The Rise and Fall of Development Theory - Softcover

Leys, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025321016X ISBN 13: 9780253210166

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2009

Synopsis

"He has this wonderful and rare capacity to delineate the most complex of arguments in the most limpid prose. He never takes refuge in jargon. He demolishes pretentiousness. He is disarmingly honest. He hits you between the eyes. He is not afraid to be a lone voice as, increasingly, nowadays he is, the still small voice of humane sanity in an increasingly barbarous and market-oriented world. He makes immediate sense to anybody voting marginally to the left of Genghis Khan, Mrs. Thatcher or Newt Gingrich." ―John Lonsdale, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

This book is a "stock-taking" of development theory at the end of the 20th century. It argues that the assumptions on which development theory has rested since the 1950s no longer hold. The postcolonial "third world" for which development theory was originally developed has fractured into increasingly diverse regions, while the end of the postwar regime of regulated international trade and capital movements has drastically curtailed the scope for state economic intervention. A much broader based, more historical and more explicitly political theoretical effort is now called for.

About this title

About the Author

COLIN LEYS is Professor of Political Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. His Underdevelopment in Kenya, published in 1977, was one of the most influential texts of the time.

From the Back Cover

This book is a 'stock-taking' of development theory at the end of the twentieth century. It argues that the assumptions on which development theory has rested since the 1950s no longer hold. The ex-colonial 'third world' for which development theory was originally developed has fractured into increasingly diverse regions, while the end of the post-war regime of regulated international trade and capital movements has drastically curtailed the scope for state economic intervention. A much broader-based, more historical and more explicitly political theoretical effort is now called for.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 025321016X
• ISBN 13: 9780253210166
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 216