9/7
9/9

INTRODUCTION:

• The great debates:  What is development?  Is capitalism (& globalism) a good or bad route to development?
• The problematic definition of "Third World";  "power words";  "essentially contested" [or at least contested] concepts
• Syllabus & policies;  overflow days;  password-protected readings
• Analytic essays and your notebook
• Extra credit
• Roll call

• Me as a teacher
• Discourse vs. absolute knowledge;  offering & opening vs. offense & defense
• The incoherence of cultural relativism;  the impossibility of moral absolutism
• Construction and/vs. critique
• Standard perspective on development and/vs. my perspective

READING:

• Purchase texts
• Read the online essay, What Is the Third World?

• [Optional] Fred Riggs (1981) "The Rise and Fall of 'Political Development'" in Samuel L. Long (ed), The Handbook of Political Behavior, Volume 4 (New York: Plenum).

ANALYTIC ESSAYS:

• What countries have you lived in (or visited), why, and for how long?  (Don't count instances where you merely zipped through one country on your way to another one.)  [Length:  Short -- just give the list of countries, your length of stay, and a brief description of why you were there.]  [Due 9/12]
• I will be assigning each student in the class one country from the Third World (incl. the former Soviet bloc countries) to pay particular attention to during this course.  Many of the analytic essays will ask you to apply the general issues raised in the course to this specific country.  In some cases you will be expected to contribute information about your country in class.  So your assignment is to list three countries, from which I will pick one.  When you list each country, explain why you are suggesting it.  Do you have any personal connection to it?  Do you think it will be particularly important in your career?  Have you just always been curious about it?  [Length:  Short -- you don't have anything to prove or argue;  just state why you're interested in the three countries.]   [Due 9/12]

WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT?

One of the central problems in studying the Third World is figuring out what development is.  It's a central problem because of the combination of two factors:  first, people are motivated by development, which then affects their politics, and second, there's great disagreement on what we mean by development.  Just the variety of terms used should indicate the problem:  "development";  "change";  "advancement";  "modernization";  "Westernization";  "industrialization";  "democratization";   etc.  We'll talk about this variety of terms and their respective advantages and disadvantages.

READING:

• KRMH, Introduction, pp.1-10
• KRMH, Ch. 1 "What Is Development?"
• KRMH, Ch. 2 "Reassessing Development Theory:  Modernization and Beyond"

• [Optional]  Stephen Chilton (1988) Defining Political Development, esp. Ch. 1 "Five Fundamental Theoretical Challenges in Defining Political Development"
• [Optional]  Stephen Chilton (1991) Grounding Political Development, esp. Ch. 3 "Detailed Justification of the Five Fundamental Theoretical Requirements"

THE ORIGINS

Today and tomorrow we're going to see the seventh part of a video series on Africa.  This part focuses on nationalism and the origins of nationalist movements for independence in Africa.  There were similar movements in other regions, but this single video will have to stand for all.  (The whole series is well worth watching.   The eighth part is especially relevant, since it has to do with what happened in Africa after independence.  If you are interested in a fictionalized version of the Indian movement for independence, you might watch the movie, "Gandhi".)  After we watch it, we'll discuss what it tells us about nationalism and the problems facing states in the Third World.

READING:

• Africa, A Voyage of Discovery, #7:  The Rise of Nationalism

• [Optional]  Watch the movie, "Gandhi".

9/21

The concern for development originated in a concern for economic development.  The newly liberated Third World countries most desired the wealth experienced by the West;  it was only later that people realized the importance of political and social factors.  And even today the primary focus is on economic wealth.   (I see Bush's use of "democratization" as a rhetorical disguise for more fundamental, economic interests.)   In this section we will talk about various issues surrounding specifically economic development, including:

• Rostow's "stages"
• Quantity vs. distribution;  HDI [Human Development Index] indicators
• Wealth vs. income;  property for production vs. property for consumption

READING:

• KRMH, Ch. 5 "The Economics of Development"

This section gives us a more concrete idea of specific problems commonly facing Third World countries.

READING:

• KRMH, Ch. 6 "Crises in Africa, Asia and Latin America"

A theme of this course is the importance of culture.  As one of the optional readings says, culture is what develops in development.  Unfortunately, culture is little understood and often overlooked, so we will spend some time discussing it.

