This document provides an overview of several influential theorists in development economics and sociological/political development theories. It summarizes the key contributions and perspectives of thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and others. It also examines the origins and perspectives of sociological theorists including Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons. The document analyzes how their work has shaped the study of development economics and sociology.

1. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
The Theoretical Heritage
and Controversial Issues in
the Development Research
Source: Martinussen, John. 1997. Society,State
and Market: A Guide to Competing Theories of
Development. Zed Books: London and New Jersey.

2. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Development Economics
It appeared as a distinct area during the 1940’s and 1950’s
together with the political decolonization of Asia, Middle East and
Africa.
Its main interest was from the outset uncover the causes for
continued poverty and underdevelopment or stagnation on Third
World countries.
It emerged as a special perspective and later as a sub-discipline
within the field of economics. its focusing on the sources and
obstacles to economic growth have separated the subject area
from the neo-classical mainstream which had been increasingly
taken up with the short term economic equilibrium analyses and
maximizing of efficiency in resource allocation.
Economics in general have common roots in the so-called
classical political economy of the 18th and 19th century
represented primarily by Smith, Ricardo , Malthus and many
others.

3. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Theoretical Origins of Development Economics
Adam Smith
(1723-1790)
Thomas Robert Malthus
(1766-1834)
David Ricardo
(1772-1823)
Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873)
Neo-Marxist
approaches
Alfred Marshall
(1842-1924)
Joseph Schumpeter
(1883-1950)
John Maynard Keynes
(1883-1946)
Development
economics
Neo-classical
paradigm

4. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Adam Smith
(1723-1790)
Author of the book, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
In it he emphasized the role of the market mechanisms
operating as “the invisible hand” which ensured that production in
society was organized in the best countries of all. Smith’s central
argument basically says that there might be other producer who
would sell inferior goods at higher prices, but if there will be
competition between producers they will be forced to deliver
proper goods at a reasonable price. Another role of the market is
that of the a growth source, according to Smith. The reason
behind is that there will be an increase of demand and growth in
production when the market expanded as a result of population
growth or territorial expansion. And also, specialization, which
according to Smith will lead to a higher productivity per working
hour, would increase. And a precondition of that is the
accumulation of wealth from the rich countries which are required
for investment in working capital and in more fixed capital. And
these ideas of Smith’s have played important role in debates ever
since his time.

5. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
David Ricardo
(1772-1823)
He elaborated on Smith’s classical political economy, especially with a land-rent and
distribution theory and with the theory of comparative advantage.
Ricardo identified two other sources of growth in addition to Smith’s capital,
namely technical innovation and international trade. His analyses of these led him
to conclude that continued population growth and the corresponding increase in
demand for food would result in the inclusion of all land for agricultural production,
including those of poor quality. He believed that there will be a squeezing of profits
in to zero because the land-rent would go up with the use of poor lands and it will
lead to the redistribution of income in to the benefit of the land-owners.
Theory of Comparative Advantage
-It was elaborated in continuation of the above argument in an attempt to
evolve a best policy for foreign trade.
-Its basic notion is that each country should concentrate its production in
areas where it has comparative advantage in relation to countries with respect
to the productivity of the workers. Meaning they should focus more on the
production of goods wherein they have low cost but a high level of production.

6. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Thomas Robert Malthus
(1766-1834)
He was basically known for his pessimistic theses on population growth.
-He believed that population would grow faster than food production,
if it was not constrained, specially with the poor breeding faster. And
this basic assertion that population will necessarily grow more
rapidly than agricultural production has played a central role as a
hypothesis that many researchers have taken a position of, either
positively confirming or negatively dismissing it.
it would now be appropriate to mention his contribution to the formulation
of an economic crisis theory, regarding population growth as a barrier to
economic growth.

7. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873)
Author of the book, Principles of Political Economy (1848)
Common to all classical economist was a strong emphasis on
generalization and abstraction. They searched for patterns,
casual relationships and laws of motion regarding societal
conditions in the short-term perspective, as well as regarding
growth and change over long term. And this has been passed
down to present-day development research.

8. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
He started in classical political economy, but transformed this body into a far more
comprehensive and quite different analytic construction.
He was interested in the totality of society and the ways in which this totality changed
over a long period of time. His focus was on how and why various forms of society
emerged, changed, acted within the structural limits primarily laid down by the forces of
production and the prevailing production relations.
According to Marx the most important sources of economic growth under capitalism were
the valorization and accumulation compulsions which individual capitalists are subjected
to. To achieve a point, capitalist must exploit labor by paying the workers less than the
equivalent of the value they produce, this became a fundamental element in his labor
theory of value. In addition to that, the capitalist has continuously to accumulate capital in
order to survive in the competition. And these processes embodied unavoidable
tendencies towards increased technical and organic composition of capital. Combined with
population growth, this necessary resulted in the marginalization of large segments of the
potential working population and the establishment of a large reserve army of unemployed
workers.
These basic laws of motion could not be viewed in isolation of class struggles because a
well-organized working class had the power to lessen the uncomfortable effects for itself,
and in the long run may also be able to overthrow capitalism and introduce first socialism,
and later communism.

9. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Joseph Schumpeter
(1883-1950)
A theorist on the three mainstreams of thinking.
Author of The Theory of Economic Development (1934), which have left a
legacy in the shape of hypotheses and ideas that continue to be debated. He made
a special distinction between ‘growth’ and ‘development’.
Growth – a gradual extension of the capital apparatus and increasing production.
Development – it could occur only when technical innovations introduced new
production techniques, new products, or new means of organizing production.
The innovators were the entrepreneurs, who as a category covered more than the
industrialists and capitalists and did not need to be capitalists themselves.
He broke ranks with the classical conception of capitalist savings and
accumulation as being the most important sources of growth. Instead, he believed
that growth was driven by technical innovations, in association with the
entrepreneur’s mobilization of credit in the economic system as a whole.
At around the turn of 20th century, long-term growth was taken for granted and
consequently attention was shifted to how to achieve the best possible utilization of
given resources – known as allocative effectiveness and efficiency. It implied the
arrival of the neo-classical paradigm.

10. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Alfred Marshall
(1842-1924)
One of the first great theorists within the neo-classical paradigm.
Author of Principles of Economics (1890) which eventually, replaced Mill’s
Principles of Political Economy as the most important standard work within
mainstream economics.
It should be noted that some of the central features of neo-classical
economics are certain explicit assumptions about nature of the economic
system and the determinants of economic behavior. And these assumptions
include one which stipulates that firms will maximize profits, another is that
consumers will maximize utility. And these behavior-determining factors are
believed to produce an optimal allocation of production factors and, further,
provide the best conditions of economic growth.

11. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
John Maynard Keynes
(1883-1946)
He wrote his main contributions during the 1930’s, including The General Theory
of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
He was not particularly interested in long-term growth or in conditions in the
colonies. This is the reason why he did not leave behind any elaborate theory of
growth and development. Meanwhile, he placed the question of the relationship
between market and state so firmly on the agenda that he thereby acquired lasting
significance for ensuing development debate.
His most significant contribution to theory formation and debate concerned the
question of the reasons for, and the possible solutions to, the problem of
unemployment. But also left behind an important legacy with his analyses and
propositions regarding institutional control of international trade and finance, and
the associated proposal for establishing what was later to become the IMF and the
World Bank.
He achieved a considerable indirect influence on the development strategies
through the work the work of Roy Harrod and Evsy Domar, after whom the Harrod-
Domar model was named. This model informed the entire way of thinking about
economic planning in the Third World during both 1950’s and 1960’s.

12. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Socio-political Development
Theories

13. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Theoretical Origins of Sociological and Political
Development Theories
Auguste Comte
(1789-1857)
Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
Emile Durkheim
(1858-1917)
Max Weber
(1864-1920)
Talcott Parsons
(1902-1979)
Radcliffe Brown
(1881-1955)
Bronislaw Malinowski
(1884-1942)
Functionalism and
anthropological field
methods
Functionalism and
modernization
theory
Post-Marxist
Neo-Marxist
approaches
Neo-Weberians

14. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Auguste Comte
(1789-1857)
He was the first to use the term “sociology”:
to describe his vision of a new science that would discover
laws of human society resembling the laws of nature by applying the
methods of factual investigation that had proved so successful in the
physical sciences.

15. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Emile Durkheim
(1858-1917)
He acknowledged explicitly Comte’s contribution to the establishing sociology as a
scientific discipline, but asserted that Comte had not successfully achieved his
objective.
He was concerned with the social change processes in the long tern. This led him
to study the development of the division of labor in society as part of
industrialization process. It was more important for him to study division of labor in
its social consequences. He believed that division of labor would eventually come to
replace religion as the most important social force of cohesion, but that the
separation and specialization of labor functions and other swift social changes would
also cause widespread anomie.
Anomie – a feeling of rootless ness and aimlessness which, furthermore, was
characterized by a lack of moral guidelines. The breakdown of the traditional orders,
which were supported by religion, would result on many people feeling that their
lives had lost meaning; they would feel isolated without clear guidelines for normal
behavior. This approach has clearly influenced post war modernization theory.
He also studied about the causes of suicide not by looking at the external social
circumstances in which suicide occurred with a markedly higher frequency. The
method of analyzing individual behavior as determined significantly by social
circumstances came to influence the further development of sociological methods.

16. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Radcliffe Brown
(1881-1955)
Bronislaw Malinowski
(1884-1942)
2 of the founders of modern social anthropology where it was the
first mainstream through which theoretical heritage from Durkheim
was transmitted.
Both pioneers in the evolution of fieldwork methods with well-
defined conceptual frameworks. The development of these methods
led to the present functionalist analysis at the micro –level, that its
analyses based on the view that social conditions and events in the
local community and its maintenance.

17. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
He is one of the founding fathers of modern social science who has left a strong
impact upon both development economics and sociological and political science
approaches to study of Third World development.
His analytic perspective and method at the same substantial contributions to
sociology. His method implied a systematic tracing of the interactions between the
basic economic structures and the processes on the hand, and the political, social
and ideological relations and institutions on the other. He believed that social
change is prompted primarily by economic influences.
The dynamism created by technological progress and the development of the
forces of production within the framework of a particular mode of production
would, in the final instance, also determine the direction and basic patterns of
societal changes in the social and political spheres. This was part of the basic idea
in his materialist conception of society and history.
Marx had a clear idea about technological progress and the development of the
forces of production as constituting the core of the dynamics that changed society.
He also held the view that social and political conflicts which really mattered all had
their roots in economic inequality and conflicts of interest.

18. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Max Weber
(1864-1920)
He directly opposed Marx.
Regarding the relationship between structure and the individual actor, there a strong
case of contrast between Marx and Weber. Marx believed that there is no consensus on
how much of individual behavior the structures accounted for. While Weber assigned to
man as an individual significantly more independence in the society. Therefore, Weber
also worked on human motivation and rationality as determinants of behavior.
He worked on many type of rationality but focused on the so-called bureaucratic
rationality which was described as the analytical ideal type in his studies of modern
bureaucracy. He found bureaucracy and its rationality as an unconditional asset, and is
useful for solving many social problems. But he emphasized that a bureaucratic system
was not subject to democratic control or counterbalanced by charismatic or otherwise
popular leaders, was an evil for society. His interest was to describe, interpret, and
explain the emergence of the bureaucratic form of organization and the related
rationality form.
He also laid foundations for the methodological principle which is known as scientific
value relativism. It takes as its starting point that there is a logical gap between ‘is’ and
‘ought’- between society as it exits and the society as the researcher would like it to be.

19. PROF. Y.G. EALDAMA
Talcott Parsons
(1902-1979)
He basically elaborated Weber into English countries.
He reduced Weber’s complex and open theory to functionalism,
into which he adopted elements from Durkheim.
He found Marx and Weber as totally incompatible that Weber
could essentially replace Marx.
His interpretations was adopted by the modernization theorists of
1950’s and can be found even today among many development
researchers, especially in the English-speaking countries.