Theories of Development

1. Theories of Development

2. Lane, Ch. 3: Political Development • Events & Theory: Political events foster the development of new theoretical approaches. • After WWII, “a ‘new’ world seemed to emerge,” says Lane… How was that world “new”?

3. Idea of Stages • Developmentalist Utopia: linear, progressive, cumulative, homogeneous, non-conflictive DEVELOPMENT. • After WWII (1950s): American Optimism on the progressive development and “Americanization” of new nations (Japan? Germany? Italy?).

4. Theories of Political Development • Common Assumption: existence of “progressive forces everywhere...and democracy and a modern market orientation would sweep everyone easily forward into a glorious future.”

5. Stages • Ex: Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) on a Turkish village Traditional Modern Linear Progress

6. Cold War influences • Poor Countries such as the Cuba were likely to generate (socialist) revolutions. • Therefore, it was in the strategic interest of the capitalist West to help new and poor nations to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. • Boom of PLANNING. Ex: Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress (= the Marshall Plan?). Assumption: technical planning allows us to jump forward.

7. A. Economics determines politics: Rostow, W.W. “The Stages of Economic Growth” • Problem: Explaining economic growth • Describes “the sweep of modern economic history,” based on a theory of supply, demand, and patterns of production. • (fixed and universal) Stages. • Traditional Society • Preconditions for Take-off • Take-off • Drive to Maturity • Age of High Mass Consumption. • ... Beyond

8. Income Population Tastes State of Technology Quality of entrepeneurship Demand Supply + Trend to Deceleration Set of Sectoral Paths Sequence of Optimun Patterns of Investment

9. HistoricalPatterns of Development • (Theoretical Optimuns are) Distorted by Imperfections • Private Investments • State Policies • War

10. Societies grow in stages because the (initial acceleration of growth in the) leading sectors of the economy produce jumps in development

11. Importance of Patterns of Choice The kind and pace of Growth are also determined bySocieties’ strategic choices. Growth is not “act of maximization,” but it consists of “balancing alternative and often conflicting” goals.

12. Stages. 1. Traditional Society: it lacks “the tools and the outlook towards the physical world of the post-Newtonian era,” thus could not master their environment (food production absorbed most of the efforts). Limited social values and hierarchical social structures. Landowners. • Examples?

13. 2. Preconditions for Take-Off • Post-Medieval world in Western Europe • Modern Science • Discovery of new lands • Development of new technologies • Internal pacification • Modern State • Widening of markets • Increase in trade and specialization • Communications • Agrarian revolution British take-off (from 1783 on)

14. 3.The Take-Off • Achievement of rapid growth in a limited group of sectors through the application of industrial technologies. • Self-sustained industrial and technological development • Sustained rate of investment (10% or more per year) • Social and political modernization.

15. 4.The Drive to Maturity • This stage is reached “when a society has effectively applied the range of (then) modern technology to the bulk of its resources”(8) • The most modern technologies extend throughout the entire economy. • Changes in the work force (from agriculture to industry and services) • Massive urbanization.

16. 5.The Age of Mass Consumption • Three alternatives: • Offer of increasing security, welfare, and leisure to the working force • Enlarged private consumption (US after the ’20s) • Enlarged power for the nation on the world scene.

17. 6.Beyond Consumption • Concern with “quality of life” issues. Rostow describes a boom in birth rates in the US during and right after WWII (he thinks this as a steady trend, but it was not) • Danger: nuclear destruction

18. (Implied) Challenge: • Societies should overcome those OBSTACLES to take-off that result from the persistence of traditional structures. • Role of planning. • Question: if we do not achieve growth, is it as a result of our wrong choices?

19. B. Economics & Politics interact within the systemStructural-Functionalist approaches to development (Easton/Almond/Coleman) • Assumption: every social system has similar basic needs. • In different societies, institutions perform the same functions and are comparable Universal Functions.

20. Structural Functionalism and the problem of Development • Coleman defined political development as the interaction between • Differentiation • Imperatives of equality • Adaptive capacity of the political system • Crises of Development • (if the function was satisfied, there was progress; if not, regress or stop). • SEQUENCES

21. C. Politics (civil polity) Determines Development: Political Modernization: America Vs. Europe. Samuel Huntington.

22. Modernitybegins when men -Develop a sense of their own competence -Begin to think that they can understand nature and society and -They can control and change nature and society for their own purposes (Huntington, 383)

23. Modernizationis“the rejection of external restraints on men, the Promethean liberation of man from control by gods, fate, and destiny.” (383) (But... Modernization also requires Social Order and Stability).

24. “What is ever will be” The environment is seen as given. Attempts of change are condemned. Man discovers but does not make LAW. Fundamental Law. Individuals can transform the world. Authority must reside in men, not in law. (State) Sovereignty Traditional Vs. Modern

25. Political modernization consists of three processes: • Rationalization of Authority: Replacement of traditional, religious, familial, and ethnic political authorities by a single, secular, national SOVEREIGN political authority. • Differentiation of political functions and the development of specialized structures to perform those functions (the military, scientists, bureaucracy, professionalization). • Increased participation in politics, since new social groups gain citizenship, and new political institutions organize participation.

26. Political Modernization results... In a Civil Polity, without which there is no economic growth.

27. Patterns of Political Modernization • Continental Europe (France)Both the rationalization of authority and the differentiation of structures were developed during the 17th century • Development of the modern, centralized, and bureaucratic state (Absolutism) • Subordination of the Church • Britain. Similar process, but...the Parliament became the site of centralization of power and began to embody Sovereignty. • The United States.No political modernization. The English sixteenth-century institutions were given new life in America

28. The U.S. • “the political system did not undergo any revolutionary changes at all.” • The American political system was organized from “the principal elements of the English sixteenth-century constitution,” which were given new life in America, precisely when they were discarded in Britain. • Political modernization was “attenuated and incomplete...” (382)

29. “In Europe the opposition to modernization within society forced the modernization of the political system. In America, the ease of modernization within society precluded the modernization of the political system.”

30. The United States “combines the world’s most modern society with one of the world’s most antique polities.” (406)

31. The U.S. have... • “given the world its most modern and efficient economic organizations,” • “pioneered social benefits for the masses: mass production, mass education, mass culture.” • Politically, however, the only significant institutional innovation has been federalism... Possible only by the traditional hostility to the centralization of authority.” (407)

32. The American case suggests that... • Modernity is not all of a piece.

33. Lane: (Bitter) Discovery. • Developmentalist assumptions were false. There was no evidence of linear progress anywhere. • Societies “might go backwards, or go nowhere, rather than progressing” (51). • Practical Problem (theoretical framework?)

34. Moore: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) • Strong use of theory and history • Class analysis: the key is how peasants and landed elites reacted to the development of commerce. • Goal: “to explain the varied political roles played by the landed upper classes and the peasantry in the transformation from agrarian societies... To modern industrial ones” [and their role in] “the emergence of Western parliamentary versions of democracy, and dictatorships of the right and the left, that is, fascist and communist regimes.” (xvii)

35. Three main routes • Bourgeois Revolutions (both the peasants and the landed elites are displaced by the bourgeoisie, or transform themselves into bourgeois)—Capitalism & Democracy. • Revolution from Above (weak bourgeoisie allied to the landed elites). Capitalism & Fascism. • Communism (predominance of the peasants)

36. “No Bourgeois, no democracy.”“we may simply register strong agreement with the Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy.” (418)

37. Moore attempted to formalize in a simple model all forms of transition to modernity