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This article provides information about the liberal perspective of development:
C.B. Macpherson has criticised liberalism on the ground that it promotes “possessive individualism”, meaning individuals with little social or collective concerns. The socialist critique of the liberal perspective is based on the interpretation of inequality and social justice. It has been argued that the economic order, characterised by inequality would promote further inequality and social injustice in an atmosphere of free market competition.
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The criticism of classical liberalism also came from within the liberal circle; Keynens, for example, came out with a critique of the classical liberalism of Ricardo, Mill and Bentham, and proposed state-welfarism for the protection of the working class’s interests.
Sociologists have critiqued the idea of the individual autonomous self as absurd; they have also rejected the possibility of neutral rule which would guarantee the promotion of equal opportunities for all, a precondition of individual liberty. Historically, there has never been a free-market economy, absolutely free of the control of the state. Even now when in the 1980s and 1990s neo-liberalism has made a strong comeback, pushing the idea of state- welfarism to the back seat, there have been renewed talks on the protection of the rights of victims of neo- liberal economics.
The liberal approach has devised an elaborate arrangement of labour control which entails “some mix of repression, habituation, co-option and cooperation all of which have to be organised not only within the workplace but throughout society at large”, and is supported by the formation of dominant ideologies. The liberal approach that consolidated capitalism worldwide has passed through “regimes of accumulation”, to borrow Boyer’s phrase.
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According to Boyer, the “regimes of accumulation” designates “the set of regularities that ensure the general and relatively coherent progress of capital accumulation, that is, which allow for the resolution or postponement of the distortions and disequilibria to which the process continually gives rise”. A “regime of accumulation”, Lipietz writes, describes the stabilisation over a long period of the allocation of the net product between the transformations of the conditions of both the conditions of reproduction of wage-earners.
A regime of accumulation thus implies the co-ordination of the activities of all sorts of social agents, or in other words institutionalisation, in the form of ‘norms, habits, laws, regulating networks and so on that ensure unity of the process … [and]… This body of interiorised rules and social processes is [what is] called the mode of regulation”. The liberal approach has thus been accompanied by an elaborate arrangement for legitimising and reproduction of the economy, embedded in a legal and social arrangement that facilitated reproduction of the self-regulated economy or the liberal economy.
The triumph of the free market economy was possible not by cutting the state down to size but with an elaborate social, cultural and political arrangement under the patronage of state and an elaborate arrangement of management of the labour force. Hollingsworth and Boyer have aptly referred to this mechanism as “social system of production.