From Economic Crisis to Political Liberalization: Pitfalls of the New Political Sociology for Africa

Abstract

Postwar development discourse has been governed by two principal preoccupations. First, the will to knowledge, that is, a concern with expanding scientific understanding of the social structures and processes of so-called third world societies and the extrapolation of generalizable rules of the dynamics of their transformation. Second, the will to change, that is, a powerful impulse to engage accumulated knowledge to transform for the better the material conditions of “the wretched of the earth.” Together, these concerns account for the social engineering ethos of development discourse and the penchant for prescriptive, problem-solving theory. As a result, the contending post-war paradigms (modernization and dependency) have functioned as models of analysis and ideologies—normatively ordered proclamations of preferred pathways to social systems that are congruent with western-style modernity (Banuri 1990; Berman 1994, 235-36; Grendzier 1985, 1–21; Ferguson 1990; Manor 1991, 2-3). Mirroring these attributes of development discourse, the study of political development has been guided by a preoccupation with two projects that are considered emblematic of political modernity: The nurturing of political communities coincident with the territorial boundaries inherited from colonialism (nation-building), and the elaboration of institutions and technologies for the effective governance of evolving political communities (state-building). For both dominant postwar paradigms, ruling elites who inherited colonial states were the primary “enablers” of these projects (Doornbos 1990, 180). Analysis of politics in developing societies has therefore been foremost concerned with explication of how the unfolding of both projects was determined by the political practices of these ruling elites.