Abstract
This chapter explores recent research by critical theorists concerning theories of (under)development. Drawing from the research of Thomas McCarthy, Axel Honneth, Jurgen Habermas, Amy Allen, Nancy Fraser, and others, the author explores some of the divergent responses critical theorists have given toward the theory and practice of global developmental assistance. Some theorists defending a strong modernist approach to development (e.g., McCarthy, Habermas and Honneth) appear to endorse a logic of development that works within a domesticated model of capitalist markets and lending practices; others (Allen and Fraser) reject this approach. The chapter raises questions about how development that fits within the traditional emancipatory aim of critical theory must also be (democratically?) empowering. Finally, it raises deeper philosophical questions about whether such a critical theory of development must or should instantiate a concept of progress and whether progress so construed should be interpreted principally in terms of expanding freedom (emancipation and empowerment) or simply expanding social welfare opportunity.
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Notes
- 1.
Pogge (2008) believes that ending tariffs and subsidies that developed countries negotiate to protect their economies would generate $750 billion in exchange for developing countries, more than twice the amount needed to eradicate severe, life-threatening poverty globally. Miller (2010) also endorses free trade as the ideal, but argues that developing nations be allowed to temporarily retain protective tariffs and subsidies for themselves to compensate for their disadvantages in competing in a global market.
- 2.
Martha Nussbaum (2000: 236–9) mentions the intriguing case of Hamida Khala, an educated Indian woman who autonomously chooses as her life plan—against her husband’s initial enlightened protestations to the contrary—a life of moderate purdah permitting some outside activities in modest full-body covering. In this instance there is no contradiction between asserting one’s right to autonomy and reflectively accepting restrictive gender roles. The reflective submission to gender roles (sometimes undertaken as an expression of female empowerment) must be distinguished from uncritical submission to gender roles in deference to patriarchal norms that one has internalized as a function of one’s identity agency.
- 3.
World Bank World Development Report (2012): Gender Equality and Development (Washington, D.C.: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, 2001), xi, xx. The Report still counts as serious problems violence against women, high levels of maternal mortality (especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia) (1), gender selection abortion and infanticide in China and India contributing to abnormally low female to male ratios (13–16), underrepresentation of women in government, exceptionally low levels (10–20 %) of female property ownership; substantial gendered gaps in earnings, with unpaid domestic and low-paying care work being done primarily by women (17).
- 4.
The WDR 2012 advocates governmental and nongovernmental interventions aimed at increasing women’s ownership, inheritance, and control over resources such as land as well as the provision of credit, extended agricultural services, and access to broader and more profitable markets (2011, 27–28). The latter is especially important, for as Cudd notes, microcredit aimed at local, small-scale needs is unlikely by itself to provide the resources for quick, large-scale improvements without partnerships involving commercial (especially multinational) enterprises (Cudd 2014: 217). The Report also recommends desegregating labor markets, introducing occupational training and placement for women, ending discriminatory labor regulations, and supporting women’s networks and cooperatives. The Report encourages release time from domestic caregiving for part- or full-time employment outside the household, facilitated by publicly subsidized child care (2011, 28–30; 223).
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- 6.
Building on the work of Susan Moller Okin and Iris Marion Young, Jaggar (2014: 178–82) notes that the cycle of exploitation and dependency that female domestic caregivers experience in marriage is not only reinforced by local patriarchal norms that make it difficult for women to live outside of marriage, but by global norms that define care work as exclusively women’s work. In tandem with global economic inequalities between South and North, these norms conspire to create a vigorous global trade in “maids” in which desperately poor women migrate to wealthy countries abroad, where they work in hotels or in wealthy households (whose female members may have escaped domestic drudgery for more lucrative occupations).
- 7.
Parsons held that persons in rationalized social systems orient their behavior around delayed gratification, universal norms, individual achievement, and specialized roles. He stressed the poverty-mitigating function of the nuclear family as a specialized subsystem headed by stay-at-home mothers whose sole function was socialization of children into responsible, hard-working adults with stable, gendered identities (Parsons 1955).
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Ingram, D. (2017). Critical Theory and Global Development. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_31
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