Political Development Theory

The Contemporary Debate

Richard Higgott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134951475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book examines development theory from a political persepctive. It considers modernisation theory and public policy, as well as Marxism, the state, and the third world.

1

Development and the Social Sciences: a Suggested Form of Analysis

Since World War II, all theorising about political development, be it positivist or Marxist, has in many ways emphasised ‘thought’ at the expense of material life. Ideas were taken to be the creator or determinant of the form history was to take in the Third World. It was commonly believed that the problems of the Third World could be solved by directly applying theoretical constructs derived from the study of the historical evolution of the West. When Western social, economic and political theorists turned their attention to the problems of the decolonising and developing world in the wake of World War II, the social, economic and political changes they came to expect—whether higher levels of economic productivity, rationalisation or secularisation—were widely accepted as deriving from our rapidly increasing knowledge of the world, both physical and social (see, inter alia, Black 1967:7; Eisenstadt 1973:231 and Boulding 1965:27–53).

If we consider the central theoretical concerns of ‘development studies’ in the post-World War II period loosely as ‘growth’, ‘modernisation’, ‘progress’, ‘development’ or whatever, then it has to be said at the outset that the academy has fared much better than the actual focus of its attention—namely, the developing countries themselves. If the growth and development of the Third World had mirrored the growth and development of its chroniclers and theoretical analysts (in the 1960s especially), the Third World would now be a much healthier place. The contemporary decline of development studies is less to be explained by the ‘take-off’, or not as the case may be, of the Third World, than by the limited accomplishments, both theoretical and practical, of development theory itself.

The assumption of a decline of development theory is not to be concluded from any perceptible decrease in the volume of literature on development issues, but rather from the lack of any substantive beneficial impact of this literature on the problem area to which it is addressed. We are in a period of pessimism in which any kind of synthesis and progress beyond the work of the last two decades or so seems unlikely. New and innovative ideas seem hard to come by and developments in theorising over the last decade are largely the result of a return to older and more tried theories—or variations thereof. Particularly influential have been efforts to re-adapt both Marxist and liberal classical theories to the problems concerned. The malaise in development studies is in large part due to a growing acceptance that the likelihood of ‘solutions’ to our problems are extremely remote. Many bold reformist solutions would appear largely unacceptable in an increasingly conservative, cut-throat, hostile and perceived zero-sum international economic and political environment.

It is not intended to suggest there have been no advances in theory-building over the last decade. Indeed there has been advance, but it has put us further back from out initial starting point. We now recognise that problems are much more intractable than when we first set out to solve them in the late 1950s and early 1960s—that optimistic period of the decolonisation process and the commencement of the UN Development Decade. Our initial theoretical assumptions were simply not a reflection of Third World reality, be it at a domestic level or the level of the Third World’s position in the international economic and political environment. Our major advance is that descriptively we are much further on in understanding Third World political and economic reality. Our major weakness is that, as a consequence of this increase in comprehension, we are prescriptively further back than we were when we started theorising about development after World War II. Our recognition of the complexity of development and under-development means that we have inevitably lowered our sights. Knowing that many questions fall quite simply into a ‘too-hard box’, we now, especially as far as policy-making is concerned, ask questions which are much less ambitious.

While development studies are extremely heterogeneous, transcending a variety of disciplines, they were all at the outset charged with the same post-World War II optimism, which asserted the mutually beneficial nature of the relationship between the developed and tJie developing worlds and the possibility of the transference of theoretical knowledge from the former to the latter. Such an ideological support system justified not only the political decolonisation process but, underwritten by the intellectual genius of Western socio-technological knowledge, the appropriateness and virtuousness of the transplantation of Western culture, institutions and technology. I trust the reader will not consider it too cynical to suggest that had we been aware of the magnitude of the problem, and the real feebleness of our theoretical weapons to cope with them, then that altruism that we have seen might not have been as substantial as it in fact was. Development studies had their birth in the boom period of post-war reconstruction in the northern hemisphere—not a period of dire economic crisis, accompanied by a belief in the zero-sum, non-mutuality of the relationship be tween developed and developing countries in the international system that prevails in the current climate at the beginning of the 1980s. Nowadays there has been a clear shift from the middle ground that was occupied in the early phases of post-World War II development by Keynesian welfare-inspired developers. Put briefly, we have on one side of the middle ground the neo-classical right, epitomised in the critique of interventionist policies by authors such as Peter Bauer (1976 and 1981) and analysts of what Robert Cox has called the ‘Establishmenf’ perspective (Cox 1979). On the left, we have a resurgent Marxist analysis. There is of course a basic irony in the fact that the lines of criticism developed by the Establishment and Marxist scholars of the radical structuralist and dependencia theorists of underdevelopment, despite different ideological perspectives, are basically the same.

Methodological Issues

Perhaps the major factor that has become apparent over the last couple of decades is that there is no such thing as a ‘typical developing’ country. Methodologically we have to be extremely careful about trying to aggregate data, knowledge and ideas about the Third World. The literature of the 1950s and 1960s assumed a homogeneity in the Third World which led to generalisation of such a nature, in both schools under review, as to lead to a distortion of reality. Perhaps the prime example at this stage was modernisation theory’s fetish for the tradition—modernity dichotomy (see Price 1975).

