of a better life, especially for those

(the poor, the people, the nation, workers and peasants) in whose name

their promises are articulated.8

On the historical canvas so broadly (and roughly) sketched here, I want only to point

to Gareth Stedman Jones recentAn End to Poverty?(2004) which brings to light

the first debates . . . about the possibility of a world without poverty. Those debates

occurred in the late eighteenth century, that is, more or less contemporaneously with

the initial theorisation of the old orthodoxy (Kitching) and invention of develop-

ment (Cowen and Shenton). The key figures were Thomas Paine (1737 1809) and

Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet (17621794),9 representatives of a distinctively

modern form of radicalism (ibid:42) inspired by the experiences of the American

and French Revolutions, who argued for a comprehensive system of social security

based on universal entitlements and funded by redistributive taxation. The wealth to

support this system that would end poverty and its attendant insecurities and indig-

nities (of which Paine was so eloquent a critic) was generated by the growth model

of Adam Smiths commercial society; how it could do so was worked out through

Condorcets revolutionary social mathematics. Stedman Jones argues that these

ideas were lost in the reaction that followed the French revolution and, after a

long political hiatus, were finally realised in the welfare state of the twentieth

century; in his view, they now need to be incorporated in a revived, and combative,

social democratic programme able to confront the global barbarities of contempor-

ary neo-liberalism. This, then, is one vision of a desirable society, first articulatedtogether with a method for measuring well being and modelling the fiscal means

of achieving it, relevant to studying development today.10



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Development studies

The conjuncture after the Second World War inherited doctrines of development,

and their associated institutions and practices, invented and applied to manage

class (and other social) conflict in industrial capitalist heartlands and colonial per-ipheries andto formulate projects of national accumulation, state modernis-

ation, and the like. However, in post-war conditions the rhetoric of development

now centred much more emphatically on the kind of vision of a desirable

society first constructed in distinctively modern fashion by Paine and Condorcet.

The principal goal was now to overcome poverty, ignorance and disease (in a

common catchphrase of the 1950s) through appropriate strategies of growth,

distribution and the provision of public goods. National development thus

centred on the welfare of all citizens became the official programme of the

newly independent states of Asia and Africa, whose decolonisation providedone vital terrain among others of rivalry between the USA and USSR. In pursuing

their rivalry in the Third World the USA and USSR established as super-

powers by the outcome of the Second World War claimed the superiority of

their own socioeconomic systems, and paths of development, as models for less

developed countries to emulate with the support of financial and technical assist-

ance (foreign aid). In this context, then, not only did the rhetoric of development

doctrine shift towards visions of a desirable society encompassing in their opti-

mism and ideological currency, but the institutional apparatus of development

expanded, in part through a novel internationalisation of its agencies (in the

United Nations and Bretton Woods systems, as well as new forms of inter-stateassociation generated by superpower rivalry).

In short, here is one connection between the two points indicated at the end of the

previous section: the extension of development doctrine to creating the conditions

of well being of all citizens (and as quickly as possible) and the internationalisa-

tion of this vision and of efforts to achieve it. In fact, the context following the end

of the Second World War, just outlined, encouraged approaches to development

more explicitly and firmly rooted in questions about its international conditions.

These approaches assimilated the key themes of the great tradition transformations of pre-capitalist agrarian structures, patterns of accumulation

and industrialisation, state modernisation and technical change, and the like,

within individual countries to how the prospects of progress in poor countries

are affected by the functioning of international markets, divisions of labour,

flows of capital and technology, and other aspects of a world economy, and like-

wise by the structures and dynamics of an international political system shaped by

superpower rivalry and the novel strategic importance it gave to (some) newly

independent poor countries.

This global political and intellectual context was key to the emergence of devel-opment studies as an academic field. I find it useful to employ a restrictive or insti-

tutional definition of development studies as the kinds of teaching and research



10/19

done in university development studies departments, centres, institutes and so on,

that is, as sites of an academic specialism of recent provenance (in fact, mostly

since the 1960s).11 The reason is that this enables exploration of whether, how

and how much development studies is able to connect with, draw on, andindeed contribute to, the great tradition of studying development. Certainly,

what justifies development studies as a specialism in its own right is the presump-

tion that it is dedicatedandequipped to generateappliedknowledge in the formu-

lation and implementation of development policies and interventions. In short, and

as Thomas (2000) rightly observes, the notion of development studies is imbued

with the intent to develop at the core of Cowen and Shentons theorisation of

doctrines of development. As policy science development studies is centred

on two sets of issues: those of economic growth and how to promote it, and of

poverty and how to overcome it, principally in what is now known as the

(global) South. Virtually all intellectual production in the name of development

studies can be assimilated to one or other of these two overarching goals or,

most characteristically, claims to connect them in virtuous models or paths of

development.

