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Michael Cowen *An inaugral lecture, delivered at the University of Helsinki, 8 December 1998
The following advertisement for a job in information technology appeared in the Guardian (London) of 22 April 1998: Department of Land Affairs, Republic of South Africa: 'Getting people back to the land'. IT Specialist: As a mere academic engaged in the present task of
lecturing, there is little point in contesting the
prejudicial views that I am devoid both of vision and the
experience for listening, stimulating or educating.
However, I do have an interest in the foremost question
of what an 'unbiased approach' to 'persona' might mean.
The question is fundamental to that of development. Some
themes about how the relation between persons has entered
into thinking and practising development, especially
those about trust and social capital, form the main basis
of this lecture. Bias and Development Bias is often thought to mean prejudice. We have been told, for example, that the aversion to prejudice is what has marked rational thinking, after the European enlightenment, to an extent that the 'fundamental prejudice’ of reason is, in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s words, its 'prejudice against prejudice itself'1 . So much has been said in recent times about how the prejudice for reason supposedly be came to be identified with a Eurocentric view of the world, and, therefore, bias against the world outside Europe, that this more abstract question of prejudice can be left aside for now. In leaving aside the general question of prejudice, we also need only note that the South African case, as exemplified above, may well imply that it is racial prejudice which is at issue and that a racially biased view of people is to be abjured. Yet, bias arises in a number of other ways, all of which imply that there is some neutral, balanced or harmonious reckoning of an issue in question, and especially so with regard to the policy of development. Bias has loomed so large in the lexicon of development that an account of post-1945 development policy could be written around the word. Firstly, we can think of the debate between balanced and unbalanced growth of the 1960s in the sub-discipline of economic development. Unbalanced development, it was asserted, arises out of the need to recognise that since capitalist development is inherently unbalanced, it is the state which must act to provide the infrastructure of lumps of 'social overhead capital' before private investment is forthcoming. State action therefore, so the argument ran, ensures that the process of development as a whole is more balanced than some direct intervention to correct for, say, the development of manufacturing industry running ahead of that of agriculture or visa versa.2 Or, in a not very different vein, we can refer to the accusations of the urban bias of development policy and practice during the 1970s and then, later, its counterpoint in the view that it is agrarian or rural bias which has almost always, for sub-Saharan Africa at any rate, informed criteria for what should constitute good development practice.3 The motif of the South African Department of Land Affairs, as it appears above, is only one latest example of how 'getting people back to the land' has been considered to be the antidote against rural-urban migration and uncontrolled urban growth with, it has been thought, all the 'social ills', including mass poverty, which follow from it. And, for a range of other disciplines which make up development studies, we can think of how one reaction against the prejudice of reason, after the Enlightenment, has been to search for a valid source of tradition against which 'development' itself is often mistakenly pitted. If the eighteenth century assertion of a belief in the idea of Progress had been one means of marking off the traditional of the past from that of the modern of the present, then we can see more clearly today that in the making of tradition, as an artifice, it was the idea of Development which has carried with it some presumption that 'to develop' means that it is necessary to compensate for the destruction wrought by how development happens. Nevertheless, so much of what presently goes by cultural studies within the ambit of development, is concerned to give primacy, on the basis of a neutrality towards lives of others, to some sense of tradition as what is harmonious about peoples lives in their different environments. If an understanding of development owes much to a biological metaphor, then it is clear why bias has carried with it some meaning of the organic. Yet, according to the organic metaphor, to be unbiased means that the whole of some body of being is being taken into account and intentionally so. And for some whole body of being, it is the social which is taken to be some medium through which interests of persons, whether individual or corporate, should be balanced. And here, we can change tack. While the social may be taken as given, in some sense, or suggested to be the end to which responsible action should be directed, it is the community which is what it intended to be the arena in which deliberate action, such as that towards development, can be fashioned. Yet, the means of establishing a community is founded on bias. Persona are given identity by community and to identify is to impart one or other bias -- such as the ethnic, national, race, religion, gender or sexual orientation -- upon particular persons. Therefore we have a problem. We are urged to search for some kind of neutral view between persons and, yet, to provide the means to do so, we are asked to accept the deliberate incorporation of bias into the means of making unbiased action possible. In asking how this problem is to be resolved, one of the fundamental issues of development is immediately raised. The market, where individuals meet only according to what they can be expected to offer in exchange, has been one offered as one means of resolving the problem of bias precisely because it is said to be neutral between persons. The attempt to promote market criteria for action, even within public institutions, has been motivated in large part by some presupposition that other criteria, such as those stemming from state-directed