ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two sets of implications of ‘modern subjectivity’ for development thinking. The first set concerns the continuing substantive salience in the development discourse of the proprietary conception of subjectivity associated with classical liberal thought. The second raises the related, yet distinct, issue of methodological individualism, through which the contemporary development discourse maintains its ties with disciplinary economics, but which increasingly distances it from progressive reconceptualisations in social theory. The emergence of the modern conception of subjectivity, and of the modern subject itself, has come to be represented under a number of rhetorical ciphers, which emphasise a break with the doctrines of personhood and socio-political standing which had dominated in the European context until the Renaissance. C. B. MacPherson offers a critique of the substantive assumptions of the liberal conception of subjectivity, with the aim of restoring a substantively conceived account of the individual interest in development, understood as a facilitation of reducing heteronomies and increasing autonomy.
