Studying Development/Development Studies

Henry Bernstein
School of Oriental and African Studies, 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 organizations 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 essay is to
explore several implications of these observations with respect to (a) studying development, (b)
the nature of development studies as a recent academic field, 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.

Studying development

My starting point is Thomas’s 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 northwestern 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 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,

1
It is fitting 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 significant historical research on Africa, namely Michael Cowen and Gavin Kitching who both worked on
Central Province, Kenya.
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 definitive philosophical and political tensions at the core of debate about
development today (Sutcliffe 1999). This is communicated especially well by a famous
(infamous?) dictum that ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less
developed the image of its own future’ (Marx 1976/1867: 91), which neatly rolls together
inevitability and desirability, prediction and progress (however painful a dialectic of
destruction and creation getting there might entail).

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

the master theme or grand ‘narrative’ of the formation of modern social science, whether
centred on the dynamics of accumulation and its social and institutional conditions (from
Locke, say, through Smith and 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 knowledges (and
modes of producing knowledge), and the desirability of prescriptions derived from them, are
fiercely contested, not least in relation to the troubled histories and uncertain futures of
development in other parts of the world (the ‘Third World’ or ‘South’, and now the once
‘Second World’ too).

A range of theoretical approaches to, and models of, development emerged within the
processes of the development of capitalism and its different times and places, from the great
achievements of eighteenth-century Scottish political economy (culminating in Adam Smith)
on the cusp of industrialisation, through those who experienced and reflected on the full force
of industrial capitalism at first hand (pre-eminently Marx), to those who contemplated the
effects of such 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 may be considered its
heroic moments and instances, for example, conjunctures of intensified inter-imperialist and
anti-imperialist struggles from the late nineteenth century. ‘Heroic’ ideas about the sources and
means of development connected, more and less programmatically (and plausibly), with a
range of aspirations 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 fine, if very different, attempts to
establish a long history of ideas/ideologies and experiences of development, and their
antinomies, in order to illuminate today’s debates. Of the various motifs that make up the
encompassing discursive universe of development, the first and most fundamental is
accumulation as central to economic growth, which in turn required industrialisation in the
world created by Britain’s pioneering economic revolution. This is nicely encapsulated as the
‘old orthodoxy’ of classical political economy in Gavin Kitching’s 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 Kitching’s 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 today’s 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 Thomas’s 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
‘deliberate efforts aimed at improvement’, albeit with some qualification.3 The qualification 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’, Thomas’s first sense of development and that which
pervades today’s rhetoric of ending poverty (see further below).4

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 Shenton’s 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
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’ first
revealed by the ‘immanent process of capitalist growth’ can be adapted to the purposes of
primary accumulation as development strategy, exemplified in his book by China which had
appropriated and refashioned that logic to its own historical circumstances. The case of China
served Kitching’s 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 China’s 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 Nyerere’s ‘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 Shenton’s 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 Britain’s
vast colonial domains as a type of anticipatory social engineering: the engineering of growth in
ways, and at rates, compatible with social order.

Examples of this include their account (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 42-56) of the ideas and
legacy of James Mill (1773-1836), a significant political economist, officer of the East India
Company, and one of ‘a long line of British writers who addressed the question of India as a
codicil of the European invention 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

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”’).
chiefly authority). Africans were not, therefore, to be allowed any immediate and unbridled
enjoyment of such bourgeois rights as private title in land and access to bank credit, which
could stimulate a dangerous individualism on one hand, and on the other hand collective action
by colonial subjects on the basis of class interests. No doubt Cowen and Shenton considered
that such attempts to combine progress with order in fact 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 would-be modernising regimes
in the conditions of an internationalising economic and political system in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries could, and did, generate other forms of development doctrine centred,
quite explicitly, on building the 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 to modernisation
- from Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century to the nineteenth-century African
examples adduced by Idahosa and Shenton or the Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman rulers -
was the acquisition of (‘modern’, ‘Western’) education and knowledge, and especially the
scientific and technical knowledge manifested in military engineering. The most compelling of
nineteenth-century instances, of course, is that of Meiji Japan - the first undeniably successful
‘developmental state’ of the era of industrial capitalism, surely, and one with scant regard for
any doctrine of development centred on ‘amelioration’?