action, intrinsically discriminate between persons, favour those without desert and, therefore, corrupt the basis of development. Contrawise, the market, as some self-organising activity of the economy, not only involves the disorganised uncertainties of doing things in a condition of intrinsic social disorder but also obliterates any given distinctiveness about the personality of us all, other than in what is inscribed in how we meet our needs through the labour of work. Therefore, to compensate for the vagaries, and uncertain outcomes of the market while also giving recognition to personality, trust relations are said to be either embedded in the exchange economy or be present as a necessary condition before the market gets to work, thereby enabling it to function 'socially'. Such trust relations are often said to belong to a community, of one kind or another, where economic agents are socialised so that their market transactions will produce socially optimal outcomes. And, unlike state-directed action, the community is also said to be a self-organising form of activity, in which individuals take the person of each other into account with the intention of associating with each other. They do so spontaneously, not on account of the authority of any super-ordinate order or rule and without the costly need to calculate for each transaction of exchange. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that during the
liberal age of non-development under which we have been
living under since the early 1970s and which may well be
now coming to an end, we find two radically opposed
versions of self-organising activity confronting each
other on ideological grounds but have the same roots in
thinking about what makes development possible. Together
with deregulation and liberalisation in the name of
economic liberty or freedom, there has been a flourishing
of communitarian approaches to development, all of which
assert the need for participation of persons in one or
other community to meet their needs. Given that market
relations are justified in the name of unbiased
development and market freedom is inimical to ordered
development, trust has come to command attention as a
means of making development both ideally unbiased and
socially ordered. The rest of this lecture is devoted
towards looking more closely at the trust relation as it
has been used to recreate the concept of social capital
and how trusteeship, an older implication of trust, is
also closely linked to an older concept of social
capital. Trust and trusteeship Adam Seligman, in partly drawing on the work of anthropologists, has taken on board the argument that trust is generated when individuals move between two systems or models of interaction in such a way that they are uncertain of what reactions to actions on the part of one are to be expected from another. Moreover, according to Seligman’s reading of studies of small-scale forms of associative action, trust is made more necessary where statuses are ambiguous, relations between individual persons indeterminate, and resources scarce. We can follow Seligman in assuming that 'trust is some sort of belief in the goodwill of the other, given the opaqueness of others intentions and calculations' in a situation in which opaqueness, for any one agent, 'rests precisely on that aspects of alter's behaviour that is beyond the calculable attributes of role fulfilment'.4 When this account of trust is brought into the work of international development practice, and one on a far larger-scale of interaction, it often seems to ring true because the donors advance and recipients receive aid funding according to different intentions and expectations. Furthermore, even when the meaning of development is the same for both, the difference in material resources available to the two agents only amplifies Seligman's contention that trust inheres in the 'undefined ' or 'metaphorical space between roles, that area where roles are open to negotiation and interpretation'.5 When their expectations of each other are necessarily ambiguous, the recipient is said to ‘trust’ that aid funding will be provided according to the reciprocal but incalculable expectation that it will secure a process of economic development. A template for international development practice as 'development co-operation' between 'partners' has been that of the Lomé Convention, a contractual agreement for trade and aid between the European Community/Union and the group of mainly former colonial territories of the Africa, Pacific and Caribbean (ACP) area. Lomé has been fraught with tension inherent in the trust relation as mentioned above, especially over the question of the extent to which aid is conditional and, thereby, the obverse of the unconditionalities implicated in the trust relation. The purpose of Lomé was to make aid work to promote diversified trade, especially between the European Community and the former European colonial territories of the South. Between 1976, when the first convention was implemented, and 1994, when the first phase of Lomé IV ended, the share of EC/EU imports from the ACP area fell from 7 to 3 per cent while that from all developing countries declined from 45 to 34 per cent. It was only from Asia, and mainly East Asia where industrialisation had happened so rapidly, that the import share rose equally rapidly, from 4 to 13 per cent. While the overall EC export share in ACP imports showed no significant overall change, the ACP as a significant market for EC/EU exports as a whole has become even more marginal. In 1976, the ACP area accounted for three per cent of all EC exports; by 1992, the area absorbed less than 1.5 per cent of the Community's exports.6 At the same time and in going back further to 1958, towards the end of the colonial period, the real value of aid funding through the European Development Fund, the main aid disbursing instrument of Lomé and its predecessor agreements, fell from 10 to less than 3 ecu per person within the ACP area as a whole for the 1990s.7 Moreover, a growing proportion of these later disbursements has been accounted for by humanitarian assistance towards supplicants. The question of conditionality, namely conditions imposed on the ACP group, either severally or as a whole, has loomed large in Lomé because it is said to be