This article was downloaded by: [TBTAK EKUAL] On: 25 February 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription

number 772815468] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

African Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713405746

Studying development/development studies

Henry Bernsteina a University of London,

To cite this Article Bernstein, Henry(2006) 'Studying development/development studies', African Studies, 65: 1, 45 62 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00020180600771733 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020180600771733

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

African Studies, 65, 1, July 2006

Studying Development/Development Studies

Henry Bernstein
University of London
Alan Thomas (2000:777) usefully distinguishes three main senses or contemporary meanings of the term development thus: (i) as a vision, description or measure of the state of being of a desirable society; (ii) as an historical process of social change in which societies are transformed over long periods; (iii) as consisting of deliberate efforts aimed at improvement on the part of various agencies, including governments, all kinds of organisations and social movements. (Emphases in original) Underlying this lucid and concise characterisation are the dramatic and contradictory histories of the formation of the modern world, of how people located differentially in the times and places of its processes have tried to make sense of them, and of the effects of those understandings for more or less coherent political projects and other forms of collective action (combining vision and deliberate efforts aimed at improvement). The aim of this article is to explore several implications of these observations with respect to (a) studying development, (b) the nature of development studies as a recent academic eld, and (c) how (and how well) the former may be accommodated with the latter. In doing so, I look over my shoulder, as it were, at the work and inspiration of Bill Freund as an economic historian of modern Africa within what I shall term the great tradition of studying development.1 Bill established a distinctive academic niche at the University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) for studying (and teaching) development, that I touch on at the end.

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Studying development My starting point is Thomass second sense of development cited above: an historical process of social change in which societies are transformed over long periods. I start here because this is the original source of any meaning of modern development in effect: that established by the initial (and long) transitions to capitalism of north-western Europe, and especially that epochal moment marked by the advent of modern industrialisation in Britain from, say, the mid- or late eighteenth century onwards. After that, nothing would be the
ISSN 0002-0184 print=ISSN 1469-2872 online/06=010045-18 # 2006 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand DOI: 10.1080=00020180600771733

46 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

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 in the 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 denitive 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).
Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

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 classical political economy to Marx and then Weber) or on the problems of social order generated by such revolutionary (bourgeois) transformations of relations of property, production and power (from Hobbes, say, to Comte and Durkheim and, once more, Weber). And social science of Northern/Western provenance, both produced 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 prescriptions derived from them, are ercely 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 reected on the full force of industrial capitalism at rst hand (pre-eminently Marx), to those who contemplated the effects of such comprehensive 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 various sources and presuppose interconnections of an intellectually expansive tradition of confronting development as social transformation, generated by what

Studying Development/Development Studies 47

may be considered its heroic moments and instances, for example, conjunctures of intensied 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 and promises 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 ne, if very different, attempts to establish a long history of ideas/ideologies and experiences of development, and their antinomies, in order to illuminate todays debates. Of the various motifs that make up the encompassing discursive universe of development, the rst and most fundamental is accumulation as central to economic growth, which in turn required industrialisation in 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 modern capitalism. 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 contradictions of 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 propensities 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 of development as intent, articulated in doctrines of development and typically practised through the agency of (state) trusteeship, connects with his third sense of

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

48 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

deliberate efforts aimed at improvement, albeit with some qualication.3 The qualication is that development as amelioration, itself a condition of reproducing immanent capitalist growth (accumulation) in the face of the social misery and class struggle it generates, hardly provides any more intrinsically or morally satisfying vision, description or measure of the state of being of a desirable society, Thomass rst 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 generated (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 rst revealed by the immanent process of capitalist growth can be adapted to the purposes of primary accumulation as development strategy, exemplied in his book by China which had appropriated 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, of ujamaa 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 to achieving accumulation and 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 striking, 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 anticipatory social engineering: the engineering of growth in ways, and at rates, compatible with social order.

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Studying Development/Development Studies 49

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Examples of this include their account (Cowen and Shenton 1996:42 56) of the ideas and legacy of James Mill (1773 1836), a signicant political economist, ofcer 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 of development; 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 production 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 chiey 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 constrain 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 of development 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 72 81 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 the authors 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 wouldbe 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 sovereignty 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 acquire advanced weaponry (preferably by establishing the capacity to design and manufacture it).5 It is striking in how many cases the primary reference of such aspirations

50 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

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 scientic and technical knowledge manifested in military engineering. The most compelling of nineteenth-century instances, of course, is that of Meiji Japan the rst 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 accumulation 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 250 years. This dynamic has generated various doctrines of development from the late eighteenth century rather than, I suggest, the single genus identied by Cowen and Shenton.6 That centrality of accumulation, with all its ramied conditions 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 collective 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 eld 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 (commodication) 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 classic Marxism of contemporary processes of capitalist development in a backward country that proceeds with virtually no reference to the international capitalist economy in which late Tsarist Russia was located (and by which in effect its backwardness was dened) 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 international 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

