4 - Contradictions

Summary

Having focussed so far on the planning activities of the state, we now turn to the planning activities of ordinary people. Official planning now looms so large that we seem to have lost sight of the fact that ordinary people everywhere plan, to assure the continuity of their lives as well as to achieve social change. We consider how this may contradict the developmental intentions of the state, and how a zeal for reform may ultimately find expression in political and social revolution. In the developmental contest between people and state the allegiance of social scientists is very much in question. Development planners and social scientists have both sought a resolution of this dilemma within the loose political and ideological framework of populism. We explore the deficiencies of this, and of official doctrines of socialism and liberalism, arguing for the need to rediscover a more speculative social science with a proper moral concern for the substance of alternative ideal worlds.

Introduction

The notion that the capacity to plan is peculiar to modern man is one of those partial truths which have become part of the cant of the contemporary study and practice of development. A theory that people in literate, industrialised societies have a greater need and capacity for planning has hardened into a dogma that particular kinds of planning are proper and necessary; that they are the responsibility of particular groups of people; and that people in non-industrial societies, or at the margins of industrial societies, do not, cannot – and maybe should not – plan their own individual and collective welfare.