inconsistent with the unconditionality that inheres in a contractual arrangement of this kind of relation between formally equal partners co-operating with each other for the purpose of development As Seligman also shows, there are two forms of unconditionality that secure a trust relationship. The first form of unconditionality, that which can be attributed to a commonly understood familiarity is, for Seligman, a 'form of unconditionality in its own right'. Examples of this first form of unconditionality include those founded on kinship, affection and friendship as well as their metaphorical counterparts such as 'the family of nations', including that of the British Commonwealth and French Community variants of an image of a post-colonial economically integrated EurAfrica as one inspiration for Lomé. Unconditionality occurs in the familiar case, that of the famil-iar metaphor, because the family of nations is regarded as if they are individuals embroiled in affective relations. However, it is a second form of unconditionality, which Seligman calls a ‘mechanism for maintaining system confidence', that draws our attention here. Stemming from the social preconditions of generalised exchange, this form of unconditionality arises out of market action and which, through the development of capitalism, creates the conditions for the social division of labour. When `rooted in the structural composition of the division of labour', and expressed as some form of social solidarity in `community', unconditionality is necessarily abstracted from any sense of personal familiarity and all its metaphors. Seligman insists that trust 'cannot be reduced to familiarity alone'. Between the two realms of trust as `"pristine trust" and trust as a principle of generalised exchange' there is contradiction and tension which is not easily overcome by the kind of associational arrangements that attempt, in the name of community, to marry the two.8
At least three related structural elements composing the division of labour can be mentioned here. The first element is the international division of labour that refers to the separation of territorial space between different economic activities. For example, one intended but not realised purpose of Lomé was to transcend the existing division of primary and manufacturing production between the ACP and the EC. Second, the division of labour refers to the way in which the work of labour is divided between both different forms of organisation and companies or corporations that share a common organisational form. Third, but not least, is the division between producers who work, also divided according to different specialisations and expertise, and those engaged in the supervising or controlling, directing, managing, envisaging, planning and co-ordinating the work of others in production. Social capital, as we show below, is certainly implicated in the division of labour but its implication in the trust relation arises out of trusteeship. Among the many ways of interpreting what is meant by unconditionality, as a means for maintaining confidence in a system, is to ask how confidence is put upon the trust that work is done when activity is divided according to the different elements as set out above. Of special note here is the third element, over which the ‘scientific socialists’, the Saint-Simonians of early nineteenth century France, contended was the crux of trust. Instead of the unwarranted, and therefore unconditional, trust which was placed upon those who supervised production due to the ownership of assets acquired by chance, usually through inheritance, the Saint-Simonians argued that control should be entrusted to those who had the assessed merit to do so. It was for the purpose of serving society, and what the later dissenting Saint-Simonian, Auguste Comte, came to cast as ‘development’, that trustees were to take upon themselves the task of ensuring that change which industrial progress brought was to ordered and the work of development done. Within a system of social trusteeship, advocated before its colonial variant and surviving after the European colonial experience, trustees ideally do the activity of supervision, and all it entails, while those who confidence is maintained in trusteeship go along with the work of development.9 There have been recurrent attempts to show why and how trusteeship can override its basis in the trust relation. One foremost example from the twentieth century has been Hannah Arendt's reworking of a fundamental distinction between the genesis of making (or craft and technique) and action (or activity in general). This distinction, stretching back to Aristotle, has reappeared in any number of guises, of which the most recent is probably Amartya Sen's distinction between human capital and capability. Human capital is the means, largely through education, learning and training for instruction in craft and technique, to make a mass of individuals fit for the work of production. However broadly defined, capability refers to the end of development in making possible 'the expansion of human freedom to live the kind of lives that people have reason to value'.10 For Arendt, the action, of deeds and words, is what constitutes us as distinct, unique individual persons while the undifferentiated activity of anonymous authors of action is haphazard and morally irresponsible since it is unpredictable in its outcomes and irreversible as a process. Activity inheres in, and contributes to, a world of disorder. Making, on the contrary, especially when associated with, and in, the work of production, is what is solid, reversible and reliable about products of human artifice. Yet, when making is brought into activity of the kind that has been called trusteeship, an ordered world cannot be trusted. This is especially so for Arendt’s particular interest in political statecraft as the means of ordering the world about us. In the intentional pursuit of order, making makes for violence, destruction and tyranny because the ends of action, posited in their realisation, are separated from their inception in design. The ends of action, in short, become objects of activity. Arendt’s argument, therefore, is that to obviate the intrinsic condition of making which forecloses on a future that is different from the present, the potentials of a future which are made possible by action, are brought into the present through the equal possibility of making a promise. It is the ‘force of mutual promise or contract’, not that of a sovereign source of agency, ‘be it the individual entity of the person or the collective entity of the nation’, which makes people cooperate.11 Promise, therefore, is about re-establishing the trust relation between persons. This is the trust relation, as we saw above, which