What I take from Kitching’s, and Cowen and Shenton’s, 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

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 Chang’s otherwise
illuminating historical survey (2002) of the centrality of state action to the economic development of the industrial
capitalist powers.
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 identified
by Cowen and Shenton.6 That centrality of accumulation, with all its ramified 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 field of study, which I turn to next. One
is to suggest that the original sources of the ‘great tradition’ in classical political economy
conceptualised processes of modern economic growth - qua accumulation, the development of
markets (commodification) and of social and technical divisions of labour, and so on - above
all as the growth (and indeed formation) of national economies: Adam Smith’s wealth of
nations, Marx’s ‘country that is more developed industrially’ (cited above), and Lenin’s
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 defined) nor to its effects for capitalist
development in Russia.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 imperative of addressing the causes of the first world war,
famously theorised imperialism and the centrality to it of a finance capital now much evolved
institutionally since Marx’s time. Lenin’s 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, first, decolonisation in
Asia and Africa and superpower rivalry, and then in the context of ‘globalisation’ (see below).

The other point is the absence so far in this exposition of any convincing example of Alan
Thomas’s first sense of development as ‘vision, description or measure of the state of being of

6
Albeit traced and analysed by them in far greater depth and detail, and with far greater benefit, than can be
adequately conveyed here; the value of their argument in reminding us of the centrality of questions of order to
doctrines of development (in however implicit a fashion) is difficult 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 northwestern 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).
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 first
debates…about the possibility of a world without poverty’. Those debates occurred in the late
eighteenth century, that is, more or less contemporaneously with the initial theorisation of the
‘old orthodoxy’ (Kitching) and ‘invention of development’ (Cowen and Shenton). The key
figures were Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet (1762-1794)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 Smith’s ‘commercial society’; how it could do so was worked out through Condorcet’s
revolutionary ‘social mathematics’. Stedman Jones argues that these ideas were lost in the
reaction that followed the French revolution and, after a long political hiatus, were finally
realised in the welfare state of the twentieth century; in his view, they now need to be
incorporated in a revived, and combative, social democratic programme able to confront the
global barbarities of contemporary neo-liberalism. This, then, is one vision of a desirable
society, first articulated together with a method for measuring well-being and modelling the
fiscal means of achieving it, relevant to studying development today.10

Development studies

The conjuncture after the second world war inherited doctrines of development, and their
associated institutions and practices, invented and applied to manage class (and other social)
conflict in industrial capitalist heartlands and colonial peripheries - and to formulate projects of
‘national’ accumulation, state modernisation, and the like. However, in post-war conditions the

8
A theme continued with even more overt provocation in Gavin Kitching’s book on development and (through?)
globalisation (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.
rhetoric of development now centred much more emphatically on the kind of vision of a
desirable society first constructed in distinctively modern fashion by Paine and Condorcet. The
principal goal was now to overcome ‘poverty, ignorance and disease’ (in a common
catchphrase of the 1950s) through appropriate strategies of growth, distribution and the
provision of public goods. ‘National development’ thus centred on the welfare of all citizens
became the official programme of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa, whose
decolonisation 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 financial 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 UN 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 firmly rooted in questions about its
international conditions. These approaches assimilated the key themes of the ‘great tradition’ -
transformations of pre-capitalist agrarian structures, patterns of accumulation and
industrialisation, state modernisation and technical change, and the like, within individual
countries - to how the prospects of progress in poor countries are affected by the functioning of
international markets, divisions of labour, flows of capital and technology, and other aspects of
a world economy, and 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 field. I find it useful to employ a restrictive or institutional definition of
development studies as the kinds of teaching and research 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
justifies 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

11
Although the conception of ‘development studies’ extends beyond academic entities that bear the name. Its
establishment and profile as a distinct academic field in the South may have been patchy because ‘national
development’, and how best to achieve it, was the principal 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.
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
Shenton’s theorisation of doctrines of development. As ‘policy science’ development studies is
centred on two sets of issues: those of economic growth and how to promote it, and of poverty
and how to overcome it, principally in what is now known as the (global) South. Virtually all
intellectual production in the name of development studies can be assimilated to one or other of
these two overarching goals or, most characteristically, claims to connect them in virtuous
models or paths of development.

Elsewhere (Bernstein 2005) I have sketched two main periods in the career of development
studies in the sense outlined, which I summarise here in (regrettably) even more truncated
form. The first is that of its founding moment (in the 1950s and 1960s) in the global context
indicated, also the ‘golden’ period of the long boom of the capitalist world economy marked by
‘a “labour-friendly” (for rich countries) and “development-friendly” (for poor countries)
international regime established under US hegemony’ (Silver and Arrighi 2000: 55) - at least
‘friendly’ relative to what was to come later. This founding moment of development studies
was able to ask big questions about development, and to pursue big ideas in seeking to answer
them, in part because of the stimulus of apparently world-historical alternatives, and in part
because of an assumption that the state in newly independent (and other poor) countries had a
central role in planning and managing economic and social development. This assumption held
across a very wide range of the political and ideological spectrum, albeit with a marked
influence of social democratic ideas associated with a structuralist macro-economics and a kind
of international Keynesianism applied to issues of aid and trade. Both were aspects of what
was now identified as ‘development economics’, to various degrees linked to, and informed by,
the ‘great tradition’ of studying development and its foundation in political economy.12

