My subject is an examination of the alternative economic and social systems which are open to Third World countries. In order to keep this discussion within reasonable bounds I must make certain assumptions. It is important that these should be clear before I begin : for if the assumptions are not shared, then much of what I say will be irrelevant. Fortunately, my assumptions are not very controversial— at least within Africa.

The Assumptions:

My first assumption is that any discussion about the appropriate economic and social organisation must, for the time being at least, be conducted within each nation state, and the decision must be made exclusively by the people of that nation.

Secondly, I take it to be axiomatic that all the peoples of the Third World desire to govern themselves, and want their countries to be completely independent of external control. This does not rule out the possibility of political or economic links between two or more countries; nor does it exclude a possible voluntary merger of sovereignties, provided that these things are agreed upon after discussions based on the equality of all participants.

Thirdly, I shall assume that, to everyone in the Third World, the present degree of poverty, and the general lack of economic development, is completely unacceptable. We have to increase our production of wealth so that we may increase the level of our collective and individual consumption.

My fourth and final assumption is that our struggles for independence were national struggles, involving the rights of all the inhabitants. We were not aiming to replace our alien rulers by local privileged elites, but to create societies which ensure human dignity and selfrespect for all.

The manifold operations with, and upon, a whole chain of representative texts which Jacques Derrida has been performing for more than a decade now, converge and conspire to outwit the continuing force of received metaphysical discourse. On every side, from Carnap to Heidegger, metaphysical discourse has been denounced and repudiated, but, as Derrida writes, ‘the way out of metaphysics is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it with cavalier ease long ago, and who are in general sunk in metaphysics by the whole weight of the discourse they claim to have disengaged from it’ (E. D., page 416). Just how difficult the break with metaphysical discourse must be it is Derrida’s purpose to demonstrate in a multiplicity of contexts. But since it turns out that our whole notion of ‘sign’ is systematically as well as historically implicated in the hegemony of metaphysical discourse, and that ‘sign and deity have the same place and the same time of birth’ (Grammatologie, page 25), one’s theological curiosity cannot fail to be aroused.

Put briefly, Derrida’s programme is to dislodge the last vestiges of idealist metaphysics from our field of discourse, in order to open the way to a ‘materialism’ like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the ‘innocence of becoming’.

The notion of ‘chance’ as a cause of the universe has fascinated many minds and nearly always it has been associated with its primeval beginnings. Milton, in Paradise Lost, especially Book II, line 890, et seq., paints a picture of the primeval chaos across which Satan is about to begin his journey from Hell to seek out Man and his earthly paradise.

‘Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce,
Strive here for mast’ry, and to battle bring
Their embryon atoms; they around the flag
Of each his faction, in their several clans,
Light-armed or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,
Swarm populous, unnumbered as the sands
Of Barca or Gyrene’s torrid soil,
Levied to side with warring winds, and poise
Their lighter wings. To whom these most adhere,
He rules a moment; Chaos umpire sits,
And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns; next him high arbiter
Chance governs all.

In a letter of November 1837 proclaiming the beauties of Agnese Schebest to his friend Rapp, Strauss declared ‘Her speech, too, is thoroughly noble and intelligent’. It is common for a man to note in others his own defects, and particularly common for a clergyman to notice such defects, but Strauss here seems to be admiring a virtue others thought to be his own. George Eliot, for example, in 1858 at her second meeting with Strauss remarked that he spoke ‘with very choice words, like a man strictly truthful in the use of language’. And it has become a commonplace of Strauss criticism in this century to praise the honest purpose of the Life of Jesus. This huge work, like the short attacks on the foxy Schenkel, was ‘directed against counterfeiting’. Strauss was ever striving to state the truth of a matter.

But is honesty enough? Was Strauss’ achievement merely, as Albert Schweitzer remarked, and Karl Barth approvingly quoted, ‘uncertain truthfulness?’ To the opening sentence of Schweitzer’s appraisal in the Quest, ‘Strauss must be loved in order to be understood’, Barth, in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, put the caution: ‘This can only mean that we must feel sympathy for him. Strauss is not a tragic figure’. He is not, perhaps, quite consistent enough in his statement of the truth to command our awed respect.

Barth’s explanation of the uneven quality of Strauss’ work was that he came across a great practical problem almost by accident, by a chance of mood. The problem was that of the relation of revelation and history. And Strauss himself admitted that he was not always ready to deal with it: I am too much dependent upon mood, and far too self-occupied’. His discovery and its disturbing effects made him ‘probably the best-known and influential theologian of the Nineteenth Century in non-theological and non-church circles’.

In 1966, Ian Gregor contributed to Essays in Criticism an essay entitled ‘What Kind of Fiction did Hardy Write?’ The simple yet arresting quality of the question posed in that title was significant on at least two grounds. First, Thomas Hardy had been for some years the subject of a good deal of critical writing, but much of it had dragged an aimless trail through the marshy terrain of Schopenhauer and the Immanent Will, fixated on peasants and pessimism. Hardy had been patronised, Freudianised, mythologised; his fiction was the lumbering vehicle of a home-spun cosmic gloom appropriate in its simplistic earnesty to a half-educated son of the soil. There had, of course, been some excellent Hardy criticism; but Professor Gregor’s enquiry about the form of his fiction opened a new, now frequently-acknowledged perspective. The question was significant, however, not only because it had been insufficiently raised before but because it seemed precisely the right question to pose about that particular author. We don’t commonly ask ourselves what kind of fiction Scott, Jane Austen or George Eliot wrote—not because those novelists don’t confront us with considerably complex issues of form and genre, but because we shape our questions about their artistic techniques within a fairly established sense of what sort of formal enterprise we are dealing with. But with Hardy the position is different. Pastoral, melodrama, social realism, scientific naturalism, myth, fable, tragedy, ideology: it isn’t only that various of these categories fit various of his novels, but that several of them can fit the same work. Maybe all developed literary forms are complex amalgams of other forms; but with Hardy the issue is at once unusually visible and troublingly elusive.