formally governs development co-operation, the process by
which an agency intends to intervene in an undirected or
spontaneous experience of historical change, namely the
immanence of development. Intended development, by this
reckoning, compensates for what makes the process of
change destructive of peoples' lives and livelihoods. In
making the intervention, the agency acts as a trustee
because it does so, for one reason or another, on the
part of those who it presupposes to be negatively
affected by the process of change in question. When the
agency of development has undergone a shift from that of
state administration towards non-governmental
organisations (the Ngos), their activity may be financed
through the administration but they are also more likely
to construct the objects of activity, namely
Arendt’s concept of making, through procedures which
belong to that of community. Although NGO activity in
general is often motivated by a critique of state
development practice, it is uncertain whether the
intention to develop is essentially different from that
which informed state development. In other words, an
object of activity may itself become the object of
trusteeship. Social capital, a very significant concept
for NGO practice, can become one such object of activity,
arising out of the relation between persons, but regarded
as an instrument for development. Two broad views of social capital It is the trust relation that has appeared in the recently renewed interest in the concept of social capital, a way of thinking about the conditions for development. Francis Fukuyama, in his more recent work on social capital has pointed out that when the phrase appeared in the United States during the 1970s it was to coined to 'describe the problem of inner-city economic development: African- Americans lacked the bonds of trust and social connectedness within their own communities that existed for Asian-American and other ethnic groups, which went a long way towards explaining the relative lack of black small businesses'.12 But, from this immediate research end, a wider theoretical interest in social capital was developed and it was out of an instrumental interest in theory, that 'social capital' has looped back during the 1990s as a theme for programmatically investigating and addressing possibilities of poverty alleviation in Africa and elsewhere. This broad concept of social capital stem from the question of bias between persons insofar as it suggests that persons recognise each other through the membership of groups and their mutual acquaintance establishes connections that entitles them to credentials, especially serving as the credit which can be used to engage in collective activities. Such, example, is Pierre Bourdieu's use of the concept of social capital as when he refers to capital generated through the social membership in 'the name of a family, a class, or a tribe or of a school, a party’. Social capital, consisting of the means by which assets can be created to serve other ends, including that of economic capital, is created out of a shared set of informal norms.13 As an influential social theorist, Bourdieu's interest in different forms of capital has stemmed from the perennial need to explain what makes the social co-ordination of action possible. It is through sharing in a set of informal norms that associated life is suggested to be possible rather than on the grounds of compulsion, both whether it be by way of the external 'third-party' enforcement of the state or the internal force of the unconscious, and that of a formal rule, either arising from the legal process and/or the self-imposition of a rule which serves as a guide to personal action of one kind or another.14 An affiliated concept of social capital has been developed differently, but for much the same purpose as Bourdieu, by another social theorist James Coleman who theoretical work has been applied by Robert Putnam, among others, and pressed into the programmatic service of development work.15 Whereas Bourdieu was inclined to put a vertical gloss upon the implication of his concept in giving stress to the 'title of nobility' as 'the form par excellence of the institutionalized social capital which guarantees’ the work of sociability16, Coleman and Putnam assert the horizontal basis of the voluntary association between individual persons to realise particular purposes of their lives. Through associating, for whatever purpose, it is argued, it is the act of association which creates and reproduces the trust relation that is so necessary to generate the socially beneficial conditions for development. Associations enable a communitarian basis of action in activities that can be directed to meet public needs. What is important to note here is that social capital, is the result of unintended outcomes when individuals enter into interdependent relations with each other. While it belongs to no one person, according to Coleman, social capital is created `through changes in the relations between persons'.17 Though changing personal relations, associations generate the unintended source of social action that makes the commitment to the work of development possible. More generally, social capital substitutes, according to this general view, for state-directed development, involving compulsory taxation and/or borrowing, raised for the creation of spending upon what used to be called social overhead capital. The overhead, the result of governmental decisions, could be deemed to be literally above the heads of individual persons, or those of them making private investment decisions. Social capital, however, is created upon the basis that individual persons trust each other through a series of mutual expectations, which are based upon their habitual interaction with each other, also in a series of transactions, such