Power of Development

Jonathan Crush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415111775
• eBook ISBN: 9781134832965
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

Post-colonial, post-modern and feminist critiques have challenged the ways we theorise and practice development. Development is not just the conclusion of economic logic; its histories reveal a legacy of contested power, illuminating the contemporary battlefields of knowledge. These essays explore the language of development, its rhetoric and meaning within different political and institutional contexts. The contested ideas behind world development are explained, with illustrative material, sensitive to place and time, chiefly drawn from Asia, Africa and Latin America. This book examines the power of development to imagine new worlds and to constantly reinvent itself as the solution to problems of national and global disorder.

Part I

HISTORIES OF DEVELOPMENT

1
THE INVENTION OF DEVELOPMENT

Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton¹

A mankind which no longer knows want will begin to have an inkling of the delusory, futile nature of all the arrangements hitherto made to escape want, which used wealth to reproduce want on a larger scale.

(Adorno 1993 [1951]:156–7)

INTRODUCTION

‘Development’ has been called the central organizing concept of our time. The United Nations has its development agencies, and the World Bank takes development as part of its official name—the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Hundreds and thousands of people are in development’s employ and billions are spent each year in its pursuit. It would be difficult to find a single nation-state in the North which does not have its departments or ministries of local, regional and international development. Nor can any Third World nation expect to be taken seriously without the development label prominently displayed on some part of its governmental anatomy.

What is development? This question is often posed in the initial stages of books or courses on ‘development studies,’ but is rarely coherently answered. Rather the reader or student is told that development means different things to different people. The authors or lecturers then move rapidly on to a discussion of ‘the development debate.’ As they proceed, the issue of what, precisely, development is grows even murkier. While the student may initially be informed that development is about the betterment of human kind through the alleviation of poverty and the realization of human potential, he or she quickly discovers that there also exists ‘good’ and ‘bad’ development, as well as ‘under’ and ‘over’ development. Development can be ‘autonomous,’ ‘appropriate,’ ‘gender-conscious,’ ‘sustainable,’ or the opposite of all these and much else besides. Which words are used seems to depend upon the views and policies of those in positions of authority in universities, national governments and international agencies. Even critics of development policies affirm, in the very act of criticism, development’s existence.

Development thus defies definition, although not for a want of definitions on offer. One recent development studies text, notably entitled Managing Development (Staudt 1991), advances ‘seven of hundreds of definitions of development.’ Development is construed as ‘a process of enlarging people’s choices’; of enhancing ‘participatory democratic processes’ and the ‘ability of people to have a say in the decisions that shape their lives’; of providing ‘human beings with the opportunity to develop their fullest potential’ and of enabling the poor, women, and ‘free independent peasants’ to organize for themselves and work together. Simultaneously, development is defined as the means to ‘carry out a nation’s development goals’ and to promote economic growth, equity and national self-reliance (Staudt 1991:28–9).

Here, quite typically, the distinction between development as an action and development as a goal of action is conflated with another important distinction. When, for example, someone mentions the ‘development of capitalism’ we take development to be an immanent and objective process. But when the same person says that it is desirable that state policy should achieve ‘sustainable development,’ we are now told that there is a subjective course of action that can be undertaken in the name of development. This distinction, between development as an immanent process and an intentional practice, has been central to European theological and philosophical debate. In contemporary development texts it is often lost.

Staudt (1991) assumes that development can happen as the result of decision and choice. Yet, the question of how actions taken in the name of development relate to any preconceived end of development is unanswered. Furthermore, because development is both means and goal, the final outcome is routinely assumed to be present at the onset of the process of development. Thus, Staudt argues that the goal of development is to enlarge choice. Yet, for choice to be exercised, let alone enlarged, there must be desire and capacity to choose as well as knowledge of possible choices. Choice is as much a precondition for development as its result. Further confusion arises when Staudt ignores another distinction between, on the one hand, a state policy of development and, on the other, attempts to empower people through or indeed against the state in the name of development. Empowerment is merely another name for development and thus embodies all its difficulties.

During the nineteenth 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,’ a doctrine which became central to the historical project of European empire. Now, in the late twentieth century, the ‘entrusting’ of the means of development to ‘the developed’ has no conviction. As a doctrine, trusteeship is condemned as Eurocentrism, a vestige of the post-1945 attempt to improve the living standards of poor colonies and nations through external state administration. Development as trusteeship is taken to have no meaning for Third World countries. It has had its day and failed as an idea and a practice.

The period of development is now routinely assumed to be the span of imperial and post-colonial history since 1945. The subject of development is the imperial state (before and after political dismemberment); its object is colonial and Third World peoples. The recent Development Dictionary (Sachs 1992) informs us that ‘underdevelopment began’ on 20 January 1949, the day on which Truman called for a ‘bold new program’ for the improvement, growth and development of underdeveloped areas (Esteva 1992:7). Five of the twenty essays in the Dictionary start with Truman’s address and he is quoted at least ten times in the volume. Students are thus regularly instructed in the shallowness of development’s history. A good deal of the confusion surrounding development arises from this sort of exercise in historical truncation. This essay argues, on the contrary, that development is a state practice rooted in the nineteenth century.

