Tariq Banuri, “Development and the Politics of Knowledge,” in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, eds. Frederique Apffel Marglin & Stephen A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 29-72.

• 29 – “Such a transfer [of Western technology] is argued to be facilitated by other forms of institutional and structural change such as ‘state-building’ . . . and the inculcation of a particular set of development-enhancing ‘modern’ (i.e. ‘Western’) values and habits among the people of traditional societies.”
• 30 – “Of course, even in that age of unbounded optimism there were several voices of doubt and dissent regarding the sagacity, desirability, or feasibility of such a gigantic endeavour; but the self-assurance of the theorists was so unequivocal and belief in their nostrums so widespread that doubters could readily be dismissed as irration and misguided ‘cranks’ if not as malicious mischief-makers. Accusations of failures could similarly be disregarded as resulting from weakness not in the theory but in the application, because of the endurance of backward behaviour, values, and institutions in the countries concerned, or (at a later stage) from the inefficiency or venality of politicians and bureaucrats.”
• 30n3 – “While different writers suggest different dates for the onset of this period of disillusionment (in some cases as early as 1960), we see the mid- to late 1970s as the watershed. One reason is the series of events — Vietnam, OPEC, Watergate, prolonged recession — which helped to destroy the myth of permanent Western superiority.”
• 32 – “As a result of these and other factors, the two dominant Western models of progress have relinquished their hold over the imagination of Third World intellectuals, and a shift towards indigenous values has become more legitimate.”

• “In this essay I take the resulting crisis in modernization theory as a point of departure to argue that it is essentially an affirmation of earlier doubts, and thus derives not from the discovery of some hitherto unobserved social costs, but rather from a newly articulated recognition of these costs. I shall argue that this recognition has helped, in turn, to reinforce deep-seated dissatisfaction with the modernizers’ perspective on human society, and therefore, in order to understand the current crisis and to discover reasonable and coherent alternatives, it is necessary to examine in detail the intellectual and cultural roots of this perspective.”

• [SECTION: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE]
• 35 – “The most common response to an ‘external’ critique is the development of an ‘internal’ critique, i.e. one which shares the analytical and intellectual perspective of modernization theory ,as wel as the concern with a ‘moral defence of modernization’, yet criticizes some of the assumptions or implications of the accepted view. In the short run this can introduce paradigmatic innovations over which a prolonged intellectual debate cane ensue. Occasionally, a new paradigm might emerge from the discussion, effectively dividing the profession into two groups. Often, however, paradigm maintenance is ensured by the ‘policing’ efforts of the orthodoxy, through which innovation can ultimately be incorporated into older paradigms. In some instances, of course, it is possible that the new ideas are rejected out of hand for being irrational and unfounded.”
• 40 – [SECTION: DUALISM]
• “Conventional explanations of this phenomenon [dualism] note that while industrialized countries are sufficiently homogeneous, the so-called developing countries are generally characterized by ‘dual’ societies, in other words, by the coexistence of a ‘stagnant’ traditional sector alongside a ‘dynamic’ modern sector, the latter reflecting conditions in Western countries. Development, in these explanations, is the gradual expansion of the modern sector until it completely displaces the traditional sector. As a result of this perspective, current development literature invariably uses the concept of ‘dualism’ to imply the inferiority of the traditional mode of existence.”
• 45 – “In contrast to the above views, some writers, such as John Lewis and Morris Morris, have argued that the requisite cultural factors exist in all societies, and no change is necessary to induce development. Albert Hirschman (1965) goes one step further to assert that these so-called obstacles may actually be assets, or could be made into assets. In fact, he goes on to say that the attitudinal changes recommended by social theorists may be self-defeating because of the cognitive dissonance they introduce into the lives of constituent citizens.”