| Abstract: | Despite its short duration and its very small number of contributors, the Kenya debate - a debate on Kenya's economic development which began with Leys's revision (1978) of his own original and very influential thesis (1975) - is already marked by that mutual weariness and exasperation which usually precedes a general withdrawal from the fray. This increasingly exasperated tone derives in turn from the shift, which occurred very early in the debate, from disputation about facts and data, to a much more openended and inconclusive discussion of the relative significance and importance of different facts. It is argued that without an explication of the political implications of the various positions in conflict, it is just not logically possible to derive criteria of significance or importance to assign to the different 'facts' (in many cases the same 'facts') in dispute. Moreover, without both the use of such explicit criteria and the construction of explicit arguments to defend different criteria (which arguments will necessarily be political) there is simply no way of ending or even reducing the factual indeterminancy and mutual incomprehension which marks the debate at the moment. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |
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