Comparative Exam Notes (Developing Nations)
Huber, Evelyne and Fred Solt “Successes and Failures of Neoliberalism.” 2004.
“It may be useful to start by clarifying how we are approaching the assessment of the successes or failures of neoliberal reforms” (150).
“If, however, the counterfactuals is a different sort of change from neoliberal change, let us call it for convenience’s sake a social democratic model, then the failures od neoliberalism seem to weigh more heavily than the successes” (150).
“We can look at five indicators to assess progress towards such a developmental model: growth, economic stability/predictability/absence of volatility, poverty, inequality and quality of democracy’ (151).
“With regard to stability versus volatility, it is clear that stability has increased in one respect, in that Latin American countries had clearly lower rates of inflation in the 1990s than before” (151).
“The growing informalization and decline of formal sector employment, together with other reforms, have led to growing income concentration, as outlined by Portes and Hoffman” (152).
“However, just as clearly, countries that pursued more radical reform approaches suffered actually a somewhat lower decline between 1982 and 1989 but then experienced six times lower average annual growth rates…” (154).
“When we turn to volatility, the picture is very consistent; more liberalization is associated with greater volatility” (155).
“Higher levels of liberalization and more radical processes of liberalization are associated with higher levels of inequality and poverty. The changes in inequality are impressive” (156).
“There is no doubt then, that higher levels of neoliberalism and more aggressive tactics of liberalization are associated with rising inequality” (156).
“So, the very least we can say is that economic growth certainly did not trickle down and did nothing to relieve the higher levels of poverty data in conjunction with the inequality data, this seems to be a great understatement” (156).
“In the Latin American context of the last two decades of the twentieth century, more liberalized economies performed better in economic growth and in improvements in the quality of democracy than less liberalized economies.” (158).
“Poverty has increased in many cases over the past two decades and inequality has increased in almost every Latin American and
“Neoliberal reforms of social policy have done little to rectify the lack of a safety net for the working-age population and less to stem the decline of the value of the safety net for the elderly” (160).
“In sum, on average, in the Latin American countries neoliberal reforms of trade and financial systems, tax systems, pensions, transfers to working-age families, health care systems, and education, have failed to put into place policies that firmly dvance growth, stability, the reduction of poverty and inequality, and improvements of the human capital base” (162).
Roberts, Kenneth M. “Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in
“Contemporary Latin American scholarship has been confronted by a novel paradox – the rise of personalist leaders with broad-based support who follow neoliberal prescriptions for economic austerity and market-oriented structural adjustments” (82).
“However, several recent works have noted a coincidence between neoliberal economics and populist politics, raising basic questions about the meaning of populism and its relationship to different economic models” (82).
“The possibility that populist tendencies could arise within – rather than against – a neoliberal project has yet to be fully explored” (83).
Our perspectives on populism:
- historical/sociological perspective
- the economic perspective
- the ideological perspective
- the political perspective
“These competing perspective can produce radically different interpretations of the same phenomenon. For example, writing essentially from an economic perspective, Kaufman and Stallings argue that the electoral platforms of
“By disaggregating, it is then possible to identify populist subtypes that share a ‘family resemblance’ and manifest some but not all of the core attributes” (88).
Core properties of populism:
- a personalistic and paternalistic, though not necessarily charismatic, pattern of political leadership
- a heterogenous, multiclass political coalition concentrated in subaltern sectos of society
- a top-down process of political mobilization that either bypasses institutionalized forms of mediation or subordinates them to more direct linkages between the leader and the masses
- an amorphous or eclectic ideology, characterized by a discourse that exalts subaltern sectors or is antielitist and/or antiestablishment
- an economic project that utilizes widespread redistributive or clientelisitc methods to create a material foundation for popular sector support (88).
“Although these core properties focus primarily on the political and sociological dimensions of populism, they maintain its economic content without binding the concept to any specific phase or model of development” (89).
“The primary beneficiaries of neoliberalism – and presumably it core sociopolitical constituency – are thus conventionally seen as more elitist and exclusive than those of populism” (90).
‘The Peruvian case suggests that a strict neoliberal project at the macrolevel may be compatible not only with populist-style political leadership but also with populist economic measures at the microlevel” (91).
“Although Peru’s economic crisis and the neoliberal revolution imposed novel constraints upon populism, they did not extinguish it, as new forms of populist expression emerged in the political vacuum bequeathed by the collapse of the party system” (91).
Phases of Fujimor’s populism:
- associated with Fujimori’ electoral campaign, when his populist formula cultivated a ‘man of the people’ image and proposed a gradualist economic program
- economic populism essentially disappeared, but a populist constituency was sustained through attacks on the political establishment
- resurgence of economic populism at the microlevel
“In order to avoid alienating voters, Fujimori eschewed ideological definition and cultivated the image of the untainted leader who was above the fray of partisan politics” (94).
“Given Fujimori’s campaign themes and political constituency, Peruvians were stunned when, within two weeks of his inauguration, the new president reversed course by adopting a stabilization program that was even tougher than that proposed by Vargas Llosa” (96).
“However, upon closer examination it can be seen that Fujimori sustained his populist project through an astute manipulation of political and symbolic themes, even during a period when populist economic measures were notable for their absence” (97).
“Popular struggle, therefore, was redefined by Fujimori: no longer ‘the people’ versus ‘the oligarchy’ it became instead ‘the people’ – represented by their elected president – versus the ‘political class’’ (97).
“Fujimori’s economic model was therefore able to challenge the interests of a politically prostrate labor movement at relatively little cost – through wage cuts, decreased public and private sector formal employment, and changes in the labor law that emasculated collective rights” (98).
“Fujimori thus governed in a highly autocratic style, deliberately weakening or eliminating institutional checks on his authority, and allying himself with military officials to neutralize the only force that could threaten his regime” (101).
“In short, Peruvian social policies have relied upon direct, highly paternalistic relationships that are conducive to the microlevel exchange of material benefits for political support, even in a context of relative macroeconomic austerity” (105).
“Although Fujimorismo provides an unusually transparent example of the affinities between populism and neoliberalism, it is hardly a unique case” (108).
O’Donnell, Guillermo. “The State, Democratization, and Some Conceptual Problems”
“Apart from describing their political and economic misadventures, the existing literature has done little more than indicate which attributes – representatives, institutionalization and the like – these countries do not have” (158).
“The analysis that follows is premised on one point: states are interwoven in various complex ways with their respective societies. This embeddedness implies that the characteristics of each state and society greatly influence which type of democracy will e likely to consolidate and which will merely endure or eventually break down” (158).
