64 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the Third World (itself a creation of the Cold War and not of the aid lobby as Bauer suggests) in the establishment of anti-communist bases, and in the securing of markets for Western products. This being so, the cost to the taxpayer of aid programmes about which Bauer writes so movingly would have been a small price to pay for any Westeren government. And for this reason, some at least of Lord Bauer's own friends in industry and government are likely in the end to find his anti-aid fulminations a trifle tedious, if not entirely irrelevant. Discussions of colonial history allow Bauer to inflict his particular intellectual predilections on the past. He claims that the impact of imperialism was unequivocably progressive on the economies of subject nations, ignoring that a cogent case can be and has been made for the opposite view, and that anyway the net impact of the imperial experience is a matter of ongoing historial controversy.13 This leads him to suggest, in the grand manner of the nineteenth century moralist, that the West has no case to answer for since it presumably civilised the colonies, and that feelings of restitution—which might conceivably motivate an aid-giver—are therefore completely out of place. It is in this vein also that he writes dismissively (in a chapter entitled, ^Broadcasting the Liberal Death Wish") about Ali Mazrui's highly regarded 1979 BBC Reith Lectures. In an essay literally brimful of barbed phrases, interesting suggestions to emerge include the following: that condemnation of the Atlantic slave trade is improper without a mention of the "even more cruel" Arab slave trade, that the descriptions of the martyrdom of young blacks in Sharpeville and Soweto at the hands of the racist South African regime are 'distorted' unless they are compared with the Ibo massacres in Nigeria in 1966 and other fratricidal wars within African states, that in Africa as in the Third World "the level of economic achievement declines with the distance from the impact of Western commercial contact9^ and so on, ad nauseam. For once at least the veneer of respectability that usually cloaks Bauer's writings seems to have worn off, and the call of prejudice— frequently latent—has proved too strong. VI But all said and done, Bauer is well worth the read—even if, as lan Little noted in an old review, his writings at times resemble "the obvious out-pourings of a political adolescent with an economic idee fixe".14 He is worth reading if only because of his uniqueness: no other economist, certainly none other writing in the field of development, revels to this extent in his own anachronism; no one else has espoused so consistently the values of a bygone age^ blithely oblivious of the concerns and needs of a changing world; never indeed has Victorian morality been so sternly preached in economics from the pulpit of academia. So I conclude by recommending this grand attempt at challenging