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Studying Development/Development Studies 51

imperative of addressing the causes of the First World War, famously theorised imperialism and the centrality to it of a nance capital now much evolved institutionally since Marxs time. Lenins Imperialism (1964/1917) arguably generated more ideological heat for anti-imperialist struggles than it cast analytical light on the 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, rst, 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 rst 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 of development 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 recent An End to Poverty? (2004) which brings to light the rst 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 development (Cowen and Shenton). The key gures were Thomas Paine (17371809) 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 indignities (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 nally 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 contemporary neo-liberalism. This, then, is one vision of a desirable society, rst articulated together with a method for measuring well being and modelling the scal means of achieving it, relevant to studying development today.10

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

52 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

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) conict in industrial capitalist heartlands and colonial peripheries and to formulate projects of national accumulation, state modernisation, 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 rst 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 ofcial programme of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa, whose decolonisation provided one 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 superpowers 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 nancial and technical assistance (foreign aid). In this context, then, not only did the rhetoric of development doctrine shift towards visions of a desirable society encompassing in their optimism 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-state association 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 internationalisation 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 rmly 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, ows of capital and technology, and other aspects of a world economy, and likewise 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 development studies as an academic eld. I nd it useful to employ a restrictive or institutional denition of development studies as the kinds of teaching and research

Studying Development/Development Studies 53

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

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, and indeed contribute to, the great tradition of studying development. Certainly, what justies development studies as a specialism in its own right is the presumption that it is dedicated and equipped to generate applied knowledge in the formulation 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 rst 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 worldhistorical 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 inuence of social democratic ideas associated with a structuralist macroeconomics and a kind of international Keynesianism applied to issues of aid and trade. Both were aspects of what was now identied 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/or supported them with contracts for advanced training, applied research and consultancy. Nor was this new profession of development studies staffed entirely

54 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

by intellectual adepts of the great tradition; it also accommodated, for example, the redeployment of former colonial ofcials (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 of Kothari 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 subSaharan Africa (for example Cooper 2002, especially Ch 5). If the record of development studies, even in the more heroic rst 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 understanding that its principal rationale as policy science was to nd ways of assisting state-led development. As neo-liberalism quickly gained a hegemonic position in development 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 becomes more and more becomes less (Bernstein 2005). The rst 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 practical labour of reconstruction, from the demands of legitimation by intellectual and technical expertise including presenting claims to better results of neo-liberal policies 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 ambitious, or grandiose, project of social engineering that amounts to establishing bourgeois civilisation on a global scale. Comprehensive market reform confronted similarly comprehensive state reform (rather than simply contraction) as a

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Studying Development/Development Studies 55

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, or transformation, 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 agglomeration. 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, ination 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 and development, humanitarian emergencies and interventions, and post-conict resolution (among other examples). At the same time, more becomes less as the (market-centred) core of this expanded agenda is framed, and its key policies justied, 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 interventions indicated for example, experts in public administration or those dealing with the soft areas of welfare, community-level and other self-help interventions16 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 yielding different interpretations, to understand the massive upheavals that created the contemporary world and continued to shape it.17 This is now displaced intellectually by the most narrow (and ahistorical) of approaches in economics and ideologically 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 for all. 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

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

56 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

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 development 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.

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

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 modernist; 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, contestations 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 accommodated within development studies as a recent academic specialism and branch of policy science, justied 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 difcult 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 rst 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 globalisation (the unprecedented freedom and scale of mobility of capital), the demise of state socialism, and the political and ideological power of a neo-liberalism that presents itself as the common sense of the epoch. Indeed achieving that effect is, in a profound sense, the function of much ideological and intellectual production, 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 dened) 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 economic and political forces and their effects for the conditions and tendencies of ideological and intellectual production affect the organisation and fortunes of

Studying Development/Development Studies 57

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 United Kingdom, and I suspect elsewhere, the generally increasing bite of value for money agendas in university modernisation combines with the demand of (ofcial) 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 is a challenge across the social sciences more generally, given todays pressures on the spaces and opportunities for social science scholarship that is independently minded or in insufcient demand in the higher education marketplace,22 let alone that is overtly critical and seeks to connect with oppositional 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 comparative history 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 exemplied 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 battleelds. Here is where I would locate a William Freund Institute for the Study of Development, whose agenda could be informed by such instructive reections on studying development as those by Leys (1996), Sutcliffe (1999), Thomas

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

58 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

(2000) and Chang (2003) that I have cited.24 Development studies under which name (ag 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 ckle an academic entity to offer a convincing space for contemplating, renewing and advancing the great tradition of studying development.

Notes 1. It is tting that this festschrift includes Fred Cooper and Bob Shenton, historians of Africa who have also made major contributions to our understanding of ideas and practices of development. 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 signicant historical research on 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 overcome the antagonism between labour and capital through some form of amelioration of the social 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 benet, than can be adequately conveyed here; the value of their argument in reminding us of the centrality of questions of order to doctrines of development (in however implicit a fashion) is difcult 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 in The Guardian (London) of 2 July 2005, where he addresses the Making Poverty History campaign and its topical dramatisations 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.