“The state is also a set of social relations that establishes and maintains a certain order via centralized coercive authority over a given territory. Relations are formalized in a legal system that is created and backed by the state” (159).
“The law is a constitutive element of the state; it is the ‘part’ that provides the regular, underlying framework of the social order existing over a given territory” (159).
“Recognition of the law as a constitutive dimension of the state has been hindered by the approached that have dominated Anglo-Saxon political science since the ‘behavioral revolution’” (159).
“The crisis of state exists along three dimensions just discussed: the state as a collection of bureaucracies capable of discharging their duties with reasonable efficacy, the effectiveness of laws, and the plausibility of the claim that state agencies normally make decisions according to some conception of the public good” (160).
“Current theories of the state often assume, as do current theories of democracy, that a high degree of homogeneity exists both in the territorial and functional scope of the state and the social order it supports” (161).
“Consider those regions where local powers (both those formally public as well as de facto) establish power circuits that operate according to rules which are inconsistent with, if not antagonistic to, the law that supposedly regulates the national territory” (162).
“In brown areas, there are election, governors, and national and state legislators. In many cases, these regions are heavily over-represented in the national legislatures” (163).
“We should not forget that in a properly functioning democracy, legality is universalistic, and it can be successfully invoked by anyone, regardless of a person’s positions in society” (165).
“Countries with large brown areas are schizophrenic democracies with a complex mix – both functionally and territorially – of important democratic and authoritarian traits” (166).
Three conditions must be met:
- private and state agents must have at least the medium run as their time horizon
- stabilization and especially, structural reforms must be more than crude tools for whatever interests have access to them.
- Some policies can be successfully implemented only if they go through complex negotiations with the various organized private actors that claim legitimate participation in the process (173).
Conaghan and Malloy. “De Tocqueville’s Fears.”
“Looking out on this horizon in the early 1990s, political scientists have been hesitant to declare free market economic and democracy as a done deal for
“Of particular concern to Tocqueville was the growing centralization of power in the state and how that might eventually lead to a progressive loss of participation and a surrender of citizens to a ‘guardianship’ by the state” (205)
“Lying at the base of the problem of representation was the highly inegalitarian socioeconomic structure of these countries. While upper classes were forced to make some concession to lower-class groups…” (205-206).
“None of the three military governments were able to resolve the basic issue of how contending social classes and interest groups were to be connected to the governing process” (206).
“Of particular concern to businesses were the reforms that proposed to alter property rights and that affected managerial prerogatives in individual firms’ (207).
“Antistatism became an attractive ideological common ground upon which a new coalition of capitalist, technocrats and politicians was constructed” (207).
“In short, business elites found themselves caught in a crisis of representation under military rule” (208).
“Rather than fearing democracy, business leaders believed that their interests would be better served in a system in which they could seek to shape policy through a variety of channels” (209).
“The character and behavior of political parties facilitated presidential power-grabbing in a number of ways” (211).
“Rather than serving as the nexus for each group in civil society and the state, most parties developed as loose and ideologically ill-defined clientele networks, organized for the purpose of winning…”
“The mentality that prevailed inside economic teams worked to reinforce the presidents’ sense that it was both necessary and legitimate to place economic policy squarely outside the purview of interest groups, the public and legislators. The economic teams viewed their task as the application of a science” (214).
“In the absence of clearly understood mass-based support for neoliberal policies, presidents proceeded in a variety of ways to create a political environment conducive to the neoliberal experiment” (215).
‘Politicians were not the only sources of instability within the elite coalitions. In all three countries, serious fissures developed within the coalitions as actors differed on issues surrounding the design and implementation of policies” (218).
“The neoliberal coalitions of the
“In Tocqueville’s estimation, the most effective checks on the development of despotism come from a combative civil society, one that jealously guards its powers to deliberate and participate by doing just that” (223).
Gershenkron, Alexander “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective”
“A good deal of our thinking about industrialization of backward countries is dominated – consciously or unconsciously – by the grand Marxian generalization according to which it is the history of advanced or established industrial countries which traces out the road of development for the more backward countries” (6).
“For the half-truth that it contains is likely to conceal the existence of the other half – that is to say, in several important respects the development of a backward country may, by the very virtue of its backwardness, tend to differ fundamentally from that of an advanced country” (7).
“It is the main proposition of this essay that in a number of important instances industrialization process, when launched at length in a backward country, showed considerable differences, as compared with more advanced countries, not only with regard to the speed of development (the rate of industrial growth) but also with regard to the productive and organizational structures of industry which emerged from those processes” (7).
“The foregoing sketch purported to list a number of basic factors which historically were peculiar to economic situations in backward countries and made for higher speed of growth and different productive structure of industries. The effect of these basic factors was, however, greatly reinforced by the use in backward countries of certain institutional instruments and the acceptance of specific industrialization ideologies” (11).
“…French industry received a powerful positive impetus from a different quarter. The reference is to the development of industrial banking under Napoleon III” (12).
“When the Rothschilds prevented the Pereires from establishing the Austrian Credit-Anstalt, they succeeded only because they became willing to establish the bank themselves and to conduct it not as an old-fashioned banking enterprise but as a credit mobilier, that it, as a bank devoted to railroadization and industrialization of the country” (13).
“The German banks, which may be taken as a paragon of the type of the universal bank successfully combined the basic idea of the credit mobilier with the short-term activities of commercial banks” (13).
‘By contrast, in a relatively backward country capital is scarce and diffused, the distrust of industrial activities is considerable, and, finally, there is greater pressure for bigness because of the scope of the industrialization movement, the larger size of plant, and the concentration of industrialization processes on branches of relatively high ratios of capital to output” (14).
‘The continental practices in the field of industrial investment banking must be conceived as specific instruments of industrialization in a backward country” (14).
Sequences of Russian economic development:
1) the state, moved by its military interest, assumed the role of the primary agent propelling the economic progress in the country
2) the fact that economic development thus became a function of military exigencies imparted a peculiarly jerky character to the course of that development
3) this mode of economic progress by fits and starts implied that…a very formidable burden was placed on the shoulders of the generations whose lifespan happened to coincide with the period of intensified development
4) the government had to subject the reluctant population to a number of severe measures
5) periods of rapid development…very likely to give way to prolonged stagnation
In Russia: “The great industrial upswing came when, from the middle eighties on, the railroad building of the state assumed unprecedented proportions and became the main lever of a rapid industrialization policy” (19)
“The scarcity of capital in
“…As industrial development proceeded apace and as capital accumulation increased, the standards of business behavior were growing Westernized” (22).
