In writing about the life and impact of Chalmers Johnson Sunday, Steve Clemons focused considerable attention on the work Johnson did before the Blowback trilogy, work that essentially prepared him for the final stage of his evolution as a thinker, without necessarily being apparent at the time. That work had at least two fundamental aspects to it: first a break with the static view of the US as the all-knowing elder in relationship with Japan–and by extension all the East Asian nations, and second, strong opposition to the incursion of rational choice theory into the study of East Asia, and area studies in general. Both these facets were a reflection of Johnson’s empirically-based conception of the “developmental state”, about which Wikipedia says:
Developmental state, or hard state, is a term used by international political economy scholars to refer to the phenomenon of state-led macroeconomic planning in East Asia in the late twentieth century. In this model of capitalism (sometimes referred to as state development capitalism), the state has more independent, or autonomous, political power, as well as more control over the economy. A developmental state is characterized by having strong state intervention, as well as extensive regulation and planning. The term has subsequently been used to describe countries outside East Asia which satisfy the criteria of a developmental state. Botswana, for example, has warranted the label since the early 1970s.[1] The developmental state is sometimes contrasted with a predatory state or weak state.[2]
The first person to seriously conceptualize the developmental state was Chalmers Johnson.[3] He wrote in his book “MITI and the Japanese Miracle”:
In states that were late to industrialize, the state itself led the industrialization drive, that is, it took on developmental functions. These two differing orientations toward private economic activities, the regulatory orientation and the developmental orientation, produced two different kinds of business-government relationships. The United States is a good example of a state in which the regulatory orientation predominates, whereas Japan is a good example of a state in which the developmental orientation predominates.
A regulatory state governs the economy mainly through regulatory agencies that are empowered to enforce a variety of standards of behavior to protect the public against market failures of various sorts, including monopolistic pricing, predation, and other abuses of market power, and by providing collective goods (such as national defense or public education) that otherwise would be undersupplied by the market. In contrast, a developmental state intervenes more directly in the economy through a variety of means to promote the growth of new industries and to reduce the dislocations caused by shifts in investment and profits from old to new industries. In other words, developmental states can pursue industrial policies, while regulatory states generally can not.