that the contribution of each towards a common purpose will realise benefit for all who are engaged in one or other course of associated action. Yet, there is an earlier and now largely forgotten concept of social capital, whose provenance originates in Karl Marx. In Volume 3 of Capital, based on his thinking from the 1870s, Marx argued that the development of capitalism had undergone a mutation. Instead of the direct personal association between the individual person of the capitalist and its effective control over capital in a private enterprise, a trust relation between individuals had enabled the impersonal corporation to be established. The joint stock company had been incorporated to both free the modern corporation from the personal interest of shareholder funds and the personality of the capitalist who controlled the use made of money-capital through its transformation into industrial capital. While the corporation may have come to regarded as a source of personality, to be as regarded as if it were a legal person, the social capital which was embodied in it was devoid of personal ownership. Capital, as such, came to be socially associated. The development of social capital represented `the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself'. While capital had increasingly become social, according to Marx, in that its ownership extended beyond the body of any individual person, capital has no social purpose and no purpose other than what is constituted by and for corporate profit and interest divided between industrial enterprises and financial institutions. As such, there were a series of trust relations pivoted on the trustees who held funds in trust for those who deposited money in banks and financial funds and, thereby, also held finance for investment by those who managed industrial enterprises. Trusteeship, residing in the bank, was highly complex since the trustees worked through norms which both had to justify that the industrial corporation had the capacity to create profitable productive assets at the same time that they were meant to ensure that money entrusted to them was secure. For example, when Marx wrote that it was the bank which distributes 'available social capital in a money form', he was conscious of how this source of trusteeship gave rise to a 'new financial aristocracy' whose propensities for speculation were now 'unchecked by private property'.18 Marx's point was reinforced by his contention that social capital also represented nineteenth century de-nationalisation of state-owned property.19 Marx's reflection on social capital was later explicated in a number of different directions, ranging from that of Rudolf Hilferding, and therefore Lenin, to that taken by Joseph Schumpeter, the 'aristocratic marxist' who regarded the bank as the ephor or supervisor of the process of economic development.20 However, it was the historical experiences of speculation, let alone simple swindling, which gave reason for the regulation of a higher-order financial aristocracy, the lenders of last resort who reappeared as central bankers and national monetary authorities during the twentieth century. In the new guise of financial regulators rather than commercial bankers, whose direct interest in money profit was the purpose of their activity as trustees, the higher-order bankers, with an interest in international regulation, reconstruction and development, also came to play a central role in, and for, the economic development of what came to be known as the post-1945 developing world. It is 'the Fund', the International Monetary Fund, and 'the Bank’, the World Bank, which commands so much attention in development, largely as a source of reference – by way of criticism far more than affirmation -- for both practitioners and dissidents. From the foregoing, it is significant that it is the trust relation of social capital which grounds the Fund and the Bank. Furthermore, the trust relation of banking and investment is expressed through bias. Personas of borrowers are evaluated through the course of making lending decisions. The Bank's decision to lend finance for a particular project or sector is grounded in some presupposed bias towards what person can be trusted to create a productive asset. However much the official authority of a state government might be unjustifiably regarded as if it is some individual person, it is the 'person' of the government which is given ranking, recognition and regard, all in relation to what purports to represent the persona of other governmental bodies, within and between countries. These two concepts of social capital, the one arising out of more recent social theory, with the other stemming from Marx's critical thinking about capital, can now be brought together. Over the past two decades, the concepts have run along parallel paths with each other. For the first, social capital stemmed from addressing what used to be called the social 'question' or 'problem', and in the more recent case quoted above, that of addressing inner-city unemployment and poverty in North America. It is this concept which has ended up in Africa, to address a much larger scale of what is intended to be done for development. For the second, social capital addressed what had happened during the course of immanent capitalist development and gave grounds for understanding the transactions of corporate capital. One concept is meant to positively counteract the negative of capitalist development while the other looms so large in explaining why the unchecked transactions of capital play so much of a role in creating the social problem in question. If the idiom of the first concept is co-operation, in that voluntary association is intended to be a co-operative form of action between persons, then that of the second is competitive insofar as social capital, for Marx, is what is divided and distributed between individual capitals, embodied in corporations, according to profitability criteria.21 These differences of idiom go some way towards explaining the different versions of trusteeship which arise out of bringing social capital into the practice of development. Associations, especially the Ngos mentioned above, which act for the purpose of development, aim to do so through incorporating social capital within a community, and