Saint-Simon’s socialism: “…He considered the appropriate political form for his society of the future some kind of corporate state in which the ‘leaders of industry’ would exercise major political functions” (23).
On ideology: “What is needed to remove the mountains of routine and prejudice is faith – faith, in the words of Saint-Simon, that the golden age lies not behind but ahead of mankind” (24).
“In a backward country the great and sudden industrialization effort calls for a New Deal in emotions” (25).
“The problem at hand is not Soviet Russia but the problem of attitudes toward industrialization of backward countries. If the Soviet experience teaches anything, it is that it demonstrates ad oculos the formidable dangers inherent in our time in the existence of economic backwardness” (29).
“…the lesson of the nineteenth century is that the policies toward the backward countries are unlikely to be successful if they ignore the basic peculiarities of economic backwardness” (30).
Evans, Peter. “Development as Institutional Change: the Pitfalls of Monocropping and the Potentials of Deliberation” 2004
“Currently, the dominant method of trying to build institutions that will promote development is to impose uniform institutional blueprints on the countries of the global South – a process which I call ‘institutional monocropping’” (30-31).
“A number of economists, including Dani Rodrik and Amartya Sen, have argued that, instead of imposing a ‘one best way’ based on the supposed experience of now-developed countries we should be seeking ways to foster institutions that improve citizens’ ability to make their own choices” (31).
“Having decided that institutions are the key, we need a theory of institutional change that will allow us to transform them” (32).
Other institutional models: “The standard strategy begins by insisting on institutional monocropping, the institutional equivalent of old-fashioned strategies of agricultural monocropping. Institutional monocropping rests on both the general premise that institutional effectiveness does not depend on fit with the local sociocultural environment, and the more specific premise that idealized versions of Anglo-American institutions are optimal developmental instruments, regardless of level of development or position in the global economy” (33).
“The theoretical attraction of monocropping as a model for institutional change is understandable. The basic institutions of rich countries are by definition, associated with development (at least in those countries)” (33).
“A broader critique argues that, even if institutional monocropping were to improve performance in individual countries, global uniformity in the organization of national political economies would still be a risky proposition” (34).
“Sen’s argument for the fundamental priority of ‘participatory political institutions’ begins with the premise that ‘thickly democratic’ decision-making institutions built on public discussion and exchange of ideas, information and opinions offer the only way to adequately define desirable developmental goals” (36).
“’Deliberative democracy is a process of joint planning, problem solving and strategizing involving ordinary citizens in which strategies and solutions will be articulated and forged through deliberation and planning with other participants such that participants will often form of transform their preferences in the light of that undertaking thus allowing solutions that would have been impossible given initial preferences’” (36-37).
“As ‘thin’ democracy becomes more nearly universal, it becomes more plausible to think about trying to institutionalize something closer to full-blown social choice exercises” (37)
Prospects for deliberative democracy:
1) Deliberative institutions must be socially self-sustaining in the sense that ordinary citizens are willing to invest their own time and energy in the decision-making opportunities that such institutions offer and to provide electoral support for the parties and political leaders that advocate them.
2) Deliberative institutions must, under some set of empirically plausible conditions, be able to overcome the political economy problem; the opposition of powerholders who have vested interests in existing decision-making structures
3) Deliberative processes must not be so economically inefficient or so biased against investment that they reduce real income growth to an extent that outweighs their intrinsic benefits (38).
Uses
“The answer to the question of whether non-elites will become sufficiently engaged to make deliberation work is clearly positive” (42).
“Elite technocrats may be potential enemies of deliberative institutions, but a public administrative apparatus with the capacity necessary to provide informational inputs and implement the decisions that result from the process is a central element in making deliberation possible…” (43).
From a left-wing perspective…
“The obvious response to the disappointing results of institutional monocropping is to facilitate (or at least not suppress) the construction of local social-choice institutions” (44).
Remmer, Karen L. “ Theoretical Decay and Theoretical Development: the Resurgence of Institutional Analysis” 1997
“Through his critique of the development literature,
“By severing the concept of development from modernization,
Huntington: “Saw the expansion of literacy, education, urbanization, industrialization, communication and virtually every other aspect of the modernization process as threatening to political order” (36).
“Since political development was defined largely in terms of institutional stability, the central argument boiled down to the idea that change (or modernization) undermines stability (or institutionalization) (36).
From
“Whereas cultural theorists emphasized values and historically determined cultural templates, structuralists stressed economic conditions and associated patterns of class formation” (40).
“By the mid-1980s, the debate between culturalists and structuralists had been overtaken by two related sets of developments – the global processes of democratization and market oriented reform” (41)
“In addressing these and related sets of questions, the burgeoning literature in the field of political economy has drawn upon neo-Marxist, rational choice, and pluralist understandings of institutional forces” (48).
“The shift away from societally based explanations for political outcomes also characterizes research concerned with questions of political democratization rather than political economy” (48).
Increase in institutional thought; new institutionalism, rat choice inst, etc.
“Thus as the substanative focus of research has shifted to political economy, institutions have emerged as important sets of explanatory variables” (50).
Four ironies:
a) Just as international variables became especially important in the 1980s, they disappeared as the key factor from theories of development
b) Although various regime types exist, only one economic form does – market-oriented approaches
c) Institutional approaches have put elites at the center of the analysis, and reduced the relative weight of the state
d) Institutions used as independent variables despite instability in world
“A more plausible line of analysis would begin with changes in the international system and explore the mediating impact of domestic interests and institutions” (54).
“As suggested above, among the most interesting and important theoretical questions raised by the contemporary context have to do with linkages between international and domestic systems – questions that cannot be adequately addressed on the basis of frameworks that accord causal primacy to domestic political institutions” (55).
“The second major challenge that needs to be addressed by comparativists relates to the two-way interaction between politics and economics” (55).
“…Comparativists have joined
“At issue is not the relevance of political institutions but the development of rigorous, testable, and cumulative theory, which is likely to call for diverse talents and approaches as well as for a more fully developed appreciation of the limitations of institutional analysis” (61).
Knight, Alan. “Social Revolutions: a Latin American Perspective.” 1990
“In short, the ‘great’ Latin American revolutions – Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba – have rarely been integrated into the mainstream debate concerning the causes, character and consequences of social revolution” (175).
“I criticize both the state-centered approach favored by Skocpol and, more generally, theories which purport to find recurrent patterns in the etiology or process of revolutions” (175).
“In the Latin American cases, international competition had little to do with the Mexican and Cuban revolutions” (176).
