Development As Modernity Modernity As Development

Development as Modernity, Modernity as Development

Development as Modernity, Modernity as Development

This book analyses the impact of the Western idea of 'modernity' on development and underdevelopment in Africa. It traces the genealogy of the Western idea of modernity from European Enlightenment concepts of the universal nature of human history and development, and shows how this idea was used to justify the Western exploitation and oppression of Africa. It argues that contemporary development, theory and practice is a continuation of the Enlightenment project and that Africa can only achieve real development by rejecting Western modernity and inventing its own forms of modernity. The book is divided into four sections. The first section provides an outline of the theory of modernity in the Enlightenment project. In the second section, an attempt is made to trace the genealogy of the idea of development as modernity and how the African development process gets entangled with it. Here, its evolution is mapped through three periods: early modernity, capitalist modernity and late modernity. Zeroing in on the current era of late or hypermodernity, the book contests the idea that there is something new in globalisation and its neo-liberal development paradigm. The third section turns to the complex but pertinent question of how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Africa can transcend the impasse of modernity. The fourth and final section sums up the argument and points the way forward.

DEVELOPMENT AS MODERNITY, MODERNITY AS DEVELOPMENT - Lwazi Siyabonga Lushaba

Tracing the history of Africa's encounter with Europe to the period of early modernity is the key to understanding the contemporary development impasse in Africa, that is, why the problem of development in Africa continues to defy even the supposedly well-reasoned alternative models. [...] The objective of this study is to construct a genealogy of the idea of development as modernity, from the early modern period through the era of capitalist modernity up to the present era of late modernity, and analyse the consequences of this idea of development for the African development process. [...] My basic point is that the current neo-liberal development discourse is the Enlightenment project writ large and that the task of thinking through the current development impasse in Africa (which I refer to as the 'impasse of modernity'), though a multifaceted one, is mainly a matter of deconstructing the idea of development as modernity, first broached by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in. [...] Along with this came the possibility of engineering both nature and the social political order so as to make the future more prosperous and just, hence the close association of the Enlightenment with the idea of progress. [...] The Heckscher- Ohlin model enhances our understanding of the theory of comparative advantage by making the point that an increase in production at the margin or the expansion of the PPF that results from the maximisation of comparative advantage is not open-ended.