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Visions of Development: A Study of Human Values

Posted on: Tuesday, 30 December 2003, 06:00 CST

Visions of Development: A Study of Human Values, by David A. Clark. Cheltenham, U.K., and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar. 2002. ISBN: 1840649828, $95.00. 282 pages.

This is a wide-ranging book. It spans the space from abstract ideas about development to surveying people about their well-being. Given the limited space, not all topics can be expected to have been covered as well as a specialized monograph on a single topic may have done. Nevertheless, this book is a valuable contribution to the development field.

The four substantive chapters after a brief introduction discuss respectively the concepts of development in the abstract, the ideas of capabilities and human development, an "augmented theory of good life," and how people perceive development. Chapter 4-Perceptions of Development-describes the methodology and findings of the survey- based empirical approach. This is the heart of the empirical contributions of the author from his PhD dissertation field research in South Africa.

There is much to admire and at the same time to be critical of in this effort. The undertaking of research in two poor communities in South Africa in itself is a good thing. The two communities seem to have not much else in common beyond their poverty. One is an isolated village in the Karoo desert. The other is a semi-urban squatter camp near Cape Town. Yet they seem to share a vision of good life, which, thanks to the painstaking surveys of the author, can be seen in great detail. In particular, the emphasis that these people put both on having a modicum of material goods and on spiritual-mental aspects of what they think of as a "good life" are revealing and indicative of the potential of this non-elitist survey- based approach. Although various aspects of the survey ranging from the formulation of questions to the manipulation and interpretation of the statistical data can be questioned and improved upon, this study is a landmark beginning in an important area of research on well-being and poverty.

The survey of the theories of gootl life in the earlier chapters is also valuable although this does not break much new ground. Synthesizing a number of mainly descriptive approaches with a modest critique of the thick vague theory of the good by Nussbaum leads to an "augmented theory of the good" (ATG). However, the philosophical basis of the ATG is not clear. Nussbaum is clear about the Aristotlean roots of her theory. A thorough critique must either reject this theory or expand it in such a way that what is scientific and survives empirical challenge is preserved and the theory itself augmented as a result of the empirical tests themselves. One way to do this would be to examine the gap between the ancient Greek city state-Athens in particular-and the modern world with its history of uneven development including colonialism and neocolonialism, and political and cultural imperialism. The study of the unevenness of the spatial and temporal development of the formerly noncapitalist and traditional parts of the world within the framework of both the imperial system and the neocolonial nation- state systems must be an integral part of this type of research. This requires an interdisciplinary approach that brings in not just ethics and well-being literature but also political economy and radical anthropology. A critical sifting of the very interesting findings of this book will require this further augmented approach. An example of this type of exercise at the theoretical level which is critical of simple Aristotlean approach, a complex but basically 'Eurocentric" Hegelian approach, and the various forms of (preand post-modern) relativisms can be found in Khan 1998. At the end, such an approach can offer a more nuanced, dynamic, and contextual theory of "socially- and culturally-based view of capabilities" that are in an important sense "non-relative virtues" and require real institutions of both positive and negative freedoms. One exciting prospect will be to combine a critical and self-critical "social and cultural" capabilities approach with the line of empirical work reported in this book. If done with care and sensitivity, such future work will expand both theory and practice in a more encompassing way than is the situation now which is correctly and admirably described by David Clark's book.

Reference

Khan, Haider A. Technology, Development, and Democracy. Edward Elgar, 1998.

Haider A. Khan

GSIS, University of Denver

Copyright Association for Evolutionary Economics Fiscal Office Dec 2003

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