onto an unsuspecting Third World. In a world in
which discourse seems to carry implausibly
robust, powerful and hegemonic efficacy, post-
development and alternatives reside in the
hybrid, in critical traditionalism, in strategic
essentialism – in the ‘discursive insurrection’ of
the Third World, as Escobar put it.
What isdifferent from the 1960s crisis of
development is the degree to which the state as a
necessary and appropriate vehicle for national
aspirations, and the universalistic (and anti-
imperialistic) claims for liberation, are no longer
axiomatic and taken for granted. Locality,
culture, authenticity are the forms of identifica-
tion which stand in opposition to states, and the
very fictions of the nation-state and nationalism
are supplanted by what Lehmann calls ‘multi-
national populist subcultures’ in search of cultural
difference: ‘cultural difference is at the root of
postdevelopment’, as Escobar (1995: 225) says.^5
One might say that the practical and strategic
content of this vision is rooted firmly in the soil
of civil society rather than in the state or market.
But it is civil society of a particular sort: of grass-
roots movements, of subaltern knowledge, of
cultural economics, of hybrid politics, of the
defense of the local, of cybercultural post-
humanism. Much less is said about the civil
society capable of engendering violence, geno-
cide and fragmentation.
This post development corpus has opened up,
initially through Esobar’s provocation, important
new avenues for understanding development
practices. But it has left its own problematic
legacy. First, there is the curious, and perhaps
appropriately ironic, way in which a postmodern
or poststructural sensibility is attached to claims
of extraordinary totalizing power, certainty and
rectitude. Development, as Escobar has it, is ‘a
historically singular experience’ (1995: 10).
Second, the unalloyed celebration of popular
energies of grassroots movements is not subject
to the sort of hypercritical discourse analysis
which might permit an understanding of their
achievements, their political strategies, the limits
of their horizons and vision. Third, there is a
curious confluence between elements of the
neoliberal counter-revolution (the World Bank’s
account, for example, of Africa’s post-colonial
modernization failure, its anti-statism and the need
to harness the energies of ‘the people’) and the
uncritical celebration, and often naive acceptance,
of post-development’s new social movements.
And fourth, the important critique of economic
reduction and class determinism (the Marxian
master narrative) – and, it should be added, the
deconstruction of the free-market myopia (the
Smithian master narrative) – has produced, toquote Stuart Hall, not alternative ways of thinking
about basic economic questions but instead ‘a
massive, gigantic and eloquent disavowal’ (1996:
258). Where are the post-development studies of
macro-economic management, of cooperatives, of
participatory budgeting?
Some of this work has curiously not engaged
sufficientlywith the idea of development as
modernity. The creative destruction of capitalist
development has, as Marshall Berman notes in
All That Is Solid Melts into Air, typically pro-
duced the experience of, and the reactions to, the
solid melting into air:There is a mode of vital experience – experience of
space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibil-
ities and perils – that is shared by men and women all
over the world today. I will call this body of experience
‘modernity’. To be modern is to find ourselves in an
environment that promises us adventure, power, joy,
growth, transformation of ourselves and the world –
and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy every-
thing we have, everything we know, everything we are.
Modern environments and experiences cut across all
boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and
nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense,
modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a
paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into
a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of
struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.
To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as
Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. (1982: 15)Modernity containsthe tragedy of underdevelop-
ment: development and its alternatives are
dialectically organized oppositions within the
history of modernity. This is not to simply fold
the current antipathy to development into the
master narrative of modernity. Rather it is to
observe that there is a danger of not learning
from history, of losing touch with the roots of
our own modernity, of not recognizing that
modernity cannot be unproblematically located
in the west, and of not seeing development and
its alternatives as oppositions that contain the
other (Chakrabarty, 2001; Harvey, 1996).Ur-historyA final line of critical development theory strad-
dles the new historicism and the poststructural/
postcolonial. It addresses what one might call the
ur-history of development – the historical
semantics that Williams (1973) invoked – filling
out the enormously labyrinthine genealogies of
development itself. Much of the post-development
work does this by starting with a rather carica-
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