Economic Development

Early Developments

The field of economic development exploded in earnest after World War II. A particular historical conjunction gave rise to the preoccupation with promoting some measure of prosperity among developing nations. The first obvious political event was the process of decolonization, which resulted in the birth and rebirth of new nations, such as Korea regaining independence in 1945 after 40 years of Japanese rule and the emergence of African nation-states in the 1950s and 1960s. The plight of newly independent developing societies and the disparities of the world economy became the focus of much public and academic debate. One result of the resonance of this intellectual trend was the remarkable growth of institutions dedicated to the study of the challenges associated with economic development. Two such emerging organizations, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Exploratory Committee on World Areas Research, and its successor, the Committee on Comparative Politics, would later, irrespective of each other, compete in their economic development theorizing.

In addition, several contextual international developments also facilitated the explosion of development thinking. After the outbreak of the cold war and the Chinese revolution, economic development policies were inserted into the overall peripheral containment strategy. Since then, the juxtaposition of political economic interests and humanitarian intentions has resonated in the minds of pundits and academics.

Meanwhile, the foundations of development studies were grounded in Western philosophy. Liberals argued that the wealth of nations depended, in large part, on their ability to capitalize on free trade policies. Mercantilists became ardent supporters of state-sponsored development. Malthusians correlated living standards with population size. Years earlier, Max Weber, in his Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, had laid out the foundations for a cultural approach to national development, while Marxists argued that developing nations are often enmeshed in [Page 274]financial and diplomatic networks that sustain their own dependency.

Competing Paradigms

Several competing paradigms offered their own prescripts of the causes as well as the policies to overcome the adverse effects of underdevelopment. The first was the modernization perspective. Modernization theory grew out of behaviorist standpoints and the structural-functionalist persuasion that dominated U.S. social sciences for much of the 1940s and early 1950s. Modernization scholars were devout anti-communists, and as such, they conformed to the view that liberalism was absolutely necessary to deflate any stipulations other than a Western approach to development. Modernity, they argued, was essentially the engine to transform backward traditions into Western-style progress. Modernization scholars envisioned this transformation incrementally and linearly. They espoused the conviction that Western development models, particularly the American model, were repli-cable anywhere in the world. For this reason, modernization scholars fervently supported development aid policies and embedded liberalist programs like the Alliance for Progress.

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