“In addition, the Bolivian Revolution, the only Latin American case which perhaps obeys Skocpolian etiology, failed to establish a powerful and durable state, which, in Skocpol’s model, is the hallmark of successful revolution” (177).
“Furthermore, analyses of peasant or labor movements per se, however illuminating, can provide only partial explanations of social revolutions which, as almost all students of the subject concur, are complex phenomena, embracing different classes, ideologies and contingent factors” (178).
“Indeed, the complexity of the ‘great revolutions’ is such that common features or patterns are hard to find, especially at the level of cause or process” (178).
“Contrary to some assertions, the Mexican Revolution avoided the classic – that is, the French and, perhaps, the Russian – progression fro moderate to radical to Thermidor” (179).
“Violence was a necessary aspect of the revolutionary process, but an approach which focuses on violence per se – for example, by compiling compendious lists of violent events – is likely to prove mechanistic and misleading” (180).
“If Latin American social revolutions – an I would go further, social revolutions elsewhere in the world – seem to defy descriptive generalizations, the same cannot be said of their functional outcomes” (182).
“Defining capitalism in ‘productionist’ terms, I contend that the Mexican and Bolivian revolutions, by virtue of making decisive contributions to the development of capitalism, were bourgeois revolutions” (186).
“The Mexican and Bolivian revolutionary regimes eventually came under the sway of elements who were ‘bourgeois’ by virtue less of their original class background thatn of their commitment to capitalist transformation” (188).
“As in France, revolution proceeded amid a welter of conflicting groups – bourgeoisie, workers, peasants, nationals and foreigners – and outcomes derived from a complex parallelogram of forces which no-one consciously planned and no-one could even foresee” (189).
“I have suggested that the Cuban transition to socialism followed a certain structural logic, linked to the island’s level of development under capitalism. An analogous argument can be applied to
“The historic association between peasant insurrection and bourgeois revolution, posited here, is of course far from original” (190).
“In societies where the Asiatic mode had historically held sway, a different constellation of forces prevailed. Here, agrarian elites combined landowning with state service and the state weighed more directly upon the peasant community that it did in Mexico or Bolivia” (196).
“No general theory of revolutionary etiology, I have suggested, can adequately accommodate these reasons” (197).
“In conclusion: a review of the Latin American social revolutionary experience suggests that Skocpol’s ‘lumping’ of bourgeois and socialist revolutions under a single, state-building rubric, is misleading, in that it assumes the primacy of the state as an organizing concept and thus mistakenly concludes that both the causes and outcomes of social revolutions are best explained in terms of statist factors” (197).
Wickham-Crowley, Timothy. “Guerillas and Revolution in
“Guerilla warfare, in fact, is almost surely the most ancient form of warfare, and is best defined in strictly military terms. Not in social or political terms” (5).
“The central negative feature of traditional guerilla warfare is thus the avoidance of decisive pitched battles, which they must surely lose…” (5).
“Despite Skocpol’s left-wing credentials and socialist leanings – she acknowledges them in her book – her conclusions have infuriated Marxists, who are probably outraged at the implications of her argument: that revolutionary opposition to certain types of regime is destined to fail” (6).
“The theoretical deficiencies that arise if we focus only on the strengths of revolutionary movements become immediately apparent when we begin o study revolutions comparatively, especially in
a) First, the distinctive traits of the Batista and Somoza regimes were such as to engender a cross-class, national opposition to those regimes, throwing radical revolutionaries into an alliance of convenience with more moderate opponents of the regime.
b) Second, those same regime characteristics meant that the ruler and the military were increasingly decoupled from civil society itself, and therefore had no taproots…
c) Finally, such regimes are virtually defined by their combination of personal rule and a correspondingly personalized military
“Powerful revolutionary movements did indeed ‘make’ revolutions in
“The bulk of the work thus consists of an inquiry into the sources of peasant support, guerilla military strength, and weak incumbent political regimes” (10).
“Such regional variations are the second way out of the national constriction: one can instead move within the nation-state, and begin to pay attention to the different ways in which regionally situated actors or events affect the chances that a social revolution will occur” (11).
“I always compare regions with high levels of support to other areas of no support, weak support, or simply no guerillas; therefore that analysis also stands firmly in the realm of macro-causal analysis’ (15).
“The latter cannot be reduced to the former, for the peasant rage so commonly found in the countryside cannot logically be explained by the cool calculation actor model” (310).
“Skocpol is on far weaker ground, however, when she extends that claim to say to say that ‘historically no successful social revolution has ever been made by a mass-mobilizing avowedly revolutionary movement’” (318).
Skocpol, Theda. “
“Social revolutions as I define them are rapid, basic transformations of a country’s state and class structures, and of its dominant ideology. Moreover, social revolutions are carried through, in part, by class-based upheavals from below” (240).
“As in most contemporary third world countries, it is hard to distinguish political and social revolution in any firm way, because the state and its incumbent elites are so central to the ownership and control of the economy” (241).
“Instead, military pressures from abroad, often accompanied by political splits between dominant classes and the state, have been necessary to undermine repression and open the way for social-revolutionary upheavals from below” (241).
“Avowedly revolutionary leaderships have often been absent or politically marginal until after the collapse of pre-Revolutionary regimes’ (241).
Challenges to Skocpol’s theory via
a) First, the Iranian Revolution does seem as if it might have been simply a product of excessively rapid modernization.
b) Second, in a striking departure from the regularities of revolutionary history, the Shah’s army and police – modern coercive organizations over 300,00 men strong – were rendered ineffective in the revolutionary process.
c) Third, if there has ever been a revolution deliberately “made” by a mass-based social movement aiming to overthrow the old order, the Iranian Revolution against the Shah surely is it.
“Their revolution did not just come; it was deliberately and coherently made – specifically in its opening phase, the overthrow of the old regime” (242).
Skocpol’s argument still consistent with her earlier theories (242).
“Help from a far-away imperialist power was used to give Iran’s state increased leverage in relation to the older, nearby imperial powers, Britain and Russia, and eventually to help it bid for regional military power in the Middle East” (244).
“Instead, opposition to the Shah was centered in urban communal enclaves where autonomous and solidary collective resistance was possible” (245).
“In the mass movements against the Shah during 1977 and 1978, the traditional urban communities of
“Revolutionary potential inhered, instead, in the socially coherent and somewhat independent world of the bazaar, surviving damaged but intact into the 1970s, as a locus of politically autonomous social life for millions of urban Iranians” (247).
“In short, political developments are not logically deducible from Shi’a beliefs as such; rather Shi’a believers are inspired to varying political activities depending on the varying places of religious activities and outlooks in the changing life of Iranian society as a whole” (248).
