Gilbert Rist and the Dark Side of Western Development

There is in Geneva a long and vibrant tradition of critical engagement with the notion of “development”. The work of Gilbert Rist (1938–2023), among others, has marked the field: he was an intellectual, but also a man of conviction, driven by values on which he would not compromise — as evidenced by his commitment to the anti-apartheid movement and the Palestinian cause. After studying political science and theology, he gradually leaned toward anthropology. He embarked on a fruitful and long-standing collaboration with Marie-Dominique Perrot and Fabrizio Sabelli, his colleagues at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (initially established in 1961 as the Geneva African Institute. Together, they published Il était une fois le développement… and La mythologie programmée: L’économie des croyances dans la société moderne, and they directed the book series Cahiers de l’IUED and later Nouveaux Cahiers de l’IUED, which for many years served as a forum where the notion of development was unpacked and repacked.

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In his most famous and influential work, Le développement: Histoire d’une croyance occidentale, Gilbert Rist presents a historical analysis of the concept of development, tracing its evolution from Aristotle via Saint Augustine to the present day. He focuses on analysing development practices while remaining sensitive to the incantatory dimension of development.

Adopting an anti-utilitarian perspective, he draws on the work of Marcel Mauss, but also on that of Karl Polanyi. These two authors inform his rejection of neoliberal economic thought, economism, individualism, utilitarianism, rational choice theory, and — in an environmentalist vein that has grown stronger over the years — extractivism and the use of fossil fuels. He sees Mauss’s triple obligation of giving, receiving and reciprocating as a social contract, the very condition of possibility of social life, fostering respect between humans and towards the environment. This echoes Polanyi’s insistence that the market has not always been the dominant economic form of human society — that reciprocity and redistribution have most often occupied a predominant place and could offer a foundation for rebuilding contemporary society. However, he rejects the idea — which might superficially appear to be Maussian — that development, as well as humanitarian aid, constitutes a system of gift and counter-gift.

From Émile Durkheim, Gilbert Rist draws a mode of argumentation that is almost scholastic, with a highly structured exposition of concepts and examples. He is also imbued with the conviction that the social is more than the juxtaposition of individual actions. But above all, he embraces the conception of society as an ekklesia, an “assembly”. It is indeed Durkheim’s notion of the church that provides the inspiration for conceiving development as a system of beliefs that originated in the West before spreading throughout the world — a system of beliefs that, under the guise of apparent good intentions, masks the commodification of the world and of social relations. Ultimately, for Rist, development is not without continuity with the colonial enterprise. In this vein, we should also recall the notion of “programmed mythology”, proposed in the book he co-authored with Marie-Dominique Perrot and Fabrizio Sabelli.

Development is tantamount to the “commodification of the world”; it aims to alleviate the effects of global capitalism rather than to reform the mechanisms that produce inequalities. In short, “development is a problem masqueraded as a solution”, as Rist said time and again. Highlighting the global expansion of the market system, Rist views development as a transversal, worldwide phenomenon, linking what is known today as the Global North and the Global South. He describes development as one of the components of the ideology of growth, which may indeed be understood as a form of modern religion. From this follows his famous definition: “‘Development’ consists of a set of practices, sometimes appearing to conflict with one another, which require — for the reproduction of society — the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations. Its aim is to increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, by way of exchange, to effective demand.” To summarise this definition in a single phrase, we might say that development is tantamount to the “commodification of the world”; it aims to alleviate the effects of global capitalism rather than to reform the mechanisms that produce inequalities. In short, “development is a problem masqueraded as a solution”, as Rist said time and again.

Personally, I have never been entirely convinced that a functionalist view of society as an integrated whole — organised by a system of beliefs essential to maintaining social order and expressed through rituals that bring people together (see Mauss’s “total social fact”, a concept so often misused) — fully captures the contemporary world. My inclinations tend to steer me towards the less dogmatic, more open, and at times hesitant system of Max Weber, characterised by a heuristic quest — which, incidentally, is also found in Marcel Mauss. In these authors, apparent approximation is always an invitation to remember the complexity of social facts — quite unlike Durkheim’s quasi-mathematical demonstrations.

That being said, Gilbert Rist’s critical response to social evolutionism, individualism and economism — namely degrowth — appears more topical today than ever. For instance, isn’t the Covid-19 pandemic a message sent by the Earth to humanity, a critique of the logic of production and accumulation that characterises capitalism? If an author like Walter Mignolo spoke about the dark side of Western modernity, Gilbert Rist spoke about the dark side of Western development, deconstructing its apparent good intentions to uncover what might lie hidden behind a smiling face.