Of course, attempts to draw on that expansive intellectual tradition for the applied tasks of
policy advice and design with which development studies was charged often generated various
tensions and confronted various (political) constraints, including in relations with the
governments and aid agencies that established development studies centres and institutes in the
1950s and 1960s and/or supported them with contracts for advanced training, applied research
and consultancy. Nor was this new profession of development studies staffed entirely by
intellectual adepts of the ‘great tradition’; it also accommodated, for example, the
redeployment of former colonial officials (notably in Britain, France, Belgium and the
Netherlands). This represented one type of continuity with the practices of previous doctrines
of development (on which see the ‘post-colonial’ argument 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 (eg Bose 1997, Chatterjee 1998) and in the independent states of
sub-Saharan Africa (eg Cooper 2002, especially Ch 5).

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 Officers and the like, was an ideology of ‘practicality’ and anti-intellectualism.
If the record of development studies, even in the more ‘heroic’ first phase of its career, is much
more mixed, ambiguous and imbued with tension than can be traced here, what of the apparent
puzzle of its (almost) seamless shift to a second phase under the neo-liberal ascendance since
the 1980s? Both champions and critics of the newly established development studies shared an
understanding that its principal rationale as ‘policy science’ was to find 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 first paradox is that less intervention as prescribed in neo-liberal development theory
means more intervention in practice. First, the major shifts of development theory, policy
discourse and design, and modalities of intervention in the period of neo-liberal ascendance,
spearheaded by the World Bank, require a great deal of work to replace what preceded them in
the period of state-led development.14 And the intellectual and political labour of
deconstruction requires a greater 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 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

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.
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, inflation and savings rates, employment, productivity), and social policy (health,
education) - are added state reform, the (re)design and management of public institutions, clear
and properly enforced property rights, democratisation, civil society and the sources of social
capital, small-scale credit, NGO management, (environmentally) sustainable development,
women/gender and development, children and development, refugees and development,
humanitarian emergencies and interventions, and post-conflict resolution (among other
examples).

At the same time, ‘more’ becomes ‘less’ as the (market-centred) core of this expanded agenda
is articulated, and its key policies justified, above all through the restrictive framework of neo-
classical economics, whose hegemony has spiralled during this period of rampant neo-
liberalism.15 On the other hand, the supply of various practitioners demanded by the expanded
range of development 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

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 of the University of Cambridge is among the most prolific and incisive
champions today of reviving and reinstating development economics (eg 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
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.

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’, justified
by the ‘intent’ to development, is another matter. How much it has been accommodated is, to a
large degree, an empirical question to which we can not expect any single or simple answer. I
have suggested, however, that it is more difficult to ensure knowledge of the great tradition and
appreciation of its contemporary relevance in the current phase of the academic career of
development studies, for several kinds of reasons.

The first and most fundamental reason is the economic and political changes in the world in the
last thirty years or so, including those often associated with ‘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 defined) assaults the great traditions of social science, including
that of studying development. Moreover, the two arms of this pincer movement exhibit a

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. The connections between development doctrine and global order/security are explored in a provocative
book by Duffield (2001).
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.
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 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 universities are principally funded by government. In the UK, and
I suspect elsewhere, the generally increasing bite of ‘value for money’ agendas in university
‘modernisation’ combines with the demand of (official) aid agencies for applied research
informed by a neo-liberal agenda, to exacerbate the tensions between intellectual and
‘practical’ objectives inherent to Development Studies to the detriment of the former.

How much does this matter? Bill Freund contends that ‘development studies as a university
subject (must) contain a non-applied theoretical, political, sociological and historical aspect’
(personal communication).21 This, of course, resonates and upholds the purpose and scope of
the ‘great tradition’ of studying development. My response is that to champion the substance of
that view and to pursue its intellectual commitment is a challenge across the social sciences
more generally, given today’s pressures on the spaces and opportunities for social science
scholarship that is independently minded or in insufficient demand in the higher education
‘marketplace’22, let alone that is overtly critical and seeks to connect with 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).