“Over time the crowds [grew] while the army became less and less active and reliable as an instrument of repression” (249).
“…A worldview and a set of social practices long in place can sustain a deliberate revolutionary movement” (250).
Goodwin, Jeff and Theda Skocpol. ‘Explaining Revolutions in the Contemporary
“It was not until the mid-1970s however, that comparative scholars began to focus on the features distinctive to Third World social revolutions – the social and political upheavals in smaller, dependent states outside of Europe” (259).
“In this article we point to what we consider the most promising avenues for comparative analyses of contemporary third world revolutions. In particular, we shall offer some working hypotheses about the distinctively political conditions that have encouraged revolutionary movements and transfers of power in some, but not all, Third World countries” (259).
“Although professional revolutionaries have certainly helped to organize and lead many Third World insurgencies, revolutionary groups in many, perhaps most, countries remain small and relatively insignificant sects” (260).
“Imperialist interests certainly exist, but they must operate through local regimes or through private agents whose activities are underwritten and strongly shaped by the local regimes” (260).
Understudied issues: “The first issue is the formation of revolutionary coalitions that invariably extend well beyond peasants alone. The second issue is the relative vulnerability of different sorts of political regimes to the formation of broad revolutionary coalitions and, perhaps, to actual overthrow by revolutionary forces” (261).
“The most successful revolutionary organizations – including those in Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua – have won the support not just of poor or middle peasants, but also of landless and migrant laborers, rural artisans, rich peasants and even landlords” (262).
“In any event, it is the ongoing provision of such collective and selective goods, not ideological conversion in the abstract, that has played the principal role in solidifying social support for guerilla armies” (263).
“Revolutionary movements, history suggests, typically coalesce in opposition to closed or exclusionary, as well as organizationally weak (or suddenly weakened) authoritarian regimes” (265).
“Such exclusionary authoritarian regimes are conducive to the formation of broad revolutionary coalitions for a number of related reasons” (265).
Regimes susceptible to revolution: politically exclusionary, repressive, and not fully in control of their nominal territories (267).
Two types of regime susceptible: Sultanistic regimes or neo-patrimonial regimes, and colonial or post-colonial regimes (268).
“The colonial power, like a personalist dictator, also provides a common and highly visible focus of opposition for groups that may have very different reasons for seeking national independence” (271).
Haggard, Stephen and Robert Kaufman. “Institutions and Economic Adjustment” 1992.
“The essays in this volume address these differences, exploring how international and domestic politics affect policy choice. The shifting perceptions of decision makers and personal differences in political style and skill naturally introduce a degree of indeterminacy into any effort to explain policy choice…” (3).
“…it is also clear that decision makers operate in a matrix of international, social and institutional incentives and constraints that set limits on the range of policy alternatives” (4).
“The economic adjustment choices addressed in this volume can be divided into three clusters of policies: balance of payments management and stabilization; so-called ‘structural adjustment’ measures; and national strategies toward creditors.’ (5).
“Second, we are interested in explaining the substantive nature of each policy response: its scope and its content” (6).
“In general, the essays share with mainstream economists the assumption that swift action is superior to delay; that developing countries need to pay greater attention to exports, fiscal and monetary discipline, and the price mechanisms; and that policies are more likely to succeed if implemented in a consistent fashion” (7).
“An essential point of departure for any discussion of policy reform is the adverse external shocks for developing countries experienced in the 1980s” (9).
“Several features of the international regime for managing the debt crisis constrained developing country options in the face of external shocks. Creditors were able to coordinate their stance toward the debtors, but cooperation among debtor countries was discouraged, in part through strategic side payments to the most important debtors” (11).
“As Stallings recognizes, however, there are also significant limits, both empirical and analytical, to the range of policy behavior that can be explained without reference to domestic political configurations” (15).
“Second, and more importantly, external shocks do not affect policy choice in an unambiguous way” (15).
“Given a preference for policy reform, we have suggested that the insulation of central decision makers from distributive claims will enhance the state’s capacity to launch new initiatives” (23).
“In the final analysis, it is entirely possible that neither interest-based explanations nor institutional ones will be entirely satisfactory for explaining how societies cope wth the challenge of policy reform and consolidation” (36).
Easterly, William. “The Cartel of Good Intentions.” 2003.
“”If the poor person is dissatisfied and wants to complain, he faces so many different organizations and such a complex hierarchy within each organization he is understandably at a loss” (2).
“Although a poor person in
“In response aid agencies have tended to redefine their mission as being more one of disbursing money than achieving economic development. Thus such aid agencies have established a tradition of focusing on the volume rather than the effectiveness of aid” (5).
“They also show little interest in improving the atrocious statistical systems of the poor countries so that the aid agencies or recipient governments would even be able to know what is happening to growth, poverty or social indicators” (6).
“Aid reports for many decades have bewailed the tendency of donors to finance new capital investment projects (easily observable at a point in time) and the neglect of opening supplies and maintenance after the project is completed (which requires more costly ongoing site by site monitoring”’ (8).
“This grab-bag of issues has no particular claim on being the most salient for welfare of the poor, they just happen to be politically visible concerns monitored by NGOs and American political lobbies” (9).
“A third characteristic of foreign aid bureaucracies is their willingness to engage in obfuscation” (9).
“In cases where aid has been unsuccessful in the past, the prominent technique of spin control is to assert that things have now changed for the better” (10).
“The international community failed to hold aid agencies responsible for this failure. Instead, rich countries were influenced by aid agencies’ perpetual promises of a change for the better in
“The aid agencies’ always presenting themselves as ‘new and improved’ makes spin control easier, in that it is impossible to test how ‘improved’ they are at any given moment. One can do research on the past but not on the present” (15).
“All of the classic criticisms of central planning – the vast information requirements, the oversimplification to quantifiable targets as opposed to the real subjective wants, the meeting of targets without regard to relative costs and benefits, the lack of feedback from local practical knowledge – apply with even more force in a poor country with poor institutions and underskilled civil service than in a rich country” (19).
“Finallt, the ‘cartel of good intentions’ extends to include the local government bureaucracy, confronting the beneficiaries with a monopoly that is not always customer-friendly” (19).
“Moreover, bureaucracies can manipulate quantitative indicators of performance to achieve ‘success’ without real quality improvements.
“As a result, advocates of one objective agree to support other objectives in return for support for their own cause” (24).
Olson, Mancur “Dictatorship, Democracy and Development” 1993.
