Rethinking The Concept of Development: Wittgenstein and Ake In Conversation

This paper emphasizes a constructive analysis on the concept of ‘development,’ by interrogating scholarships, philosophical perspectives, theories, and contemporary interdisciplinary usage of the term. The paper employs Philosophical analysis as its method in establishing the connection between development and philosophy, and evaluating that connection in terms of the debates around African political economy. Spanning from the employment of this methodology, two main arguments are addressed. Firstly, the argument for a human-centric idea of development; and secondly, the interrogation of the capitalist ideology on development via the lens of Wittgenstein's language game theory and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. Having broken the edges of capitalist induced developmental idea, the paper engages Amartya Sen’s capacity approach of development as freedom to argue for the need of a third condition- hitherto, development as intersubjective. This third condition is then practically demonstrated in the evaluation of Claude Ake’s political economy approach to the question of development; especially as it relates Africa. Keywords: Development, Political Economy, Language game, Wittgenstein