Historicizing the Development Narrative

Abstract

The post-war development ideal, imagined after the society and economy of the modern West, is valorized as an ahistorical and acultural planetary discourse. The chapter examines how a historical–cultural product like development can take the form of an ahistorical and disengaged narrative, and how subjects of other histories are affected by the neutralized, universal form of development. Ahistorical developmentalism follows the trail of the mainstream ahistorical tendencies of the modern intellectual currents. This mainstream tendency is resisted in the historical thinking of a line of philosophers from Herder to Heidegger and others. Historical thinking has given rise to the possibility to show something like the post-war development narrative in its historical peculiarities rather than in its ahistorical, universal normality. Heidegger’s history of Being—a way of showing the historical uniqueness of the Western understandings of Being in various epochs, leading up to the world-dominating technological understanding of Being as resourceful material in the late modern epoch—can help historicize developmentalism ontologically as the planetary concretion of the technological understanding of Being. Historicizing development can make possible genuine, contextually–historically sensitive and purposive engagement of a historical people with their futures.