Overview of culture:  Ways of relating and public commonness.  Negotiated, not absolute;  social constructionism.  Material vs. social culture.  "Culture" vs. "high culture" vs. "popular culture".  Language vs. dialect.  "Cultured" vs. "acculturated".   "Shallow" vs. "deep "culture.  Dimensions of social culture:  time, incl. ideas of lateness;  space, esp. personal space;  family obligations;  child-rearing, esp. age boundaries and discipline;  cooperation, contribution, trust, sharing;  making decisions when there is a conflict;  offering & opening oneself;  taboos, incl. conversational taboos;  central beliefs;  history, esp. the "lessons of the past" (historical legacies);  prejudices;  conversational structure, incl. interrupting, volume, language, vocabulary, accent;  symbology;  attitudes toward money.  The "hidden curriculum".

READING:

• [Optional] Edward T. Hall (1959).  The Silent Language.  See also Hall's 1966 analysis of "proxemics", The Hidden Dimension.
• [Optional] Lynn T. White, Jr. (1966).  Medieval Technology and Social Change.  See also On Pre-modern Technology and Science: A volume of studies in honor of Lynn White, Jr. (1976).
• [Optional] Murray Edelman (1967) The Symbolic Uses of Politics
• [Optional] Stephen Chilton (1988) "Defining Political Culture" and (1991) "Culture Is the Locus of Development"

The video "Small Happiness" shows us one concrete example of Third World life.  It raises some other issues we will explore:  cultural relativism, the nature of oppression, and the intergenerational stability of culture.

READING:

• Small Happiness
• KRMH, Ch. 8 "Poverty and Development:  The Struggle to Empower the Poor"

Capitalism (a.k.a. "classical liberalism", "neoliberalism", "free markets", etc.) is often seen as the engine of development in the West and thus as a prescription for development.  We will study this prescription in two parts, corresponding to the two different books by Hernando de Soto.  In his 1989 book, The Other Path (now out of print, to my sorrow), de Soto identifies Peru's economic problems as rooted in its "mercantilist" economic system.  He argues that continuing the system much longer will result (is resulting) in revolution, as also seen historically in various European countries.  He then argues that freeing up the economy will result in wealth for all and a decrease in revolutionary pressure.

In his more recent (2000) book, The Mystery of Capitalism, de Soto asks why attempts to transplant capitalism to various Third World countries have not succeeded.  He identifies several little-recognized institutional & cultural concomitants of capitalism, arguing that capitalism fails because Westerners unthinkingly rely on cultural patterns and habit that cannot be assumed to exist in non-Western societies.  (We will see a concrete example of such unthinkingness in the Ayolé video, although capitalism is not the issue there.)

Between the two books, we should get a good idea of how capitalism works and how, at least in theory, it could be a powerful engine for development in the Third World.

10/19:  The nature of capital
10/21:  History
10/24:  Policy direction(s)

READING:

• David Brooks column of 8/14/05 on immigration reform (by 10/12)
• Hernando de Soto (1989) The Other Path
  • Ch. 1 "Introduction" (by 10/12)
  • Ch. 2 "Informal Housing" (by 10/14)
  • Ch. 7 "The Parallel with Mercantilism" (by 10/14)
  • Ch. 8 "Conclusion" (by 10/17)
• HdS Ch. 1 "The Five Mysteries of Capital" (by 10/19)
• HdS Ch. 3 "The Mystery of Capital" (by 10/19)
• HdS Ch. 4 "The Mystery of Political Awareness" (by 10/21)
• HdS Ch. 5 "The Missing Lessons of U.S. History" (by 10/21)
• HdS Ch. 2 "The Mystery of Missing Information" (by 10/24)
• HdS Ch. 6 "The Mystery of Legal Failure" (by 10/24)

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and then transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."  (Karl Marx "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte")

The Ayolé video is short but crucially important.  Two elements are key:  first, the intertwining of material and social culture, and second, the difficulty of changing culture.  Marx seemed to believe that societies would automatically change when the control over means of production changed;  this video shows that there is a lot more involved in it.

