ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical survey of the work of a few recent theorists who have identified in the pattern of rural-urban relations the prime cause of slow economic growth and/or continuing mass poverty in the contemporary Third World. It reveals the extent of their debt to classical and Marxian political economy and the analytical problems to which this gives rise. Implicit in this critique is the belief that the rural-urban dichotomy has been asked to bear too heavy a burden. In terms of economic activities there is often more overlap between and differentiation within the two sectors than the theorists' models would imply. And the theorists have been too ready to assume and define away the complexities of actual patterns of political action by reducing politics to a set of conflicts between a few large social categories defined in an a priori fashion on the basis of their relationships in the processes of production and distribution.
