ABSTRACT
Theories of the developmental state, which emphasized and elaborated the central role of state-directed industrial policy in successful national development, increasingly emerged to challenge the neo-liberal ascendancy in the late Cold War and early post-Cold War era. Like the emergent cultural explanations for the rise of East Asia, theories of the developmental state were closely connected to the wider battle for the East Asian Miracle. The emergence of a distinctive Anglo-American tradition of developmental state theory was also linked to the broader effort in various branches of the social sciences in North America to “bring the state back in”. This chapter examines the rise and decline of theories of the developmental state in relation to the wider development debate and the changing global order. It is emphasized that most theories of the developmental state implicitly, if not explicitly, legitimated authoritarianism. This is a characteristic shared with many of the more culturally oriented approaches to capitalist transformation in East Asia and with the neo-liberalism that developmental state theorists sought to challenge. In fact, this chapter emphasizes that while developmental state theorists challenged neo-liberalism, they also shared many of the key assumptions on which neo-liberalism rested. Like neo-liberalism, theories of the developmental state routinized the nationstate and the nation-state system and produced explanations for the East Asian Miracle that were ahistorical and technocratic. While originating in part in important historically grounded studies of capitalist transformation, theories of the developmental state as they rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s have been increasingly domesticated to the dominant neo-liberal development discourse and are characterized by a failure to understand the wider historical significance of the universalization of the nation-state system, the capitalist transformation of East Asia and the emergence of the US-led globalization project.