By truncating development’s historical domain, we lose the crucial sense in which it emerged in the nineteenth century as a counterpoint to ‘progress.’ Development emerged to ameliorate the perceived chaos caused by progress. In many texts, the ideas of development and progress are seamlessly stitched together. There is little sense of a dynamic relationship between the two concepts (Harris 1989:4–11; Thomas 1992:7). In this chapter, we argue that 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’s failure—a failure which occurred long before its supposed mid-twentieth-century birth.

THE EUROPEAN SETTING

The doctrine of development was already old before Truman’s invocation. For example, Bourdillon, the British Governor of Nigeria, addressing the Royal Empire Society in London in 1937, stated that ‘the exploitation theory …is dead and the development theory has taken its place’ (quoted in Cowen and Shenton 1991:165). Nearly a century before, Robert Chambers (1969 [1844]:360) wrote in his widely read anticipation of Darwin, The Natural History of the Vestiges of Creation, that ‘the inorganic has one final comprehensive law, GRAVITATION. The organic, the other great department of mundane things, rests in like manner on one law and that is, DEVELOPMENT.’

By the early twentieth century, the idea of development was already well established in British thought. So was that of underdevelopment. Responding to Joseph Chamberlain’s injunction to develop Britain’s imperial estates in Africa, the Liberal Prime Minister, Campbell-Bannerman, put forward a project of his own, ‘to develop our underdeveloped estates in this country; to colonise to our own country’ (quoted in Cowen and Shenton 1991:147). Much earlier, John Henry (Cardinal) Newman, a contemporary of Robert Chambers, writing in a field totally remote from the concerns of late twentieth-century developers, had begun to define the modern idea of underdevelopment. The concept emerged as part of a theory of development in Newman’s 1845 ‘Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine’ (Newman, 1992[1845]), which, the historian Acton said, ‘did more than any other book of the time to make the English “think historically,” to watch the process as well as the result’ (quoted in Chadwick 1957:ix). Although concerned with the development of Christian doctrine, Newman’s book had a far wider influence. Pattison, a fellow cleric, wrote to Newman in 1878 that it was:

A remarkable thing that you should have first state the idea—and the word— development, as the key to the history of church doctrine, and since then it has gradually become the dominant idea of all history, biology, physics, and in short has metamorphosed our view of every science, and of all knowledge.

(quoted in Chadwick 1957:ix-x)

Newman’s argument encompassed both development and underdevelopment. Emphasizing that history moved through ‘true’ developments, Newman believed that there were doctrines and practices which did not evolve in a manner that remained faithful to the originating concept. He called this ‘corruption’ and used it to distinguish between the true development and the perversion of religious doctrine. Newman’s idea of corruption conveys much of the sense of decay and decomposition, of disarticulation and disintegration that is essential to the modern meaning of underdevelopment. In the history of Western thought, the idea of corruption as part of a theory of change long predates Newman. As Robert Nisbet (1969) has noted, it developed in classical times and was based on the life cycle of all living things. The growing and maturing organism deposits a seed to recreate life amidst its own decay and destruction. Applied to the history of the state, the metaphor predicted that periods of state building would lead to periods of ‘disorder’ and ‘ruin’ which were, in turn, the prerequisites for renewed political construction. Successful statecraft and the art of politics, as in the work of Machiavelli, aimed to prolong maturity and forestall degeneration. It could do no more. This older meaning of development expressed a dual character of change. 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.

The classical theory of cyclical change remained dominant until it was challenged by modern ideas of progress that began to emerge in work of thinkers from at least Fontenelle to Hegel more than a century later and that gradually but, not wholly, supplanted the concept of inevitable degeneration. The idea of progress also had Christian origins stemming from the doctrine of divine revelation in which Providence through history maps out a design in advance of human efforts (Brunner 1948; Baillie 1950; Wager 1967). Enlightenment thinkers constructed secular variants of this idea, giving autonomy to human purpose and proposing the prospect of unlimited improvement through unaided human effort.

It has become commonplace for those attempting to legitimize the supposed modern sub-discipline, development economics, to rummage through the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially those of Adam Smith. These eighteenth-century writers 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. As one commentator (Meek 1976:255 quoted in Skinner 1982:91) has suggested, ‘the four stages, at any rate at the outset of its career, usually took the form of a theory of development embodying the idea of some ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ movement through a succession of different modes of subsistence.’

The attempt by modern would-be developers to find the origins of their development practice in the Scottish Enlightenment requires a very selective reading of texts. Smith, like Locke, was fundamentally concerned with the Hobbesian problem of how social and political order might be maintained. In addressing the old idea of the inevitable corruption of the ‘body economic’ Smith simultaneously, and perhaps unwittingly, held out the possibility of progress as a linear unfolding of the universal potential for human improvement which need not be recurrent, finite or reversible. In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1937 [1776]), commonly seen as an eighteenth-century precursor of the modern ‘development debate,’ Smith is credited with rejecting the classical view, that national wealth and power were subject to inevitable cycles of advance, decline and stagnation, replacing it with a ‘new description of rich and poor countries interlocked in a system of free trade reflecting the realities of a changing world. He could see the possibilities of progress both for rich and poor countries offered by a system of natural liberty in foreign trade’ (Hont 1983:302). Yet, Smith’s optimism was immediately challenged by contemporaries who observed the political disorder that followed the French Revolution and the social disorder that accompanied the birth of industrial capitalism. In these grim facts, they found reasons to question the idea of boundless human improvement.

