Since, with rare exceptions, development economists disdain the work of anthropologists, they are, presumably, unaware that it was as long ago as the last decades of the nineteenth century that the notion of development by stages in the growth of society became outmoded. It is true that anthropologists subsequently had a hard struggle to free themselves from historicist or even evolutionary theories – thus Leach refers to: ‘Malinowski's persistent struggle to break out of the strait-jacket of nineteenth-century historicist theory without getting hopelessly bogged in empirical detail.’ Economists' similar dread of incomprehensible marshes of empirical detail is doubtless one of the main reasons why so many of them still cling to an historicist approach, though it is fairly commonly believed that there is simply no alternative.

This latter belief has been bluntly expressed by Lewis, who claims that when economists pass through phases of dissatisfaction with deductivism and feel a need to appeal to history, they find there are few relevant facts: ‘It is only for a very few countries and for very recent periods that any adequate quantity of historical records exists; and even when there are plenty of records we cannot always be certain exactly what happened.’ So Lewis is obliged to resort to such generalizations as that ‘Economic growth entails the slow penetration and eventual absorption of the subsistence sector by the capitalistic sector.’