also especially one which is deemed to be civic. While people may act through associations for any number of purposes, their action is entrusted to be capable of generating social capital and thereby have the cause for development. The Bank and Fund, together with bilateral funding agencies for development, effectively incorporate the second concept within their agency in deciding to whom funds are to be lent, granted and administered. It is through a process of selection that the Bank acts as trustee to ensure conditions for development, a process which is by no means naturally indifferent towards whom funds are to be entrusted. If there is now some apparent cohesion between the two concepts of social capital, then it is trusteeship for development that binds them together. One glue which is what has come to bind the two concepts together is that of the assimilation of development practice to that of welfare. A welfare or social insurance system, aided and abetted according to the conceptions of social partnership and cohesion, has been the commonly historical means by which obligation to the European poor has be expressed. For poorer, former colonial countries in the South, the historical analogue to welfare has been a development apparatus. Although the reach and extent of a welfare system may be seemingly incomparable to that of development, the principle at work is fathomable because both have expressed a sense of reciprocal obligation in that to be regarded as a self-determining recipient of assistance, rather than mere supplicant of charity, there should be a commitment to work. In the case of development practice, the conditions for development have literally meant that welfare is a direct result of workfare, with persons meeting their own livelihoods through the conditions of work which may be enabled by a development scheme or project. When social capital, therefore, enters into the lexicon of the Bank, it does so on the grounds of the first concept. Norms, obligations and reciprocity are all given emphasis in the trust that social capital enables society's 'members to achieve their individual and community objectives'.22; The trust here, however, is made conditional upon the other concept of social capital which establishes the relation between the lender or donor of funds and the recipient, usually the agency of a state who is meant to stand for 'the community' or communities as a whole. This second implication of social capital, in the same way that development co-operation has come to stand for the administration of aid, only reinforces the principle that recipients of assistance have the reciprocal obligation to engage in the work of development. An overriding focus upon the identity between social capital and that of the poor has eclipsed the view of the kind of association which made Marx, for example, aware of the social relation involved in capitalist accumulation and the institutional form of the business corporation. Poverty is said to be social relation between the relatively poor and rich rather than to be treated as if it were akin to a natural disease. Likewise, social capital also stands in a relation to the labour of producers whose associated forms of production are also markedly absent from the contemporary conception of social capital. Self-organised activity is the mark of what is posited as the ideal condition for the generation of social capital. However much a restricted ideal of self-organised labour stands opposed to what is regulated in, and for, production through the control of capital as a whole, the absence of wage-work in connection with social capital is paralleled by how accounts of capitalist accumulation fall between the two concepts of social capital. It is instructive that Fukuyama's reference to the difference between African- and Asian-American forms of business has risen in the case of different layers of capitalist accumulation in Kenya where the comparison has been made between the history of indigenous African and Kenya-Asian business along much the same lines. African business in Kenya has been as cast as being bereft of the trust relation and social connectedness as mentioned earlier, the obverse of what is brought to bear upon the explanation of why Kenya-Asian capital accumulation has been so relatively successful in manufacturing industry.23 Yet, the trajectories of these layers of capital accumulation owe little to the first concept of social capital with its unremitting focus on what can be intended to make poverty alleviation possible. While African business, as it has developed hitherto and about which we know only too little of its internal organisation, has yet to acquire the form that Marx understood more precisely as social capital, it is also instructive that social capital has entered into an account of what is called 'the felonious state' or 'the state as an agent of deception'. The state in Africa, Jean-François Bayart and others have very recently argued, does not merely act to abet accumulation of a buccanneering kind, and therefore is part of a process which is intrinsically biased towards the persona of accumulators, but is the 'system' by which private plunder for primary accumulation is made possible.24 By taking up the negative dimension of social capital, the oft mentioned propensities for 'criminals', in the name of the mafiosi or cronyism, to act cohesively through the trust relation for a socially malficient purpose, we are provided with a second source of glue to bind the two concepts of social capital together. For the purpose of this lecture, a significant implication follows for international development practice from what Seligman had concluded from his understanding, as mentioned above, of the trust relation. Trust is not some intrinsic end of social action but the means to accommodate two different orientations towards activity. From the standpoint of donors, assistance is intended to act for social welfare whereas from that of a ruling state agency as recipient, aid serves an immediate self-interested purpose. It is only the trust that conditional self-interest, working through what the Idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant called 'unsocial sociability', will establish the conditions for development that keeps the practice going.