“Anarchic violence cannot be rational for a society: the vitims of violence and theft lose not only what is taken from them but also the incentive to produce any goods that would be taken by others” (567).
“Thus, within the most primitive tribes of preagricultural history, the logical presumption that the great gains from a peaceful order can be achieved by voluntary agreement appears to hold true” (567).
“There is by now a huge theoretical and empirical literature…that, just as small groups can usually engage in spontaneous collective action, very large groups are not able to achieve collective goals through voluntary collective action” (568).
“Since the warlord takes a part of total production in the form of tax theft, it will also pay him to provide other public goods whenever the provision of these goods increases taxable income sufficiently” (568).
“Autocrats of all kinds usually claim that their subjects want them to rule and thereby nourish the unhistorical assumption that government arose out of some kind of voluntary choice” (568).
“The autocrat is not in a position analogous to the owner of a single house or even to the owner of all housing, but rather to the owner of all wealth, both tangible and human in a country” (569).
The autocrat: “will use his monopoly of coercive power to obtain the maximum take in taxes and other exactions” (569).
“The rational autocrat will devote some of the resources he obtains through taxation to public goods but will impose far higher tax rates than are needed to pay for the public goods since he also uses tax collections to maximize his net surplus” (569).
“I shall impartially assume that the democratic political leaders are just as self-interested as the stationary bandit and will use any expedient to obtain majority support” (570).
“Would a vote-buying democratic leader, like the rational autocrat, have an incentive to push tax rates to the revenue-maximizing level? No” (570).
“Democratic political competition, even when it works very badly, does not give the leader of the government the incentive that an autocrat has to extract the maximum attainable social surplus from the society to achieve his personal objectives” (571).
“Given autocracy, then, dynastic succession can be socially desirable, both because it may reduce the likelihood of succession crises and because it may give monarch more concern for the long run and the productivity of their societies” (572).
“We have seen that whenever a dictator has a sufficiently short time horizon, it is in his interest to confiscate the property of his subjects, to abrogate and contracts he has signed in borrowing money from them, and generally to ignore the long-run economic consequences of his choices” (572).
“Interestingly, the conditions that are needed to have the individual rights needed for maximum economic development are exactly the same conditions that are needed to have a lasting democracy” (572).
“The gains from contract-intensive activities such as banking, insurance, and capital markets are also mainly reaped by stable democracies like the United States, the United Kingdom and Switzerland” (572).
“We can deduce from the theory offered here that autocracy is prevented and democracy permitted by the accidents of history that leave a balance of power or stalemate – a dispersion of force and resources that makes it impossible for any one leader or group to overpower all of the others” (573).
“The main obstacle to long-run progress in autocracies is that individual rights even to such relatively unpolitical or economic matters as property and contracts can never be secure, at least over the long run” (574).
“The moral appeal of democracy is now almost universally appreciated, but its economic advantages are scarcely understood” (575).
Karl, Terry Lynn. “Dilemmas of Democratization in
“Having undergone this evolution, theorists should now develop an interactive approach that seeks explicitly to relate structural constraints to the shaping of contingent choice” (1).
Democracy:
- contestation over policy and political competition for office
- participation of the citizenry through partisan, associational, and other forms of collective action
- accountability of rulers to the ruled through mechanisms of representation and the rule of law
- civilian control over the military (2).
“The scholarship that preceded the new wave of democratization in the 1980s argued that a number of preconditions were necessary for the emergence of a stable democratic polity” (2-3).
“…The search for a set of identical conditions that can account for the presence or absence of democratic regimes should probably be abandoned and replaced by more modest efforts to derive a contextually bounded approach to the study of democratization” (5).
“The failure to identify clear prerequisites…has caused theorists of comparative politics to shift their attention to the strategic calculations, unfolding processes, and sequential patterns that are involved in moving from one type of political regime to another…” (5).
“A variety of actors with different followings, preferences, calculations, resources and time horizons come to the fore during these successive stages” (5).
“The absence of predictable ‘rules of the game’ during a regime transition expands the boundaries of contingent choice” (6).
“The notion of contingency (meaning that outcomes depend less on objective conditions that subjective rules surrounding strategic choice) has the advantage of stressing collective decisions and political interactions that have largely been underemphasized in the search for preconditions” (6).
“These cases illustrate the limits, as well as the opportunities, that social structures place upon contingent choice” (7).
“In other words, structural and institutional constraints determine the range of options available to decision makers and may even predispose them to choose a specific option” (7).
“Once the links between structures, institutions, and contingent choice are articulated, it becomes apparent that the arrangements made by the key political actors during a regime transition establish new rules, roles, and behavioral patterns which may or may not represent and important rupture with the past” (8).
“What unites all of these diverse cases, except Chile, is the presence of foundational pacts, that is, explicit (though not always public) agreements between competing actors, which define the rules of governance” (9).
“Thus, the typical foundational pact is actually a series of agreements that are interlocking and dependent upon each other; it necessarily includes an agreement between the military and civilians over the conditions for establishing civilian rule, an agreement between political parties to compete under the new rules of governance…” (11).
“…these pacts serve to ensure survivability because, although they are inclusionary, they are simultaneously aimed at restricting the scope of representation in order to reassure traditional dominant classes that their vital interests with be respected” (11).
“The choice taken by key political actors to ensure the survivability of a fragile democracy – the compromises they make, the agreements they enter into – will necessarily and even irrevocably affect who gains and who loses during the consolidation of a new regime” (13).
“Pacted democracies, whatever their defects, have been honed through compromise between at least two powerful contending elites” (13).
“Pacted transitions are likely to produce corporatist or consociational democracies in which party competition is regulated to varying degrees determined in part by the nature of foundational bargains” (15).
Bratton, Michael and Nicolas Van De Walle. “Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in
“Conceptually, these studies employ models of political change that are useful in explaining the demise of bureaucratic forms of authoritarianism but cannot account for transitions from more personalistic types of rule” (453).
“Our thesis is as follows: contemporary political changes are conditioned by mechanisms of rule embedded in the ancien regime” (454).
“We emphasize political institutions in a bid to develop midlevel generalizations and to help make the study of regime transitions more comparative” (454).
“
“The argument that the political institutions of the preceding regime condition historical transitions is of course not novel; it runs through the historiographic literature, notably on revolutions” (457).
“But African leaders have rarely used bureaucratic formulas to construct authoritative institutions or granted subsidiary spheres of influence to occupational interest groups within civil society” (458).
“In neopatrimonial regimes, the chief executive maintains authority through personal patronage, rather than through ideology or law” (458).