20
Fred Cooper and Randall Packard (1997: 3) suggest that ‘The ultramodernist [by which they mean neo-liberal]
and the postmodernist critiques have a lot in common, especially their abstractions from the institutions and
structures in which economic action takes place and which shape a power-knowledge regime. The ultramodernists
see power only as a removable distortion to an otherwise self-regulating market. The postmodernists locate the
power-knowledge regime in a vaguely defined “West” or in the alleged claims of European social science to have
found universal categories for understanding and manipulating social life everywhere’.
21
The other side of this coin is his question: ‘How can you sustain a “discipline” teaching stuff like poverty
alleviation or an introduction to current buzzwords or survey techniques?’ (same source). Indeed, but if there’s
buoyant demand for professional staff from aid agencies with an expanded agenda of interventions (illustrated
above), and a plentiful supply of recruits who want to make careers in development, hence need to know how to
alleviate poverty (!) as well as how to use the latest buzzwords fluently (talk the talk)…? For advanced buzzword
capacity see the portrait of Jim ‘Fingers’ Adams, spin doctor to World Bank president Hardwick Hardwicke, in
Michael Holman’s 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 Harte’s cameo account of ‘The Economic History Society, 1926-2001’
on the Society’s website (www.ehs.org.uk); also Peter Wardley’s review of The Oxford Encyclopedia of
Economic History in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 29 October 2004 (‘Outlook poor for a once rich
group’).
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 Master’s programme in development (together with applied research
and consultancy).23

It remains my view, then, that the concerns and intellectual commitments exemplified 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 battlefields. Here is where I would locate a
William Freund Institute for the Study of Development, whose research agenda could be
informed by such instructive reflections on studying development as those by Leys (1996),
Sutcliffe (1999), Thomas (2000) and Chang (2003) that I have cited.24 Development studies -
under which name (flag of convenience?) Bill was able to establish a wholly exceptional
enclave for a while (because it was so personal an invention and preserve?) - is today too
restricted, incoherent and fickle an academic entity to offer a convincing space for
contemplating, renewing and advancing the great tradition of studying development.

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 official agencies (both national and
international) that define 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.

Bernstein, H., 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 ed. T. J .Byres, 190-225.

Bernstein, H., 2005. “Development Studies and the Marxists”, in U. Kothari (ed), A Radical
History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies. London: Zed Books,
pp111-137.

Bose, S., 1997. “Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: India’s
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.

Burawoy, M., 2004b. “Public Sociology: South African Dilemmas in a Global Context”.
Society in Transition 35: 11-26.

Chang, H.-J., 2002. Kicking Away The Ladder. Development Strategy in Historical
Perspective. London: Anthem Press.

Chang, H-J. (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,
pp82-103.

Cooper, F., 2002. Africa Since 1940. The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Cooper, F. and R. Packard, 1997. ‘Introduction’, 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 1-41.

Corrigan, P., H. Ramsay and D. Sayer, 1978. Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory.
Bolshevism and its Critique. London: Macmillan.

Corrigan, P., H. Ramsay and D. Sayer, 1979. For Mao. Essays in Historical Materialism.
London: Macmillan.
Cowen, M.P. and R.W.Shenton, 1991a. “The Origin and Course of Fabian Colonialism in
Africa”. Journal of Historical Sociology, 4 (2): 143-74.

Cowen, M.P. and R.W.Shenton, 1991b. “Bankers, Peasants and Land in British West Africa
1905-1937”. Journal of Peasant Studies, 19 (1): 26-58.

Cowen, M.P. and R.W.Shenton, 1995. “The Invention of Development”, in J. Crush (ed),
Power of Development. London: Routledge, pp27-43.

Cowen, M.P. and R.W.Shenton, 1996. Doctrines of Development. London: Routledge.

Duffield, 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 B.Shenton, 2004. “The Africanist’s ‘New’ Clothes”. Historical
Materialism. 12 (4): 67-113.

Kennedy, P., 1989. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military
Conflict from 1500 to 2000. London: Fontana Press.

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.

Kothari, U., 2005. “From Colonial Administration to Development Studies: A Post-Colonial

Critique of the History of Development Studies”, in U. Kothari (ed), A Radical History of
Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies. London: Zed Books, pp47-66.

Lenin, V.I., 1964/1899. The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Collected Works, Vol 3.
Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lenin, V.I., 1964/1917. Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Collected Works, Vol
22. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Leys, C., 1996. The Rise and Fall of Development Theory. Oxford: James Currey.

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.

Seers, D., 1969. “The Meaning of Development”. International Development Review 11 (4): 2-
6.

Silver, B. and G. Arrighi, 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. O’Hearn (eds), Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New
Paradigm. London: Zed Books, pp135-153.

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.