Elsewhere (Bernstein 2005) I have sketched two main periods in the career of

development studies in the sense outlined, which I summarise here in (regrettably)

even more truncated form. The first is that of its founding moment (in the 1950s

and 1960s) in the global context indicated, also the golden period of the long

boom of the capitalist world economy marked by a labour-friendly (for rich

countries) and development-friendly (for poor countries) international regime

established under US hegemony (Silver and Arrighi 2000:55) at least friendly

relative to what was to come later. This founding moment of development studies

was able to ask big questions about development, and to pursue big ideas in

seeking to answer them, in part because of the stimulus of apparently world-

historical alternatives, and in part because of an assumption that the state in

newly independent (and other poor) countries had a central role in planning and

managing economic and social development. This assumption held across a

very wide range of the political and ideological spectrum, albeit with a marked

influence of social democratic ideas associated with a structuralist macroeco-nomics and a kind of international Keynesianism applied to issues of aid and

trade. Both were aspects of what was now identified as development economics,

to various degrees linked to, and informed by, the great tradition of studying

development and its foundation in political economy.12

Of course, attempts to draw on that expansive intellectual tradition for the applied

tasks of policy advice and design with which development studies was charged

often generated various tensions and confronted various (political) constraints,

including in relations with the governments and aid agencies that established

development studies centres and institutes in the 1950s and 1960s and/orsupported them with contracts for advanced training, applied research and

consultancy. Nor was this new profession of development studies staffed entirely



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by intellectual adepts of the great tradition; it also accommodated, for example,

the redeployment of former colonial officials (notably in Britain, France, Belgium

and the Netherlands). This represented one type of continuity with the practices of

previous doctrines of development (on which see the post-colonial argument ofKothari 2005)13; a more strategic continuity is argued for some of the practices

and politics of colonial development regimes in India following independence

(for example Bose 1997, Chatterjee 1998) and in the independent states of sub-

Saharan Africa (for example Cooper 2002, especially Ch 5).

If the record of development studies, even in the more heroic first phase of its

career, is much more mixed, ambiguous and imbued with tension than can be

traced here, what of the apparent puzzle of its (almost) seamless shift to a

second phase under the neo-liberal ascendance since the 1980s? Both champions

and critics of the newly established development studies shared an understandingthat its principal rationale as policy science was to find ways of assisting state-led

development. As neo-liberalism quickly gained a hegemonic position in develop-

ment theory and policy from the 1980s, manifested in the supremacy of the World

Bank in the production of contemporary development doctrine (see Moore, in

press), and in a context of now virtually unchallenged capitalist globalisation,

the question arose whether development studies retained any purpose. This

question made sense, and yet development studies has not disappeared with the

withering away of state-led development (if hardly of the state). This is explicable

in part by what I have characterised as a double paradox, whereby less becomesmore and more becomes less (Bernstein 2005).

The first paradox is that less intervention as prescribed in neo-liberal development

theory means more intervention in practice. First, the major shifts of development

theory, policy discourse and design, and modalities of intervention in the period of

neo-liberal ascendance, spearheaded by the World Bank, require a great deal of

work to replace what preceded them in the period of state-led development.14

And the intellectual and political labour of deconstruction requires a greater prac-

tical labour of reconstruction, from the demands of legitimation by intellectual and

technical expertise including presenting claims to better results of neo-liberalpolicies to the design and implementation (policing?) of structural adjustment

packages to the nuts and bolts of reforming particular institutions and practices.

Second, after a brief initial moment of market triumphalism in the early 1980s (get

the prices right and all else will follow: growth, prosperity, and stability), it

became evident that a few decisive strokes of policy to roll back states and liberate

markets was not enough to achieve accelerated economic growth and reduce

poverty. Freeing the market to carry out the tasks of economic growth for

which it is deemed uniquely suited rapidly escalated into an extraordinarily ambi-

tious, or grandiose, project of social engineering that amounts to establishingbourgeois civilisation on a global scale. Comprehensive market reform confronted

similarly comprehensive state reform (rather than simply contraction) as a



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condition of the former; in turn, the pursuit of good governance quickly extended

to, and embraced, notions of civil society and social institutions more generally.

In short, the terrain of development discourse and the range of aid-funded

interventions have become ever more inclusive to encompass the reshaping, ortransformation, of political and social (and, by implication, cultural) as well as

economic institutions and practices.

The scope of development studies has thus expanded greatly, in line with the

agenda of development doctrine orchestrated by the World Bank and the

agenda of international security under US hegemony in a post-Soviet world.

