From Getting the Development Question Wrong to Bringing Emancipation Back In: Re‐reading Alice Amsden

Abstract

This article appraises Alice Amsden's theory of development. In particular, it focuses on Amsden's juxtaposing of the concrete and the universal, and the national and the global, as antithetical, and her prioritizing of the former over the latter. The author argues that this key feature of Amsden's work reduces the concept of development to a nationally determined process and empties capitalist development of its class content. It is argued that Amsden's primary focus on why and how development occurs in the Third World bypasses the question of what development is, thereby reinforcing ‘Third World developmentalism’, and removes the emancipatory content from the concept of development. Given the continued legacy of Amsden's theory, as evidenced in recent debates, and the inadequacy of extant Marxist critiques in addressing its conceptual and political problems, this article proposes an alternative conceptualization of concrete–general and national–global relations based on Marx's critique of political economy, and calls for the resuscitation of the emancipatory content of the concept of development.

Alice Amsden: A Reasoning Revolutionary in Development Economics

“…Amsden's consistent concentration on industrialization as the key to development was one of the things that made her such a powerful presence in developmental debates throughout the decades. It also helped prompt younger development scholars to argue that Amsden's vision of development was bereft of 'emancipatory content' (Song, 2019(Song, : 1573. Regardless of how Amsden might have responded to the idea of 'emancipatory content', the debate over relative income versus relative manufacturing output was one among many interesting debates in development theory that were emerging at the turn of the millennium.…”