The Green Revolution and "Economic Man": Some Lessons for Community Development in South Asia?

Abstract

ONE OF THE GREAT controversies in the literature of development has revolved around the issue of rationality in the peasant farmer. Is he basically an man, or is there substantial truth to the image of nonWestern man as non-materialistic and other-worldly? It would appear that the in much of the underdeveloped world today has resolved this debate, at least in large measure, in favor of man. At the same time a similar though rather ill-defined argument has been going on about political development at the peasant level. The central issue here is whether or not this peasant is a political analogue of man. The failure to resolve this question has been a major reason for the unfortunate record that community development has produced thus far. The present article will focus on this similarity between economic and political development at the village level in South Asia, where the available research on these issues is far greater than for other developing areas. South Asia is also the area where one of the most promising experiments in community development has been attempted-the Comilla project in East Pakistan. This experiment, it will be contended, was promising (at least until the i97i civil strife) largely because it showed a way to apply the lessons of the Green Revolution to low-level political development and to combine both the economic and the political spheres in a singularly effective manner.* What was for many years the accepted view of Indians as a spiritual, other-worldly, and in general non-materialistically oriented people has its intellectual foundation in the works of Max Weber.1 Weber's thesis was that (subject to some qualifications) Hinduism inhibited the development of a South Asian counterpart of the Protestant Ethic that served as the mainspring of the Industrial Revolution in the West. Even today, some scholars hold to one version or another of the Weberian thesis.2 Like many of Weber's