That expansion of objects of intervention has proceeded principally by agglomera-

tion. To what may be considered the constant preoccupations of development

theory for example, in international economics (trade, investment, and

today above all? capital markets), macroeconomics (exchange, interest,inflation and savings rates, employment, productivity), and social policy (health,

education) are added state reform, the (re)design and management of public

institutions, clear and properly enforced property rights, democratisation, civil

society and the sources of social capital, small-scale credit, non-governmental

organisation (NGO) management, (environmentally) sustainable development,

women/gender and development, children and development, refugees anddevelopment, humanitarian emergencies and interventions, and post-conflict

resolution (among other examples).

At the same time, more becomes less as the (market-centred) core of thisexpanded agenda is framed, and its key policies justified, above all through the

restrictive framework of neo-classical economics, whose hegemony has spiralled

during this period of rampant neo-liberalism.15 On the other hand, the supply of

various practitioners demanded by the expanded range of development interven-

tions indicated for example, experts in public administration or those dealing

with the soft areas of welfare, community-level and other self-help interven-

tions16 does not require or encourage any broader intellectual vision, rationale

or formation (only the profession of economist requires an academic training of

any rigour, albeit within its extremely narrow and technicist intellectual culture.)

In the founding moment of development studies, key questions of development

strategy were framed within serious attempts, from different viewpoints and yield-

ing different interpretations, to understand the massive upheavals that created the

contemporary world and continued to shape it.17 This is now displaced intellec-

tually by the most narrow (and ahistorical) of approaches in economics and ideo-

logically by such notions as pro-poor (market) growth, which expresses nicely

the commitment of contemporary development doctrine to win-win solutions

and its faith that an inclusive and globalising market economy, or more

broadly bourgeois civilisation, contains no intrinsic obstacles to a better life forall. There is so much to gain with relatively little pain; the only losers will be

rent seekers and others who fail to play by the rules of the game.18



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The commitment to such win-win policy solutions to continuing problems of

economic growth and poverty imposes another kind of constraint on (or reduction

of) the intellectual spaces of development studies. It is the credo of what Ferguson

(1990) memorably termed an anti-politics machine that depoliticises develop-ment doctrine, and marginalises or displaces investigation and understanding of

the sources, dynamics and effects of typically savage social inequality in the

South, and of no less savage relations of power and inequality in the international

economic and political system. It elides consideration of the often violent social

upheavals and struggles that characterise the processes and outcomes of the

development of capitalism.

Studying development/development studies

What I have termed here the great tradition of studying development is rooted

intellectually in political economy (if not exclusively so); is consistently moder-

nist; and is intrinsically historical indeed it can not be thought, to use an

Althusserian expression, other than in intrinsically historical terms. It provides a

frame of reference, a set of themes, and a wealth of ideas and interpretations, con-

testations and debates, across the main social science disciplines, including history

and especially economic history perhaps.19 How well its themes and debates, its

intellectually expansive and politically contentious character, can be accommo-

dated within development studies as a recent academic specialism and branch

of policy science, justified by the intent to development, is another matter.How much it has been accommodated is, to a large degree, an empirical question

to which we cannot expect any single or simple answer. I have suggested,

however, that it is more difficult to ensure knowledge of the great tradition and

appreciation of its contemporary relevance in the current phase of the academic

career of development studies, for several kinds of reasons.

The first and most fundamental reason is the economic and political changes in the

world in the last thirty years or so, including those often associated with globali-

sation (the unprecedented freedom and scale of mobility of capital), the demise of

state socialism, and the political and ideological power of a neo-liberalism thatpresents itself as the common sense of the epoch. Indeed achieving that effect

is, in a profound sense, the function of much ideological and intellectual pro-

duction, which indicates a second kind of reason. In relation to the social sciences,

a pincer movement of the imperialising ambitions of neo-classical economics and

of post-modernism (broadly defined) assaults the great traditions of social

science, including that of studying development. Moreover, the two arms of this

pincer movement exhibit a perverse complementarity, partly indicated by their

shared antipathy to properly historical explanation.20

A third, more proximate, reason is how the larger changes indicated of econ-omic and political forces and their effects for the conditions and tendencies of

ideological and intellectual production affect the organisation and fortunes of



14/19

the academy. This is also (and inevitably) an uneven process, because of the very

different institutional histories of universities, and of the types and degrees of

pressure that can be effectively imposed on them by public policy especially,

of course, where government principally funds universities. In the UnitedKingdom, and I suspect elsewhere, the generally increasing bite of value for

money agendas in university modernisation combines with the demand of

(official) aid agencies for applied research informed by a neo-liberal agenda, to

exacerbate the tensions between intellectual and practical objectives inherent

to development studies to the detriment of the former.