Theory-building really does have to pay serious attention to the problems of generalising about the conditions and prospects of states as diverse as Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan or Nigeria on the one hand, and states such as Bangladesh or the Sahelian states of West Africa, such as Mali, Upper Volta or Chad on the other. In the past, theory-building based on polar opposites—be it Weberian ideal types or radical attempts to provide explanations of underdevelopment by generalising from André Gunder Frank’s early and near ubiquitous metropolis-satellite polarisation—has meant that little or no account has been taken until recently of regional, spatial or temporal disparities. The danger of such polar analysis is that reality tends to become subordinate to theory. On the other hand, it can be argued, as Scarrow (1969: 33) does, that ‘generalisations are the hallmark of all scientific endeavour’ and that generalisations must therefore be made. The brief of this book—to provide an overview of the recent intellectual history of development theory—must permit such a generalising approach.

We accept that macro-sociological concepts can hide much of the socio-economic reality of the Third World, just as the aggregation of statistics and data can hide the failure of development theory actually to improve the lot of people in the Third World; and just as focusing at the level of the nation, or even the region, ignores much of the political, social and economic activity which takes place at the level of the smaller unit.

Several other initial methodological problems that have beset the study of underdevelopment by social scientists need to be raised at this stage. First, the tendency towards specialisation. While the academic heritages of the sociologist and the social anthropologist are important, neither is entirely sufficient in its own right; the same can be, and is of course, said about the specialised material of the economist and the political scientist, Even given the realities of academic differentiation and, at a less savoury level, the rivalries of academic professionalism, a multi disciplinary approach should not be entirely beyond our means. The major problem is in dealing with a situation in which solutions cannot be presumed to emerge simply from aggregating the various disciplines of the social sciences:

The fundamental problem…is that the social sciences are linked by a common subject matter rather than a common theory—where disciplines operate in generally different fields but are linked by a common theoretical base (as say, biochemistry and mechanical engineering depend on a common stock of ideas about molecular and atomic structure) the problem of joint application is much less than where the disciplines operate in the same field but with different intellectual bases (for example biochemistry and psychiatry) (Cumper 1973:248).

A second problem is to be found in the relationship between the social sciences and society. More than any other branch of the academy, social scientists reflect the conditions under which their work emerges; while society is the object of study, it does at the same time, to a greater or lesser extent, determine the direction inquiries will take. Working from such an assumption, it will be argued throughout this monograph that the various phases of development studies very largely reflect the prevailing moods of optimism, pessimism, resignation and even cynicism that have characterised certain stages in the study of underdevelopment.

In trying to write this intellectual history it has become clear that new ideas on development theory (and probably new ideas in general) would appear to go through three phases. First, a stage of organised resistance and hostility to a set of ideas as the old view comes under challenge. Second, a stage which sees a largely uncritical support and acceptance of these new ideas when they are deemed to have ‘arrived’. Third, a stage, which is practically and intellectually the most rewarding, in which the new perspective undergoes a period of critical evaluattion. Chapters 2 and 3 will try to illustrate that this progression in stages has taken place in post-World War II development theory.

The first stage can be characterised as one of growing criticism of modernisation theory as the initial optimism of the 1950s and early 1960s began to fade and a sustained critique of the theory was developed. The second stage, the late 1960s and early 1970s, can be characterised by the rise of a crude radical alternative in the work of early Latin American dependency theorists and its uncritical acceptance in many areas. The third stage, from about 1974, has to date seen a critical evaluation of notions of dependency, from both left and right, resulting in an increasingly sophisticated debate about the nature and causes of underdevelopment. This stage exhibits two main facets: first, a stimulating, if at times convoluted, neo-Marxist debate over the nature of class formation and the role of the post-colonial state in the Third World, to be discussed in Chapter 3; and second, the resurgence of liberal theory as ‘post-conventional’ development theory, to be discussed in Chapter 4.

The utility of such a review will lie not in its originality, but in its attempt to treat the recent intellectual history of development theory as a whole. There are many individual studies of orthodox and radical theory, but few studies which try to see them in relation to each other through various phases of intellectual development.

To talk of ‘phases’ of development is not, however, to imply that this progression should be seen as some kind of Kuhnian paradigm change. WhHe there is indeed some kind of dialectical relationship between competing schools of thought, they have in other ways developed ‘internally’ and quite separately from each other’s influences. Chapter 2, for example, argues that the response to the crisis in modernisation theory has not been to plump for the radical alternative of the neo-Marxist but to restructure itself from within. Remaining largely within their North American intellectual tradition, and in keeping with the responses to the inadequacies of behaviouralism, political scientists, for example, have placed a growing emphasis on political economy—not the political economy of the neo-Marxist, but a political economy using rational-choice models, and decision-making and policy-analysis approaches, to the study of political behaviour in the Third World.

