An archaeology of development demands,
then, a full grasp of location, situating it histori-
cally(in tracing its complex genealogy and mean-
ings, particularly to the eighteenth century),
geographically(in relation to sites of produc-
tions, routes of movement and patterns of recep-
tion) and culturally(in relation to the west’s
self-representation, of reason and the Enlighten-
ment). In sum, development commands a complex
historical-semantic field. Of course this critical
modernist turn had a pre-history in the sense
that a few economic historians like Alexander
Gerschenkron and the development economist
Albert Hirschmann were deeply sensitive to the
longue duréewithin which any critical examination
of development must be located. Hirschmann’s
(1986) brilliant account of the relation of market-
based development to the Enlightenment idea of a
perfect social order is simply one early contribu-
tion to what became a veritable landslide of
scholarship, heeding Fredric Jameson’s injunction
to ‘always historicize’.
The cultural and historical turn in the study of
development was not all of a theoretical or politi-
cal piece. To simplify a complex intellectual
landscape I want to highlight four broad
genealogical threads.New historicismFred Cooper and Randall Packard acutely
observe, in their foundational text on develop-
ment and the social sciences, that the concept of
development must be located in: ‘historical con-
junctures ... understood in relation to intellectual
trends, shifts in global economic structures,
political exigencies and institutional dynamics’
(1997: 29). I have chosen to characterize such an
approach, borrowing from the work of Stephen
Greenblatt and others, as ‘new historicism’. An
important early effort in this genre was the work
of Arndt (1987) who, in a text mercifully unen-
cumbered by discourse or high theory, charted
the shifting intellectual trends and the circulation
of ideas and people from the 1950s to the neo-
liberal counter-revolution three decades later. To
simplify, one might say that the immediate post-
war period was dominated on the one hand by
variants of growth theory, in which the state was
seen to have a legitimate and active role in
human capital formation and infrastructure, and
on the other by trade pessimism coupled with a
proclivity for import-substitution industrial (ISI)
strategies and a recognition of international
protectionism.
By the mid 1960s what Arndt calls ‘social
objectives’ were very much in evidence. A shiftfrom interstate inequality and economic growth
to a concern with employment, welfare and
poverty was marked by the growing role of
UNRISD and ILO in the international sphere
and by the central role of figures such as
H.W. Singer, Mohammed ul Haq and Richard
Jolly, who ushered in a development discourse of
redistribution with growth (RWG), the priority of
basic needs and the powers of the informal
sector. RWG contained a strong populist tone –
‘small is beautiful’, ‘informal business’ – rather
than an affirmation of a ‘strong’ redistributive
platform. Nonetheless, the fact that Robert
McNamara, the new president of the World Bank
(elected in 1968), was talking the language of
equity and the poorest 40 per cent, highlights the
slide in thinking away from both the glorification
of economic growth per se and GNP as its
lodestar. Dudley Seers’ important 1969 address
questioned whether the presumption that an
economic growth rate of 6 per cent (the UN target)
was always beneficial, and suggested that under
some circumstances it might actually be politi-
cally dangerous. Seers had questioned, in his
assault on GNP, the ‘meaning of development’.^2
The quickfire succession of development fash-
ions, from social development to employment to
equity to poverty eradication to basic needs, can
be subject to all manner of cynical rebuttal, but
Arndt and other new historicist work revealed
something of its institutional and political
dynamics and specifically the fundamental role
of the University of Sussex, International Labor
Organization and World Bank triumvirate who
shifted the terms of the development debate. By
the mid 1970s however the tenor had changed
once more. Oil price increases, inflation, a reces-
sion and a grain shortage (coupled with world-
wide drought) alerted McNamara and others to
international inequity and the need for economic
growth at all costs. Calls for a new international
economic order in 1974 reflected the gravity of
the global crisis, but as a redistributive (as
opposed to a growth) program it was pretty much
still born. As the 1970s wore on, all talk of basic
needs and redistribution evaporated, overtaken
by the neoliberal counter-revolution. By 1980
and the appearance of the famous Berg Report on
Africa, laissez-faire capitalism was back in
vogue (Toye, 1985).
The story of how and why this counter-
revolution happened, and why it became hege-
monic in the way it did, remains largely untold
(Gore, 2000). To invoke the rise of Kohl and
Thatcher and Reagan is part of the story, but
understanding the circulation and institutionali-
zation process – the key figures, the key institu-
tions, the dispersion and reception of ideas, and436 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 436