Contemporary discussion of the politics of development typically focuses on such intra-national issues as class-state relations, the social and cultural contexts of development politics, the connections between regime-types and development patterns, and empowerment of the poor; and such international issues as North-South relations, militarization versus development, and the implications for development of the crisis in the global political economy. Both the coverage of issues and the sophistication of arguments have been notably uneven, no doubt in part for the reason suggested by Robin Luckham: Deveiopment studies . . . has had more success in assimilating some areas of political and social enquiry (such as the role of the state in development) than others (like international conflict, military power, nationalism or fundamentalist religion), perhaps because the latter raise more serious difficulties for the assumption that development can be managed by national decision-makers if they can only implement appropriate policies. (Luckham, 1985: 83) Certainly there is much more work to be done in 'assimilating areas of political enquiry'. The premise of this essay, indeed, is that notwithstanding the growth of interdisciplinary development studies and a many-stranded tradition of critical development theory,' a great deal of thinking about development remains politically uninformed, to its clear detriment. In 'political economy', for example, which in both its radical and market variants is supposedly built upon a recognition of the ultimate inseparability of politics and economics, it is still not unusual for politics to be either relegated to the sphere of the superstructural or allotted a conditioning rolesomething that might influence outcomesrather than being made integral to the analysis. The typical result is political simplism.2 Development and Change (SAGE,