“Thus, personal relationships are a factor at the margins of all bureaucratic systems, but in
Political transitions in neopatrimonial regimes:
- political transitions from neopatrimonial regimes originate in social protest…”Regimes built on personal loyalty rather than bureaucratic authority are susceptible to institutional collapse when patronage resources run out” (460-461).
- Neopatrimonial elites fracture over access to patronage… “To regulate and control rent seeking, to prevent rivals from developing their own base, and to demonstrate their own power, rulers regularly rotate officeholders” (463). “Even if the state elite does begin to fragment over the pace of political reform, such splits are governed more by considerations of self-interest than of ideology” (464).
- Elite political pacts are unlikely in neopatrimonial regimes… “In corporatist regimes the parties to a political pact are the acknowledged leaders of a major interest blocs within state and society; by carrying their supporters along, they can make agreements stick” (465).
- In Neopatrimonial regimes, political transitions are struggles to establish legal rules… “The opposition leadership, which commonly includes lawyers within its ranks, calls for a rule of law” (466).
- During transitions from neopatrimonial regimes, middle-class elements align with the opposition… (467).
“In the absence of a dominant party, ensuing regimes have been characterized by instability and a greater reliance on coercion, notably through military intervention” (468).
“We find it useful to distinguish the neopatrimonial regimes in sub-Saharan
“[Personal dictatorship] is the quintessence of neopatrimonialism” (474).
“Transitions in personal dictatorships are also conditioned by the weaknesses of political institutions. In the absence of institutional mechanisms for political competition, the protagonists find difficulty in reaching a compromise formula to end the regime” (476).
“For these regime variants, levels of participation and competition are mutually reinforcing: participation and competition exist at at least moderate levels for the competitive one-party systems, yet both are extremely low for the personal dictatorships” (486).
“Democracy is possible only in the presence of a set of political institutions that allows protagonists to propose, negotiate, and win popular acceptance for political accommodations; even then, it is never guaranteed” (486).
Huntington, Samuel. “The Third Wave.” 1993.
“As a form of government, democracy has been defined in terms of sources of authority for government, purposes served by government, and procedures for constituting government” (6).
“Political regimes will never fit perfectly into intellectually defined boxes, and any system of classification has to accept the existence of ambiguous, borderline and mixed cases” (8).
“Modern democracy is not simply democracy of the village, the tribe, or the city-state; it is democracy of the nation-state and its emergence is associated with the development of the nation-state” (13).
“A wave of democratization is a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period of time” (15).
1st wave: 1828-1926 (American and French revolutions,
1st reverse wave: 1922-42 (Word War II, fascism)
2nd wave:1943-1962 (post-WWII,
2nd reverse wave: 1958-1975 (Latin America,
3rd wave: 1974-present (
Democracies made how: “They were made through negotiations, compromises, and agreements. They were made through demonstrations, campaigns, and elections, and through the nonviolent resolution of differences” (164-165).
“Negotiations and compromise among political elites were at the heart of the democratization processes” (165).
“In almost all cases the principal participants were the leaders of government and opposition political parties” (166).
“Historically the first efforts to establish democracy in countries frequently fail; second efforts often succeed. One plausible reason for this pattern is that learning occurred” (172).
“Later democratizers not only received a snowballing impetus to regime change from those who had done it earlier, they also learned lessons from the previous experience of others” (173).
“Elections are the way democracy operates. In the third wave they were also a way of weakening and ending authoritarian regimes. They were a vehicle of democratization as well as the goal of democratization” (174).
“The lesson of the third wave seems clear: authoritarian leaders who wanted to stay in power should not have called elections; opposition groups who wanted democracy should not have boycotted the elections authoritarian leaders did call” (190).
“Almost every democratization between 1974 and 1990 involved some violence, yet the overall level of violence was not high. Taking place as they did through compromise and elections, most third wave democracies were relatively peaceful compared to other regime transitions” (192).
“In virtually all countries a central tactic of the opposition was the mass rally, march, or demonstration against the regime” (204).
Ignatieff, Michael. “
“Only
“Call it peacekeeping or nation-building, call it what you like – imperial policing is what is going on in Mazar” (2).
“…the Bush administration wants to do this on the cheap, at the lowest level of investment and risk” (2).
“This is how an upper level warlord plays the new political game in
“The warlords don’t threaten the cohesion of
“Yet the essential contradiction in American efforts to stabilize Afghanistan is that in the south, at least, winning the war on terrorism means consolidating the power of the very warlords who are the chief obstacle to state-building” (5).
“Peace in Afghanistan depends on whether the warlord militias can be lured into policing or other civilian lines of work, and the only people determined to make this transition happen are a silent quartet from Special Forces, watching from the reviewing stand, just behind the warlords adjutants” (5).
“What the Afghan warlords saw being inflicted on their Taliban opponents, they know can be visited upon them. For the moment, this keeps the peace” (6).
“One paradox of the new American empire is that it is being constructed by a Republican administration that hates big government. Its way around this contradiction is to get its allies to shoulder the burdens it won’t take on itself” (8).
“But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect. Nations sometimes fail, and when they do, only outside help – imperial power – can get them back on their feet” (9).
O’Donnell, Guillermo. “Illusions About Consolidation.” 1996.
“The bulk of the contemporary scholarly literature tells us that these ‘incomplete’ democracies are failing to become consolidated, or institutionalized” (34).
“The main argument is that, contrary to what most of current scholarship holds, the problem with many new polyarchies is not that they lack institutionalization. Rather, the way in which political scientists usually conceptualize some institutions prevents us from recognizing that these polyarchies actually have two important institutions: elections; particularism” (35).
“Only in the oldest Latin American polyarchy (Costa Rica) and in two cases of redemocratization (Chile and Uruguay) do the executive branch, congress, parties, and the judiciary function in a manner that is reasonably close to their formal institutional rules, making them effective institutional knots in the flow of political power and policy” (36).
“By definition, all the Latin American cases that I have labeled polyarchies are such because of a simple but crucial fact: elections are institutionalized” (36).
“In all polyarchies, old and new, elections are institutionalized, both in themselves and in the reasonable effectiveness of the surrounding conditions of freedom of expression, access to alternative information, and associational autonomy” (37).
“Mst students of democratization agree that many of the new polyarchies are at best poorly institutionalized” (37).
“Consequently, calling some polyarchies ‘consolidated’ or ‘highly institutionalized’ may be no more than saying tha they are institutionalized in ways that one expects and of which one approves” (39).
“Polyarchy is the happy result of centuries-long processes, mostly in countries in the global Northwest” (39).
