ABSTRACT
For at least the last fifty years, if not much longer, the conceptual and institutional context has been dominated by what I call the rights-preferences couple. The rightspreferences couple is a way of understanding and practising politics common to liberal political and economic theory and liberal democratic practice that reduces politics to the security of individual human rights, the aggregation of individual preferences, or a contrived combination of both. This reduction excludes the two main components of politics: collective decision determined by the need to act and collective evaluation determined by the requirement to control and enhance the development and satisfaction of individual human needs. As a consequence the rights-preferences couple impoverishes practical and theoretical understanding of the nature of human needs and how to satisfy them. In the first part of this chapter I discuss these problems. Then in the rest of the chapter I use an alternative conceptual framework based on the concept of human needs to develop a couple of suggestions for tackling the problem of the development of weak states. I begin by developing an account of the normative, historical and political nature of needs. This involves an account of how needs simultaneously can be distinct from and related to wants, a definition of needs in terms of human functioning, and a causal
understanding of the formation, evaluation and satisfaction of needs. I then provide suggestions for how to obtain democratic, sovereign evaluation of needs and institutions, and why this would require radically new kinds of political participation and coercive authority. The chapter ends with an application of these ideas to the realities of the development of weak states such as African states within the new economy, which includes an analysis of markets and the power of these states.
