ABSTRACT
The history of thought and action concerning international development, particularly since World War II, bears great similarity to what Isaiah Berlin (1962), largely inspired by Hegel , observed about the history of social and political theory. In fact , international development discourse has been no more, to use Berlin's words, than "a changing pattern of great liberating ideas which inevitably turn into suffocating straightjackets, and so stimulate their own destruction by new emancipating, and at the same time, enslaving conceptions" (Bernstein, 1976: 57). Each time a particular development policy-whether at the local, national, regional , or international levelis proclaimed to solve a particular development controversy, an underlying statement is being made about its "liberating" and "emancipatory" effects, and each time the proclaimed "great liberating ideas" fail to bring about the desired results in a particular development controversy, they inevitably become "suffocating straightjackets," breeding their own destruction and calling for "new emancipatory ideas" to emerge.
