The Anti-politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho

By James Ferguson

Cambridge University Press 1990

First edition but it has been read and has some wear as per photos.

The book is a case study of development in the Thaba-Tseka district of Lesotho during the period 1975 to 1984. It looks at the workings of the development industry in the country and in particular at one development project. The book looks at the way specific ideas about development are generated and deployed by development agencies, and the effects of these ideas in the outcome of the schemes.

Review: The most penetrating and insightful case study of `development discourse’ I’ve encountered. Ferguson not only shows the bureaucratic logic of the misrepresentation of Lesotho but the pernicious political and economic consequences of this misrepresentation. It would be hard to teach any course on third world development without taking Ferguson’s original argument into account. — James C. Scott, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science Yale University

“Through a detailed case study of the Thaba-Tseka Development Project in Lesotho over the period 1975 to 1984, Ferguson exposes the discourse and the practice of 'development' to a highly explicit and critical scrutiny. . . . The importance of Ferguson's book is that it exerts a decisive wrench away from evaluation of the success or failure of development projects in their own terms and towards an analysis of what development does, who does it, and whom it actually benefits.” --Colin Murray, Man