self-representation and then charting one of
its dimensions through the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century trajectory of development (see
Schech and Haggis, 2000: 5). For Esteva this is
individualism, for Alvarez science, for Shanin
progress, for Rist reason, for Kothari state ration-
ality (see their contributions in Rahnema, 1997).
For some, like Escobar (1995), this post-
Enlightenment legacy congeals in a foundational
moment to produce the ‘invention’ of develop-
ment in 1945 in President Truman’s famous
inaugural address in 1949. The development
industry then commences, through its national
accounts data and statistical inventories and
forms of governmentality, to produce a Third
World subject (Mitchell, 2001).
There is something very clunky about all of
these narratives. Even Gupta’s (1998) sophisti-
cated account is wide of the mark: are, as he says,
the tropes of modernity in development
‘rehearsed unchanged’? Is the Third World past
always historically ‘depoliticized’ in develop-
ment discourse? Several observations are in
order. First, the Enlightenment itself has all of its
contradictions, complexities and tensions read
outof the script of post-development. Second,
modernity as a contradictory experience
(Berman, 1982) is not read intothe shifting
meanings of development. And third, the key dif-
ference between development as an immanent
process and as a series of intentions is typically
occluded. It is for this reason that Doctrines of
Development(1996) is such an important inter-
vention: Cowen and Shenton precisely show
how in the course of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries an immanent conception
becomes intentional development, something to
be ordered to ‘ameliorate the disordered fruits of
progress’ (1996: 7).
Development as a state project in Europe was
a response to the creative destruction of indus-
trial capitalism. How it travels – as trusteeship in
the colonial period, or as structural adjustment in
our own epoch – should not obscure this ur-
history which is not readily captured in a claim
that developmentalism is essentialist, homo-
genizing and evolutionary (Gupta, 1998: 33). Who
would make this alloyed claim of the UNDP
Human Development Report? Perhaps more than
anything this UN agency has, through the work
of Sen (2000) on capabilities and freedom, begun
to radically and philosophically rethink the idea
of development as economy and in a way which
surely belies Gupta’s homilies.
One of the strengths of all of this work never-
theless has been to chart for example the
recycling of foundational ideas – for exam-
ple populism (Brass, 2000; Watts, 2000) orMalthusianism (Greene, 1999) – rooted in
specific geographical and cultural-historical cir-
cumstances: say villagization in Tanzania,
Maoism in China, or micro-credit in Bangladesh.
Another is that it scrutinizes the complexities,
ruptures and disjunctions associated with the
circulation and reception of ideas, representations
and institutional practices, always attentive to the
‘traffic’ in development which produces hybrid
ideas (not simple mimicry or adoption), and
processes of ‘indigenization’ (the ‘domestica-
tion’ of state planning and Keynesianism in post-
independence India). Culture and geography
are self-evidently in play throughout. This is
nowhere more the case than in the relations
between postcolonial development and the
nation. Gupta’s (1998) excellent book Post-
colonial Developmentreveals that agricultural
development was rooted firmly in Cold War
Indian nationalist discourses but that the develop-
mental packages were nonetheless struggled and
fought over and radically reshaped (‘indige-
nized’) by the unanticipated consequences of
populist politics in the 1960s and especially by
Mrs Gandhi’s political ploy to decentralize to the
masses. In this sense the critical development
field has contributed in some small way to what
Hall calls the renarrativization which ‘displaces
the story of capitalist modernity from its
European centering to its dispersed global
peripheries’ (1996: 250). It is an interruption of
the grand historiographicalnarrative. But has it
made the overwhelming material powers of
capitalist expansion and modernity any less over-
whelming or salvageable?
Curiously all of these critical perspectives –
each sensitive in different ways to place and
culture – emerged at a moment when conven-
tional development practice seemed to have
hardened, in the wake of the neoliberal counter-
revolution, into an overwhelming free-market
Washington consensus. The fall of the Berlin
Wall added fuel to the capitalist fire as the likes
of the World Bank crowed at the disappearance
of alternatives, while radical critics like Perry
Anderson (2000) could solemnly note that the
arrival of the new millennium marked a massive,
premeditated defeat. It was against this backdrop –
one of political defeatism on the left and free-
market triumphalism on the right – that the call
for alternatives to development, for the radical
deconstruction of development, and later for the
anti-globalization movements came to fruition.
This can be read in a number of ways: as a death
throe, as myopia, as a reaction to the creative
destruction of a global capitalism and so on. But
it is incontestable that the growing clamor to
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