Chalmers Johnson & the fundamental nature of the progressive/conservative culture war

by: Paul Rosenberg

Wed Nov 24, 2010 at 10:30

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.

Returning to Clemons, he wrote:

Johnson, who passed away Saturday afternoon at 79 years, invented and was the acknowledged godfather of the conceptualization of the “developmental state”. For the uninitiated, this means that Chalmers Johnson led the way in understanding the dynamics of how states manipulated their policy conditions and environments to speed up economic growth. In the neoliberal hive at the University of Chicago, Chalmers Johnson was an apostate and heretic in the field of political economy. Johnson challenged conventional wisdom with he and his many star students — including E.B. Keehn, David Arase, Marie Anchordoguy, Mark Tilton and others — writing the significant treatises documenting the growing prevalence of state-led industrial and trade and finance policy abroad, particularly in Asia.

Today, the notion of “State Capitalism” has become practically commonplace in discussing the newest and most significant features of the global economy. Chalmers Johnson invented this field and planted the intellectual roots of understanding that other nation states were not trying to converge with and follow the so-called American model.

This seems so obvious now, hardly something one would need a leading scholar to point out and even argue for. But for many “experts” in the foreign-policy field, the lesson has yet to sink in.  Outmoded, simplistic Cold War-era ideas continue to dominate, as they did when Johnson first advanced his views comprehensively:

In the 1980s when Johnson was arguing that Japan’s state directed capitalism was succeeding at not only propelling Japan’s wealth upwards but was creating “power” for Japan in the eyes of the rest of the world, Kissinger and the geostrategic crowd could not see beyond the global currency and power realities of nuclear warheads and throw-weight. The revisionists were responsible for injecting the economic dynamics of power and national interest in the equation of a nation’s global status….

This is one front on which Johnson represented a pragmatic realist approach in conflict with conservative ideologues.   This same pragmatic realism would eventually lead him to his criticism-of-empire stage–and this empirically-driven trajectory of his thought is emblematic of the way in which it is simply, empirically false that right and left are mirror images of one another.  But there was another front on which Johnson clashed with conservative ideologues, and that was over the influence of rational choice theory–the “free market” micro-economic one-size-fits-all approach to all of human behavior.  Clemons recalls:

Johnson who then headed UC Berkeley’s important China Studies program abandoned the university and became the star intellectual of UC San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. There is no doubt that Johnson but UCSD’s IRPS on the map and gave it an instant, global boost.

But as usual, Johnson — incorruptible and passionate about policy, theory, and their practice — eventually went to war with the bureaucrats running that institution. Those who had come in to head it were devotees of “rational choice theory” — which was spreading through the fields of political science and other social sciences as the so-called softer sciences were trying to absorb and apply the harder-edged econometrics-driven models of behavior that the neoliberal trends in economics were using.

Johnson and one of his proteges, E.B. “Barry” Keehn, wrote a powerful indictment of rational choice theory that helped trigger a long-running and still important intellectual divide that showed that rational choice theory was one of the great ideological delusions of the era. I too joined this battle and wrote extensively about the limits of rational choice theory which I myself saw dislodging university language programs, cultural studies, and more importantly — the institutional/structural approaches to understanding other political systems.

Johnson once told me when I was visiting him and his long-term, constant intellectual partner and wife, Sheila Johnson, that the UCSD School of International Relations and Pacific Studies no longer either really taught international relations or pacific studies — and that a student’s entire first year was focused on acultural skill set development in economics and statistics. To Johnson, this tendency to elevate econometric formulas over the actual study of a nation’s language, history, culture and political system was part of America’s growing cultural imperialism. Studying “them” is really about “us” — as “they” will converge to be like “us” or will fall to the way side and be insignificant.

The irony here is that “rational choice theory” claims to be a universalist theory, but it’s actually a culturally determined one. If you want to understand it properly, you need to take the sort of approach that Johnson himself advocated, and study the culture and institutions that give rise to it and support its growth.  Indeed, “free market” ideology as a whole is highly concentrated in English-speaking countries, those whose welfare state models fall into the category of “liberal” welfare states in  Gosta Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism–states whose welfare mechanisms are guided by a desire to minimize the impact on markets, cleaning up their messes where necessary, but otherwise leaving things alone as much as possible.  It’s worth noting here that the “conservative” welfare state model in  Esping-Andersen’s “three worlds” model was itself an early example of Johnson’s “developmental state.”  The first such example was Bismark’s Germany, and its explicit purpose–aside from stealing the socialists most popular issue–universal health care–away from them–was to use state power to build state power in the development of a modern industrial nation.

Another perspective on the free-market dynamic in cultural context comes from Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  Both Britain and the US benefited from not being continental powers, but instead being off-shore (geopolitically speaking, the US was like Britain, only much moreso), and thus oriented toward world trade with minimal encumbrances.  In this context, the “free market” ideology neatly fit their primary mode of wealth-building via imperialist market exploitation.   Of course there are many things this ideology could not make sense of–not least the railroads whose development played such a crucial role in the 19th Century industrial revolution, as Michael Perelman brilliantly explains in Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology.  And that profound, long-standing reality-denial lies at the very heart of our current economic and political crisis.

In short, reflecting on Chalmers Johnson’s life work, and the trajectory of intellectual conflicts that eventually lead him to his late-life anti-imperialist critique, is one of the most clarifying ways of understanding the asymmetry of empiricism vs. baseless ideology between left and right, as well as understanding the basic nature of what the progressive/conservative culture war is all about.