“The various laments, from all parts of the ideological spectrum, about the decay of democracy in these countries are largely a consequence of the visible and apparently increasing gap between formal rules and the behavior of all sorts of political actors” (40).
“In such polyarchies, particularism is an important part of the regime. Poluarchies are regimes, but not all polyarchies are the same kind of regime” (41).
“If the main criterion for democratic consolidation or institutionalization is more or less explicitly a reasonably close fit between formal rules and actual behavior, then what of countries such as Italy, Japan, and India” (41).
“It almost goes without saying that all actual cases exhibit various combinations of universalism and particularism across various relevant dimensions” (42).
“Polyarchy, even if not formally institutionalized, marks a huge improvement over authoritarian regimes of all kinds. What is largely lacking, however, is another dimension of accountability , which I call ‘horizontal’” (44).
“By contrast, little horizontal accountability exists in most new polyarchies” (44).
“Within the country, elections are a moment when something similar to horizontal accountability operates: parties other than the one in government are present at the polling places, sharing an interest in prevailing fraud” (45).
“It is through a nonteleological and, indeed, nonethnocentric, positive analysis of the main traits of these polyarchies that we scholars can contribute to their much-needed improvement” (46).
Gourevitch, Peter. “Second Image Reversed” 1978.
“While the German state did not exist, local ones did. These had very strong traditions of state activity, especially state-directed economic activity” (886).
“While Gerschenkron’s article deals only with the nineteenth century, it is possibly to extend the argument quite widely” (886). But how? It’s a historical argument.
Rogowski, Ronald. “Political Cleavages and Changing Exposures to Trade.” 1987.
“Take first Gerschenkron’s observation, and Hirschman’s subsequent challenge and amendment of it, that latecomers to economic development tend to assign a stronger role to the state” (1130).
Gootenberg, Paul. “Hijos of Dr. Gerschenkron: ‘Latecomer’ Conceptions in Latin American History.”
Latin American politics: “The working assumption is that Gerschenkron might have been an attractive thinker here, given his broad affinities with the dominant postwar nationalist or statist model of industrialism in Latin America” (1).
“…A handful of scattered intellectual progeny have appeared who have tried to apply ‘Gerschenkronian’ motions to development studies and to Latin American industrialism and state building” (5).
“Gerschenkron’s pivotal metaphor seems to be about time (being ‘late’, ‘behindness’), and consequently about the followers ‘catching up’” (9).
“In the rest of the Globe, only
Gerschenkron, Alexander. “
Critial of Hjarne: “It is based on the view that ‘when all is said, economic development followed similar lines all over the world,’ the world presumably meaning the world of
“The first magnitude of the effort, its vigor, amplitude, and persistence endow the Petrine reign with unique features. Nowhere else in the mercantalistic world do we encounter a comparable case of a great spurt, compressed within such a short period” (72).
Petrine
“Hence it came that the large-scale plants were established and run — at least for some time — by the State; that for those plants the State supplied everything: land and entrepreneurship and management, capital and labor, and, finally, the demand” (73).
“The combination of poverty and strength of the State resulted in pressures that were incomparably greater than those produced by mercantalistic policies in other countries” (73).
“The Tsar’s [Peter] lack of concern for the cost of his projects in terms of human lives was absolute” (76).
“…the never-ending cogitations of Marxian historians in
“…it was the State that was creating the classes: labor, and even the entrepreneurs, although soon more and more men became ready to make use voluntarily of the great benefits that were held out to them by the state” (80).
“The role of vested interests in co-determining the policies of the state varied from country to country” (86).
“…protectionism was enormously strong in some countries and tended to be fairly insignificant in others” (86).
“…it may indeed be said that in the West in some respects mercantalist policies prepared the soil for modern industrial development while in others they had created obstacles that had to be removed, at times requiring a considerable effort” (88).
General proposition: “The less backward, economically speaking, was a country when it went through its mercantalist experience, the less formidable were the obstacles for subsequent development that resulted from that experience and the more easily they were overcome” (88).
“The units of observation are the individual of
“The basic proposition is that within each of the individual countries in Europe certain specific features of the industrialization process depended on the level of relative backwardness of the countries concerned on the eve of the period of great accelerations in their industrial growth” (98-99).
Examine the factors for backwardness on page 99.
Critique of stage theories: “The only difficulty is that these beautiful exercises in logic have been defeated by history. They are not very consistent with crude empiricism, and are damaged seriously when confronted with the relevant facts as we know them” (101).
“And if we move on farther eastward into Russia, we see that the same function in the great upswing of the 1890s was exercised by the State, that is to say, the State budget which used the power of the State to collect, through taxation, funds from the population and pass them on to industrial entrepreneurs” (102).
“I have hazarded the following generalization: the mosr advanced a country, the richer is its pre-industrial history and the simpler is its industrial history. But the mosr backward a country, the more barren appears its pre-industrial landscape and the more complex and exciting its industrial history precisely because it is shot through with substitutions of all kinds” (104).
In answering criticism from E.H. Carr: “It is true that I am not particularly elated about the present, even though I realize that the acquisitive society in the West has improved considerably over my lifetime, and even the State in the east of Europe, that very acquisitive and inquisitive — or rather inquisitorial — State, is no longer quite as horrible as it used to be” (106).
“What I have said is exactly the opposite: the State played its role because the country was backward” (110).
Gerschenkron, Alexander. “Prerequisites of Modern Industrialization.” 1962
“Obviously, some of the factors listed are not prerequisites at all, but rather something that developed in the course of industrial development” (33).
“If industrialization comes as a spurt, it must demand considerable capital and is therefore predicated upon the existence of a sizable ‘preindustrial’ accumulations of capital” (35).
Gerschenkron, Alexander. “Notes on the Rate of Industrial Growth in
“The following pages, then, purport to discuss the process of Italian industrialization before 1914 in terms of its conformity with, or deviation from, the pattern just described” (73).
“In the classical case of Count Witte’s
“The ineptness of governmental industrialization policies becomes quite obvious as one moves from the measures just mentioned to a consideration of the Italian tariff, which must be viewed as the real piece de resistance of those policies” (80).
“At any rate, it would seem difficult to attribute much positive influence to the tariff structure that existed in
“The Italian government’s participation in, and contribution to, the big industrial push in the country certainly fell far short of what one might have expected on the basis of the industrial industry of other backward countries such as Russia or Hungary” (83).
“By and large…what took place in Italy was a deliberate application of techniques of investment banking as evolved in Germany in the course of attempts to overcome its own economic backwardness” (88).
“As in
posted by Joseph M. Ellis @ 10:33 PM
<< Home