Planning for What? The Relationship between Improvement, Development, and Growth before the Nehruvian State

What is the intellectual lineage within which we should situate the Nehruvian idea of planning? To what other series of ideas was it connected, past, present, and future? In my paper I will take a genealogical approach to the idea of planning that was emerging within the anti-colonial nationalist movement during the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, I will move backwards in time, starting from the imminent future in which developmentalism became the watchword of the day in South Asia and ‘the third world’ more widely. I will then consider the immediate origins of the idea of development in the neoclassical idea of growth during the 1940s. Finally, I will relate the ideas of development and growth to which the Nehruvian idea of planning was related to the terms of a tradition of 19^th century political economy that was more inclined to speak of accumulation and, especially in a colonial context like the Indian, ‘improvement.’  Ultimately, my paper has two goals. First, I hope to shed light on what is now a largely silenced debate about law and development by showing how policy in the post-colonial world historically started from a very different premise as that to which we hold today concerning the relationship between the state and the market. Second, I hope to clarify how this latter premise so readily was inverted starting in the late 1970s by considering  changes in  the conceptual lexicon of economic thought across the classical/neoclassical divide. By considering the history of economic policy in the post-colonial world I make the case that we must avoid seeing the history of economic ideas teleologically. Rather than a discipline of economics that was constantly maturing and developing, the history of economic ideas has involved fundamental disagreements, including about the language in which it speaks.