Revisiting the History of Development Theories

The article reconstructs the debate on economic development since the Second World War until today. For that, connects to the value of progress and wealth production that won place in previous centuries. It reviews the factors that made the development discourse emerge, and then, the various theories that surfaced later: modernization paradigm, industrialist socialism, the Economic Commission for Latin America (Cepal), dualism, dependency theory, social approaches, environmentalist's visions, human scale development, import substitution, neo-liberalism, neo-structuralism, ethnic development, human capital, human development, anti-development, and others. These theories or approaches are seen in terms of the inflections that marks respect of earlier times, as of historical circumstances that partly explain its occurrence. The article concludes by proposing a position on the state and future of the field of development studies in relation to the challenges of today's society. The thesis of the article is that theoretical and policy reference of the development has been and is a contested concept, embedded in history.