Similarly, as Chapter 3 argues, radical theory, without having as pure a parentage as modernisation theory, and despite its initial flirtation with the radical structuralism of early Frankian dependency theory, is developing more and more into a debate about the rectitude or otherwise of what are seen as variants of internal neo-Marxian analysis. Both schools of thought would appear to be running along parallel lines having little direct influence on one another.

It is, therefore, important that we consider briefly in this introduction the tendency, exhibited by several authors of late, to apply Kuhnian ‘notions’ of theory development to the study of underdevelopment. ‘Notions’ is used loosely since these authors represent only a small percentage of the social scientists who have watered down and popularised Kuhn’s concepts in order to justify a proliferation of paradigms in the social sciences (Perry 1977).

Susanne Bodenheimer (1971), for example, developed an ideological critique of modernisation theory which she termed the ‘American paradigm surrogate for Latin American studies’. Aidan Foster-Carter (1976) used Kuhn’s ideas in a self-explanatory paper entitled ‘From Rostow to Gunder Frank: Conflicting Paradigms in the Analysis of Underdevelopment’, and Raymond Duvall (1978) argued that concepts of dependence and dependencia were paradigmatic in as much as they represented distinct conceptual views and epistemological underpinnings. Such work clearly illustrates the currency of Kuhn’s views, for better or worse, amongst students of development and underdevelopment and suggests that there is a need at this stage to consider their relevance or otherwise,

Perhaps a first point worth noting, and more or less universally accepted, is Kuhn’s view that the social sciences are in a pre-paradigm situation. The study of development or underdevelopment is clearly not established science in the Kuhnian sense; as will be seen, neither of our schools of thought has established an ascendancy which would allow for a process of normal and revolutionary science.

Perhaps more relevant to the kind of historiographical analysis provided in this book is Imre Lakatos’ notion of a ‘research programme’ (Lakatos and Musgrave 1970), as opposed to the more commonplace Kuhnian paradigm. As one author has suggested, albeit in another context, such a concept allows us ‘to steer a middle course between the scylla of Kuhnian relativism and the charybdis of positivist formalism’ (Ball 1976:152). A utilisation of the ideas of Kuhn and Lakatos in combination helps us to see that changes in paradigms, pre-paradigm theories, research programmes or simply theoretical orthodoxies are, as often as not, as much sociological as methodological processes.

Borrowing from Lakatos, this book will, by examining the durability of modernisation theory and broadly defined ‘Marxist’ theory, suggest that neither theoretical approach has been killed off (or falsified) in empirical fashion. As research programmes, for analysing developing countries, both modernisation theory and Marxism would appear to be made of sterner stuff. They are ‘good swimmers’ that have survived in an ocean of anomalies, Both research programmes have at times seemed at risk, as testing has appeared to be ‘degenerative’ or ‘content decreasing’ (Ball 1976:165)—especially during the hey-day of dependency theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The last few years, however, as this book attempts to show, have demonstrated that both theories are extremely durable. Neither is likely to disappear from development studies in the foreseeable future. This is because both research programmes have a greater degree of validity than either is normally prepared to concede to the other and also, for slightly more negative reasons of the kind alluded to by Ball in his study of behavioural political science, ‘no matter how waterlogged it is a research program will not sink and have to be abandoned until a better, more buoyant one comes along to replace it’ (Ball 1976:165–6).

While modernisation theory and Marxism have both come under attack as research programmes, neither has seen its fortunes plummet in the manner of early dependency theory. In their different spheres, both modernisation theory and Marxism are fairly strong and, as will become apparent, this is in large part due to their shared view, albeit from conflicting normative positions and in sharp contrast to dependency theory, of the essentially progressive nature of capitalism in the Third World. This common progressivist core has kept these competing research programmes afloat amongst a variety of ephemeral fads and fantasies. It is because of the similarity and strength of this common core that one needs to avoid what Lakatos has called ‘dogmatic falsificationism’.

Historiographical analysis demonstrates the essential durability of the hard core of both modernisation and Marxist approaches and suggests the need for a greater ‘tolerance in matters theoretical’ (Ball 1976:171). Rather then engage in dogmatic falsification, we need to allow much greater latitude to research programmes in a subject as young as development studies. As I will try to suggest in the conclusion to this work, maybe our two competing schools should not be so automatically contemptuous of one another as they have tended to be in the past. Historiographical analysis, by a process of reconstruction, also helps explain the kinds of adjustments that take place in the protective surrounds of a theory’s inner theoretical core.

The modifications that have been imposed upon the initial Hobsonian/ Leninist theories of imperialism by dependency theorists such as André Gunder Frank, Paul Baran and later world systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin, represent a perfect case study for this form of analysis. This process is given full treatment in Chapter 3. Similarly, our historiographical analysis of modernisation theory in Chapter 2 enables us to highlight major modifications in the research programme. Such a methodology closes for us the unreal gap that emerged in the later 1950s and early 1960s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Development and the Social Sciences: a Suggested Form of Analysis
• 2. From Modernisation Theory to Public Policy: Continuity and Change in the Political Science of Political Development
• 3. Beyond the Sociology of Underdevelopment: Dependency, Marxism and the State
• 4. The Search for Common Ground: Public Policy and the State in the Third World
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index