READING:

• The Water of Ayolé
• Stephen Chilton (n.d.) "An Hypothesis Re. the Origin of the Modern Christian Wedding Ceremony"
• Stephen Chilton (2002) "Cultural Survival(s)"
• [Review] Small Happiness (the online notes;  the video itself isn't assigned)

• [Optional] Robert Merton (1957).  [The Latent Functions of the Machine].  Pp.124-136 in Social Theory and Social Structure . Glencoe, IL: Free Press. This selection is one section of the chapter, “Manifest and Latent Functions” (pp.114-138), which is worth reading in its entirety.

As stated above, most discussion of development revolves around economic growth.  This has been true since the term was applied to the Third World after WWII.  And yet as we have seen in the HdS text and the Ayolé video, there is a vast, little-recognized infrastructure on which such economic development depends.  One aspect of this is political development.  I generally object to the separation of the political and the economic, but that's currently the way development discourse is structured, so in this section we deal with "political development" as a distinct, even self-contained process.  We will also look in passing at the currently hot concept of "failed states".

READING:

• KRMH, Ch. 7 "Political Development"

The rest of the course will be devoted largely to a critique of capitalism and globalism, its extension to international trade.  In this section we start the critique through the entry point of hunger.

Subjects:  Basic elements of the critique of market systems:  use vs. exchange value;  quantity vs. distribution;  individualism vs. empathy;  political vs. economic ("subsistence") rights.  The differing orientations of de Soto and LCRE.  The four levels of democracy.  Misdiagnoses of hunger's causes.  Bad solutions:  population control;  the Green Revolution and genetic engineering;  the free market.

Note that there is no class on 11/11.

READING:

• LCRE, "Beyond Guilt and Fear" [Introduction] (by 11/2)
• [Review]  KRMH, Ch. 8 "Poverty and Development" (by 11/2)
• LCRE, Ch. 1 "Myth 1:  There's Simply Not Enough Food" (by 11/4)
• LCRE, Ch. 2 "Myth 2:  Nature's to Blame" (by 11/4)
• NYT article on the vulnerable in New Orleans (forcefully illustrating the argument made in the above reading) (by 11/4)
• LCRE, Ch. 3 "Myth 3:  Too Many Mouths to Feed" (by 11/7)
• LCRE, Ch. 5 "Myth 5:  The Green Revolution Is the Answer" (by 11/9)
• LCRE, Ch. 7 "Myth 7:  The Free Market Can End Hunger" (by 11/14)

The LCRE text argues that "more foreign aid" is not a solution to the problem of hunger, certainly not when given in its present form(s).  In this section we look at the aid issue in more detail.  As we go through the KRMH chapter on the subject, compare its perspective with that of the LCRE text.  Where are they similar?  How do they differ?

READING:

• KRMH, Ch. 3 "Aid and Development"
• [Review] LCRE, Ch. 10 "Myth 10:  More U.S. Aid Will Help the Hungry"

OVERFLOW DAY

THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

The Steger text makes a useful distinction between "globalization", a multi-faceted process in which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, and "globalism" (a.k.a. neo-liberalism, "free trade", and the "Washington consensus"), an ideology that seeks to shape this process in a certain way.  In this section we will discuss both of these concepts, but the central issue will be the critique of the globalist ideology.  Here, as with the LCRE critique, the argument is that capitalism is a disease masquerading as a cure.

Note that your journal of analytic essays is due on December 14.

READING:

• MS, Ch. 1 "The Roots of Globalism" (by 11/28)
• MS, Ch. 2 "The Academic Debate over Globalization" (by 11/28)
• LCRE, Ch. 8 "Myth 8:  Free Trade Is the Answer" (by 11/28)
• MS, Ch. 3 "Six Core Claims of Globalism" (by 11/30)
• MS, Ch. 4 "Antiglobalist Challengers from the Political Left and Right" (by 12/2)
• MS, Ch. 5 "Confrontations:  Antiglobalist Demonstrations from the 'Battle of Seattle' to the Collapse of Cancún" (by 12/7)
• MS, Ch. 6 "Epilogue:  Future Prospects" (by 12/7)
• KRMH, Ch. 4 "Globalization and Development" (by 12/9)

• [Optional] Arlif Dirlik (2004).  Globalization and National Development:  Futurism and Nostalgia in Contemporary Political Economic Thinking").  Chapter 12 of Manfred Steger, ed.  Rethinking Globalism.  (I put some notes on Dirlik's essay here.)

FINAL EXAM