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Studying Development/Development Studies 59

11. Although the conception of development studies extends beyond academic entities that bear the name. Its establishment and prole as a distinct academic eld in the South may have been patchy because national development, and how best to achieve it, was the principal preoccupation across social science departments and institutes in Asian and African universities following 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 his Rise 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 Ofcers 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 the frustrations 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, stakeholders 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 attention 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, there is now no intellectually legitimate basis for a development economics, only a universal economics of maximising behaviour. Ha-Joon Chang is among the most prolic and incisive champions today of reviving and reinstating development economics (Chang 2003). 18. Those who fail to play by the rules are criminalised by the discourse, in effect; rent-seekers, for example, are associated with corruption, while social actors and practices that disturb the social and political order of 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, Dufeld (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 the possible that development has taken, a proposition that is explored and illustrated in the overview 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 powerknowledge regime in a vaguely dened 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

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

60 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

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 uently (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 this festschrift, 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 is not to 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 sociology in South Africa as indicated by Burawoy (above). Those dilemmas in part stem from having to negotiate with ofcial agencies (both national and international) that dene current development 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).

References
Bernstein, H. 1996. Agrarian Questions Then and Now, in H. Bernstein and T. Brass (eds), Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of T. J. Byres. London: Frank Cass, pp 22 59. 2004. Changing Before Our Very Eyes: Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism today. Journal of Agrarian Change 4(3 4), special issue on Redistributive Land Reform Today T. J. Byres (ed):190 225. 2005. Development Studies and the Marxists, in U. Kothari (ed), A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies. London: Zed Books, pp 111 137. Bose, S. 1997. Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: Indias Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences. Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 45 63. Burawoy, M. 2004a. Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas, and Possibilities. Social Forces 82:1603 1618. 2004b. Public Sociology: South African Dilemmas in a Global Context. Society in Transition 35:11 26.

Studying Development/Development Studies 61

Chang, H.-J. 2002. Kicking Away The Ladder. Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. London: Anthem Press. (ed) 2003. Rethinking Development Economics: London: Anthem Press. Chatterjee, P. 1998. Development Planning and the Indian State, in T. J. Byres (ed), The State, Development Planning and Liberalisation in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp 82 103. Cooper, F. 2002. Africa Since 1940. The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, F. and Packard, R. 1997. Introduction, in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences. Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 1 41.
Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Corrigan, P., Ramsay, H. and Sayer, D. 1978. Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory. Bolshevism and its Critique. London: Macmillan. 1979. For Mao. Essays in Historical Materialism. London: Macmillan. Cowen, M.P. and Shenton, R.W. 1991a. The Origin and Course of Fabian Colonialism in Africa. Journal of Historical Sociology 4(2):143 74. 1991b. Bankers, Peasants and Land in British West Africa 1905 1937. Journal of Peasant Studies 19(1):26 58. 1995. The Invention of Development, in J. Crush (ed), Power of Development. London: Routledge, pp 27 43. 1996. Doctrines of Development. London: Routledge. Dufeld, M. 2001. Global Governance and the New Wars. The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Books. Ferguson, J. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fine, B. 2002. Economics Imperialism and the New Development Economics as Kuhnian Paradigm Shift? World Development 30:2057 2070. Freund, W.M. 1996. Economic History in South Africa: An Introductory Overview. South African Historical Journal 34:127 150. Holman, M. 2005. Last Order at Harrods: An African Tale. Edinburgh: Polygon. Idahosa, P.E.L. and Shenton, B. 2004. The Africanists New Clothes. Historical Materialism 12(4):67 113. Kitching, G. 1982. Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective: Populism, Nationalism and Industrialization. London: Methuen. Kitching, G. 2001. Seeking Social Justice through Globalization. Escaping a Nationalist Perspective. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

62 African Studies 65: 1, July 2006

Kothari, U. 2005. From Colonial Administration to Development Studies: A PostColonial Critique of the History of Development Studies, in U. Kothari (ed), A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies. London: Zed Books, pp 47 66. Lenin, V.I. 1964/1899. The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Collected Works, Vol 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1964/1917. Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Collected Works, Vol 22. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. 1976/1867. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy Vol 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Moore, D. (ed). In press. The World Bank: Constructing Hegemony or Alleviating Poverty? Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Downloaded By: [TBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:40 25 February 2011

Seers, D. 1969. The Meaning of Development. International Development Review 11(4):2 6. Silver, B. and Arrighi, G. 2000. Workers North and South, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds), The Socialist Register 2001. London: Merlin Press, pp 53 76. Sutcliffe, B. 1999. The Place of Development in Theories of Imperialism and Globalization, in R. Munck and D. OHearn (eds), Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. London: Zed Books, pp 135 153. Thomas, A. 2000. Development as Practice in a Liberal Capitalist World. Journal of International Development 12:773 787. Webster, E. 2004. Sociology in South Africa: Its Past, Present and Future. Society in Transition 35:27 41.