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The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline By Gunnar Myrdal Pantheon, 518 pp., $8.95 Gunnar Myrdal’s latest book is, by his own statement, a kind of summary and derivative from his massive Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. Like most of Myrdal’s work, it is complex, brilliant in spots, poorly organized and annoyingly didactic. There is no attempt to define the key word “poverty”; that concept seems to be subsumed, for Myrdal, under two ideas—“development” and “modernization.” As one tries to follow these two faint trails, they seem to come together, become fainter and suddenly lead one into policy recommendations without any foundations—giving rise to the suspicion, further reinforced throughout the book, that the policy recommendations came first, born out of the author’s passionate subconscious, with a superstructure of justification added later, fading into vagueness just where the keystone of the argument should be. Any resemblance to Karl Marx’s technique of coming to a “policy” conclusion in the Manifesto and spending the rest of his life giving it a “scientific” foundation through Das Kapital is purely coincidental, no doubt.

Myrdal defines his categorical imperative, “development,” as “a macroplan for inducing changes simultaneously in a great number of conditions, and doing it in such a way as to coordinate all these changes in order to reach a maximum development effect of efforts and sacrifices.” Leaving aside the tautological aspect of the definition (even more obvious in another of Myrdal’s definitions: “Development is the movement upward of the whole system”), it is striking as a good working definition of totalitarianism in its early messianic phases, before the onset of consolidating authoritarianism.

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Cecil Osbaine

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The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline By Gunnar Myrdal Pantheon, 518 pp., $8.95 Gunnar Myrdal’s latest book is, by his own statement, a kind of summary and derivative from his massive Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. Like most of Myrdal’s work, it is complex, brilliant in spots, poorly organized and annoyingly didactic. There is no attempt to define the key word “poverty”; that concept seems to be subsumed, for Myrdal, under two ideas—“development” and “modernization.” As one tries to follow these two faint trails, they seem to come together, become fainter and suddenly lead one into policy recommendations without any foundations—giving rise to the suspicion, further reinforced throughout the book, that the policy recommendations came first, born out of the author’s passionate subconscious, with a superstructure of justification added later, fading into vagueness just where the keystone of the argument should be. Any resemblance to Karl Marx’s technique of coming to a “policy” conclusion in the Manifesto and spending the rest of his life giving it a “scientific” foundation through Das Kapital is purely coincidental, no doubt.

Myrdal defines his categorical imperative, “development,” as “a macroplan for inducing changes simultaneously in a great number of conditions, and doing it in such a way as to coordinate all these changes in order to reach a maximum development effect of efforts and sacrifices.” Leaving aside the tautological aspect of the definition (even more obvious in another of Myrdal’s definitions: “Development is the movement upward of the whole system”), it is striking as a good working definition of totalitarianism in its early messianic phases, before the onset of consolidating authoritarianism.