This article demonstrates how the evolution of US social sciences during the Cold War influenced French attempts to develop Algeria economically and socially. During a violent war of decolonization, French researchers drew from social psychology to inform development policies. Studying political trends through the lens of cultural and psychological factors transformed older understandings of social classification. Rather than being conceived in primarily biological terms, racial difference was increasingly defined in relationship to economic capacities. The Constantine Plan, introduced in 1958, exemplified the intimate link between social planning and the postwar social sciences. The article then studies attempts to develop the Sahara, where planners sought to determine which races would be able to work in the harsh conditions of the desert. Arguing that social planning in Algeria was not merely a 'colonial' phenomena, this article shows how development reflected the broader shifts in thinking about the economy and social organization that marked the 1950s and 1960s. Keywords Algeria, decolonization, development, France, race, social sciencesThe Algerian war began with a series of coordinated attacks by the National Liberation Front (FLN) on 1 November 1954. The war exhausted France institutionally, morally, and financially, as forms of violence ranging from counterinsurgency operations, internment camps, and torture came under public scrutiny in the metropole. While scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the physical

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One of the essential tasks of the movement is to reconstitute a richer tapestry of Algerian nationalism than has been permitted since independence.

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While there is little doubt that Algeria was of enormous importance to the theoretical output that is often recognized as French, here I would like to ask: what is at stake in re-inscribing these French intellectuals as postcolonial? In what ways did the particularities of Algerian history impact French philosophy? Indeed, if the term postcolonial is meant to describe those who were influenced by events in Algeria, then an entire generation of French thinkers might be considered postcolonial to varying degrees. Surely Derrida’s oeuvre was influenced by his experiences in Algeria, but does this make him postcolonial in the same way as Jean-Paul Sartre or Pierre Bourideu, who have also become important figures in postcolonial theory?