POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT' 65 one teaches courses on the 'economics of development', since one feels compelled to read them: one's alarm tempered by the faint hope that a text of distinction may emerge. Few of them, in fact, can be regarded as anything other than ephemeral: Lewis's book being a striking exception. Not many go into a second edition. The 'economics of development9 awaits its Samuelson or its Lipsey. The pot of gold remains to be claimed at the end of the rainbow. It would appear that in what passes for the 'economics of development' no Kuhn-style paradigm has been fashioned: it is diffuse, there is no real agreement over fundamentals, and there is no clear definition of the field. Unless the necessary Kuhnian conditions are met, the supposed "text-books' will proliferate, and no one will become established. The texts to which I refer have been almost uniformly 'orthodox', since, after all, it is a perceived 'orthodox9 demand, as generated in the academies, that they seek to meet. 'Orthodoxy' entails several things, which might easily be the subject of a lengthy treatise in the sociology of knowledge. I would here point to the following. It means, almost always, a failure to distinguish, and a failure, therefore, to explore the fundamentally differing logic of a recognisably capitalist development path and a recognisably socialist path. It means an absence of any historical content: 'orthodox' texts exist, most often, in an historical vacuum. It means, frequently, a rag-bag eclecticism. But even where this latter feature exists, even where the market is held to be ineffective and some form of planning or etatisme is advocated, even where some kind of egalitarianism is embraced, the dominant orthodoxy is held in the thrall of neo-classical economics. Despite occasional efforts to take over the citadel of orthodoxy in the name of the 'classical tradition'— such as by Lewis, and by some who followed in his trail— despite the interjection of 'structuralist' elements, the tutelage of neo-classical economics is plain to see. However insipid, watered-down, and unri-gorous the form, and whatever the accretions, modifications and distortions, the 'orthodox' texts are inhabited by the neo-classical spirit. And that is unmistakably so, despite the recent efforts of such marketeers as Deepak Lal to argue the contrary, in the name of a purer, more unrestrained, more extreme version of the neo-classical creed, which holds, with puritan zeal, that the market must be allowed to work, absolutely untrammelled, in poor countries, and that 'getting the prices right' is 'probably the single most effective means of alleviating poverty'.2 What 'orthodoxy' does not entail is political economy in any genuine sensed that is to say, Marxist political economy with class analysis at its centre: again notwithstanding the confused, ill-intormed and crude attempts of laissez faire ideologues, like Lal, to suggest that 'development economies' is 'tainted' by 'Marxist dogma'3 the apparent ignorance, in guch quarters, of what constitutes Marxist analysis, and the cheap gibes to which they resort, are sad to behold. It is a remarkable fact that as one surveys the various general