Although Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1986 [1798]) is usually presented as an anodyne theory concerning the limits to the growth of population imposed by agriculture, his book, published in the wake of one of the first crises of industrial capitalism, presented primarily a moral argument. He used his theory of population growth to argue against the possibility of limitless social perfectibility. Malthus attacked Smith’s optimistic views about the possibility of unlimited human improvement. In particular, he challenged the idea that increases in society’s wealth would necessarily bring improvement or happiness to every part of it. He argued that Smith had ‘not stopped to take notice of those instances where the wealth of a society may increase without having any tendency to increase the comforts of the labouring part of it.’ For Malthus, an increase in society’s wealth would only mean a consequent growth in population which was ‘the great obstacle in the way of any extraordinary improvement in society and was ‘of a nature that we can never hope to overcome’ (Malthus 1986 [1798]: 183–4, 198–9).

For those who lived through the early decades of the nineteenth century, Malthus’ grim predictions seemed to be coming true. E.J.Hobsbawm (1968: 58–9) captures the spirit of the times when he observes that no period of British history was as tense, or as politically and socially disturbed, as the 1830s and early 1840s. According to Hobsbawm, much of the tension of the period was the result of the working class despairing that they had not enough to eat and manufacturers despairing because they genuinely believed that the prevailing political and fiscal arrangements were slowly throttling the economy. These ‘troubled times’ gave birth to Luddites, Radicals, trade unionists, utopian socialists, Democrats and Chartists (Hobsbawm 1988:13; Hobsbawm 1968:55). They also gave rise to development. In France in the 1840s, the same sense of imminent turmoil was apparent (Sewell 1980). The French economy was more backward than the British but it was plunged, by industrial capitalism, into even greater social and political turmoil. In 1848, the Journal des travaillers declared that ‘unemployment is the most hideous sore of current social organisation’ (quoted in Sewell 1980:249). The modern meaning of development (imbued with an overt sense of design) emerged to confront this ‘hideous sore.’ This new meaning was in direct opposition to the idea of progress as a ‘natural’ process without intentionality.

THE DESIGN OF DEVELOPMENT

The Samt-Simonians, writing at the end of the 1820s, were the original positivists. Their ideas were nurtured during the rise of industrial capitalism and, like Adam Smith, they posed the problem of creating order in a society undergoing radical transformation. Their analysis and solutions differed markedly from Smith’s. The Saint-Simonians argued that humanity was a collective entity that had grown from generation to generation according to its own law of ‘progressive development’ (Iggers 1972 [1892]:28). Progressive development demanded ‘a progressive amelioration of the moral, physical, and intellectual condition of the human race.’ By this process everyone would realize that individual prosperity was inseparable from the prosperity and growth of all (Iggers 1972:79).

The Saint-Simonians divided human history into ‘organic’ and ‘critical’ epochs. Organic epochs were characterized by harmony, widerning associations and common goals. The Middle Ages was one such epoch. Religious ideas were paramount and the economy was regulated by feudal corporations. By contrast, ‘critical’ epochs of human history were ‘filled with disorder; they destroyed former social relations, and everywhere tend(ed) towards egoism.’ Although harmful, they were necessary and indispensable, destroying ‘anti-quated forms’ and facilitating the emergence of ‘better forms’ (Iggers, 1972:28).

The thinkers of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had succeeded in destroying the basis of the old ‘organic epoch’ but were incapable of visualizing a new era. This was because they remained wedded to ideas which put a premium upon self-interested individual action. This prolonged the social agony and delayed the arrival of a new organic epoch in which men would once again be ‘associated,’ though on a new footing. The new basis of human association, would be industrialism, guided by intellect, and governed by ‘sympathy.’ Unlike many of their conservative contemporaries, the Saint-Simonians applauded industrialization but argued that egoism produced irrational and destructive industrial practices: The industrialist is little concerned with the interests of society,’ they argued, ‘his family, instruments of production, and the personal fortune he strives to attain, are his mankind, his universe, and his God’ (Iggers 1972 [1829]:12).

According to the Saint-Simonians, ‘laissez faire’ was the source of disorder. Amidst the ‘throngs’ who could testify to the disasters of this principle was the man ‘who lives by his hands’ who could never applaud the introduction of steam power to his trade. If, as the Saint-Simonians willingly acknowledged, steam was necessary and potentially beneficial for all, this was little consolation to the ‘thousands of famished men’ whose live...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Fulltitle Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I Histories of Development
• Part II GEOGRAPHIES OF DEVELOPMENT
• Part III Other Developments
• Bibliography
• Index