Conclusion The most obvious meaning of trust in development is the belief in reasons for why development happens in one place over a particular time and why the active failure to believe in a reason for why development is possible is a condition of what the nineteenth century Catholic theologian, John Henry Newman, called ‘corruption’ or what, in later twentieth century parlance, has been referred to as underdevelopment.25 After 1945, at the beginning of the age of development, when concerted international official effort to combat underdevelopment in Africa and elsewhere established the development apparatus, belief in reasons for development was abundant. Among these reasons, of which one was explicitly called welfare, was an imperial self-interest in development. A half-century later, at the seeming end of the neo-liberal age, which itself followed the end of the age of development during the 1970s, an official belief in development is far more scant. However, for Africa at any rate, the mass poverty of underdevelopment is now far more pressing than it was in 1945. Two examples can be used to show how beliefs in reasons for development have faltered. The first is the dramatic decline in Finnish aid after the economic crisis of the early 1990s, when the real value of the aid budget was cut by more than a half between 1990 and 199426 with barely a murmur of public resistance. Less locally, as shown above, the second example is the experience of experience of Lomé which revealed that during the period in which the ACP area has become internationally even more marginal to the EC/EU, the real value of aid funding has declined. There is no purpose here in arguing whether the decline in the real value of aid has been a cause or consequence of the decline of the international trading significance of an area for which Lomé was intended to make a difference and, during the 1980s, believed to embody a different relation of social capital to that expressed by the Bank and Fund. Nor is the immediate point of the argument about whether the cause and/or consequence of the trade-aid relation is primarily a matter of the internal basis or external cause of development and underdevelopment. Rather, in conclusion, it is necessary to go back to the beginning and, given the ground that international development practice has increasingly meant aid for welfare, address the aspiration for an unbiased approach towards the persona of the 'clientele' of development. Under conditions in which poverty appears in the mass, and the material means of confronting it so meagre, it is hardly surprising that a plea has been made to bring the personal into development. Robert Chambers, so influential in promoting participatory approaches towards agrarian development, and 'putting the first last', has done just this by also suggesting reasonably enough, in line with a point made earlier, that development studies have been overwhelmed by the study of the poor at the expense of that of the relatively rich.27 However, in proposing that a 'concept of responsible well-being puts the personal in the center' and that it is 'an individual condition', we are drawn into the voluntary vortex of illusions which have so beset visions of development. We may have no inclination to dissent from believing that ‘the major issue is how to encourage and enable the powerful and wealthy to accept the ideal’ of ‘responsible well being and to define it for themselves in ways which make things better for those who are weak and poor’.28 However, we should also bear in mind that when such a statement becomes a ‘personal agenda’, tantamount to being an object of activity, it does so for the less powerful and less wealthy as well as the weak and poor themselves. From a plea for agendas intended to be centred on privileged persons, the injunction to be so moral and ‘evangelical’ more often than not finds its way into official practice, of the kind which is governed by the powerful and the rich, the very reason why the plea has presumably been made in the first place. But what is practised is more often than not different from the kind that was intended, especially when those who have the least are made to make the most of being responsible for their own ill- and better-being. Unintended consequences belong to disillusions of vision. It may be better, after all, to be the humble academic, engaged in the activity of ‘simply bringing to light what is going on anyhow – often enough, it may be behind the backs of the practitioners themselves and in spite of the large ambitions which they may suppose themselves able to realize’.29
1Quoted in J. Dunne, Back to the
Rough Ground: practical judgement and the lure of
technique, Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1993, p. 109. 2he classic reference to unbalanced
development is A. O. Hirschman, The Strategy of
Economic Development, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1958. 3For the foremost statement of
urban bias, see M. Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor:
a study of urban bias in world development, London:
Temple Smith, 1977; one counter-argument about the
agrarian bias of development is to be found in M.P. Cowen
and R.W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development,
London: Routledge, 1996. 4A. Seligman, The Problem of Trust,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp.
