Uneven and combined development

Uneven and combined development (also known as "unequal and combined development", and similar to "uneven development") is a concept in Marxian political economy, Marxist sociology, political science and social geography. It refers to the different patterns of development within and between countries trading in the world economy, characterized by the coexistence of traditional and modern economic systems, as well as the coexistence of old and new political systems.

The idea was most famously used by Leon Trotsky in the early 20th century to analyze the possibilities for industrialization and political emancipation in the Russian Empire, and the likely future of the Tsarist regime. After 1905, the theory of uneven and combined development became the basis of the Trotsky's political perspective of permanent revolution. Trotsky rejected the idea that human society inevitably had to develop through a uni-linear sequence of necessary "stages" of modernization; instead, backward countries could adopt the most advanced knowledge and technology from other countries for the purpose of accelerated development, without the need to repeat all the preceding stages to get there.

In the 1990s and the early 21st century, the concept of uneven and combined development experienced an academic revival among Marxist scholars in fields such as development theory and economic geography. David Harvey endorsed the usefulness of this concept to understand the spatial development of global capitalism.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.