How much does this matter? Bill Freund contends that development studies as a

university subject (must) contain a non-applied theoretical, political, sociological

and historical aspect (personal communication).21 This, of course, resonates and

upholds the purpose and scope of the great tradition of studying development.My response is that to champion the substance of that view and to pursue its

intellectual commitment isa challenge across the social sciences more generally,

given todays pressures on the spaces and opportunities for social science scholar-

ship that is independently minded or in insufficient demand in the higher education

marketplace,22 let alone that is overtly critical and seeks to connect with opposi-

tional forms of politics, for example, the public sociology advocated by Michael

Burawoy (2004a). Burawoy (2004b) has extended his discussion to South Africa

to consider the dilemmas faced by a tradition of oppositional and activist

sociology in the face of the normalisation of university life after apartheid,and the demands it imposes in line with (generally conservative) public policy

reform almost everywhere (see also Webster 2004).

I am sceptical that development studies today offers much space and opportunity

for critical scholarship in the great tradition of studying development, for the

reasons given above and however much one might wish it were otherwise.

And here it is worth noting the particular, indeed unique, achievement of Bill

Freund in creating what must have been the only department of economic

history and development studies in the world, where he was able to exemplify

the teaching and study of development within the great tradition of comparativehistory informed by political economy (and has continued to do so). However,

and symptomatically of the wider issues considered here, later a wholly separate

School of Development Studies (SODS) was established in the same university on

the back of a professional or applied Masters programme in development

(together with applied research and consultancy).23

It remains my view, then, that the concerns and intellectual commitments exem-

plified by Bill Freund as student of development are better engaged with on the

more general terrain of the social sciences and the ample horizons of its battle-

fields. Here is where I would locate a William Freund Institute for the Study ofDevelopment, whose agenda could be informed by such instructive reflections

on studying development as those by Leys (1996), Sutcliffe (1999), Thomas



15/19

(2000) and Chang (2003) that I have cited.24 Development studies under which

name (flag of convenience?) Bill was able to establish a wholly exceptional

enclave for a while (because it was so personal an invention and preserve?) is

today too restricted, incoherent and fickle an academic entity to offer a convincingspace for contemplating, renewing and advancing the great tradition of studying

development.

Notes

1. It is fitting that thisfestschriftincludes Fred Cooper and Bob Shenton, historians of Africa who

have also made major contributions to our understanding of ideas and practices of develop-

ment. 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 researchon 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 1995:34).

3. In fact, Thomas (2000) structures the argument of his thoughtful essay on the condition of

Development Studies today around Cowen and Shentons 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 over-

come the antagonism between labour and capital through some form of amelioration of thesocial 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 Changs 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 cen-

trality of questions oforderto doctrines of development (in however implicit a fashion) is dif-

ficult 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 1996; also 2004).

8. A theme continued with even more overt provocation in Gavin Kitchings 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 inThe Guardian(London)

of 2 July 2005, where he addresses the Making Poverty History campaign and its topical dra-

matisations of sub-Saharan Africa by emphasising the radical insistence of Paine and Condorcet

on entitlement as opposed to charity. Seers (1969) is a classic statement of a social democratic

meaning of development in what I call below the founding moment of development studies.



16/19

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 preoccu-

pation across social science departments and institutes in Asian and African universities follow-

ing 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 hisRise 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 thefrustrations 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 2002).

16. Where NGO activity concentrates and the jargon of participation, empowerment, stake-

holders 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 atten-

tion 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, thereis now no intellectually legitimate basis for a development economics, only a universal econ-

omics of maximising behaviour. Ha-Joon Chang is among the most prolific and incisive

champions today of reviving and reinstating development economics (Chang 2003).

18. Those who fail to play by the rules arecriminalisedby the discourse, in effect; rent-seekers, for

example, are associated with corruption, while social actors and practices that disturb the social

and politicalorderof 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

(2001) explores the connections between development doctrine and global order/security.19. Bill Freund (1996:128) has observed that economic history is probably more capable (than

other branches of history) of explaining the constraints and limitations, the range of thepossible that development has taken, a proposition that is explored and illustrated in the over-

view his article provides.

20. Fred Cooper and Randall Packard (1997:3) 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 theres buoyant demand for professional staff from aid agencies



17/19

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 Holmans contemporary satire (2005).

22. In the context of thisfestschrift, 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 Hartes

cameo account of The Economic History Society, 1926 2001 on the Societys website

(www.ehs.org.uk); also Peter Wardleys 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 isnotto 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 soci-

ology 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 currentdevelopment 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).

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Documents

Bernstein Development Stuides