27,83,43. 6M. Voutilainen, ‘Economic issues
and trade preferences under the Lomé convention’ in
M. Vehnämäki (ed.), 1998, Finland and the future of
the Lomé Convention, University of Helsinki
Institute of Development Studies Report B 29/98, 1998, p.
12; J. Moss and J. Ravenhill, 1987; ‘The evolution
of trade under the Lomé Conventions: the first ten
years’ in C. Stevens and J.V. van Themaat (eds.), Europe
and the International Division of Labour: new patterns of
trade and investment with developing countries,
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987, p. 119; Eurostat
– ODI, 1996. 7E.R. Grilli, The European
Community and the Developing Countries, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993; table 1.7, p.33; Courier,
Jan-Feb 1996. 8Seligman, 1997, pp. 92,100. 9See Cowen and Shenton, 1996, ch.1. 10A. Sen, 'Human capital and human
capability', World Development 25 (12), 1997,
p.1960. 11H. Arendt, The Human Condition,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 244-5;
for the interpretation of Arendt more generally, see
Dunne, 1993, ch. 3. 12F. Fukuyama, The End of Order,
London: The Social Market Foundation, 1998, pp.3-4. Also
see F. Fukuyama, Trust: the social virtues and the
creation of prosperity, New York: Free Press, 1995. 13P. Bourdieu, 'The forms of capital'
in J.G. Richardson, Handbook of Theory and Research
for the Sociology of Education, Westport, CONN:
Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 249. 14For example, see C. Calhoun, Critical
Social Theory: culture, history, and the challenge of
difference, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, ch.5, esp. p.
143. 15One, now widely known example of
how Putnam has influenced this conception of social
capital is D. Narayan, Voices of the Poor: poverty and
social capital in Tanzania, Washington D.C.: The
World Bank, 1997. 16Bourdieu, 1986, p. 251. 17J.S. Coleman, `Social
capital in the creation of human capital', American
Journal of Sociology 94 (Supplement) 1988, p. S100. 18K. Marx, Capital. Volume 3,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, pp. 569, 558. 19Ibid., p. 567. 20R. Hilferding, Finance Capital: a
study of the latest phase in capitalist development,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985[1910]; J.A.
Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: an
inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest and the
business cycle, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, (1934)[1912]. For these issues raised here, see
Cowen and Shenton, 1996, ch.7. 21Ibid., pp. 258,272,959. 22Narayan, 1997, p. 57. 23For this view, see D. Himbara, Kenyan
Capitalists, the State and Development, Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner, 1994; for a criticism of this culturally
informed perspective, see M. Cowen and S. MacWilliam, Indigenous
Capital in Kenya: the 'Indian' dimension of debate,
Helsinki: Interkont Books 8, 1996. For a general overview
of indigenous capitalism, see M. Moore, 'Societies,
polities and capitalists in developing countries: a
literature survey, Journal of Development Studies
33(3) 1997. 24J.-F. Bayart, S.Ellis and B. Hibou, The
Criminalization of the State in Africa, Oxford: James
Currey, forthcoming. 25For the significance of Newman in
thinking about development and activity generally, see
for example, Dunne, 1993, ch.1 and Cowen and Shenton,
1996, ch.2. 26J. Koponen, 'Some trends in the
Quantity and Quality of Finnish Aid, with particular
reference to Tanzania and Nepal', University of
Helsinki Institute of Development Studies Finnish Aid in
Development Working Paper 7/98, 1998, appendix, table
1. 27R. Chambers, 'Responsible well-being
-- a personal agenda for development', World
Development 25(11), 1998, p. 1749.
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