This may not be the "worst of times" for the discipline of
development economics, but this is also not the "best of times" for it.
The discipline, rocked by a kind of schizophrenia that its votaries
appear to be suffering from, is undergoing a painful, though not
necessarily a Kafkaesque, metamorphosis. The consensus of the decades of
the Fifties and Sixties about the nature and legitimacy of the
discipline and about its 'world-view' has been seriously strained -
indeed, according to some 'observers', already broken down. While the
defenders of the faith [27; 36; 48] refuse to surrender, some of its
erstwhile votaries [11] wish to force on the discipline a Carthaginian
peace. And the dissenters [3; 24] have subjected its predictions and
prescriptions to the "slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune."
