Social and Economic Development

The Myth of Progress

This link happened in Europe where, starting from the Middle Ages, growing attention was given to improving the material life of the masses and making better use of human labor. Gradually, political powers took a keen interest in the relationship between the rise in productivity and social improvement, thereby establishing a new understanding of what social life should be about. Economic growth became a concept as well as something to be measured. Later it became something to be valued for itself. Unlimited growth of production and of productive forces was presented as being a crucial factor for successful human existence.

Some countries experienced greater economic growth than others. At first, however, many citizens of countries with outstanding growth in production and consumption explained the economic gap in an ethnocentric manner, often referring to a supposed superiority of a so-called white race and suggesting that other “races” or cultures were too “primitive” to reach this higher stage of civilization and rate of “progress.” Progress was a new myth that would soon be exported worldwide. Economic growth was thought to be to everybody's advantage, as a world market would favor an efficient division of labor between regions of the world. The increasing wealth of the dominating center (advanced capitalist societies) was supposed to bring progress in the form of “civilization” and economic growth to the periphery (less economically developed societies). Some, however, doubted this. During the second half of the nineteenth century, many of those who characterized capitalism as a system of exploitation subscribed to the myth of progress. Even after the economies of the center had experienced the “crisis of progress” in the form of the Great Depression during the 1930s, the main idea still persisted as the “myth of development”—to its believers as the only true alternative—to which every country of the world had to subscribe. Countries of the center—that is, to say countries with the greatest wealth and growth—did not necessarily experience social progress along with economic growth and wealth. The concept of development, thus, sounded more appropriate to those managing the economy. Countries of the center were signified as “developed” in the dominant discourses of the time. However, to take further advantage of growth, they needed to employ more appropriate political economic tools that could correct the market's perverse effects. On the other hand, countries of the third world had not “developed” themselves and, according to erstwhile ideology, they needed to initiate a stage of self-sustaining growth. Development economics would have to address the procedures to be followed to enter this stage. It was often assumed that real social development could not be achieved without joining the path of economic development.

...