While European reconstruction after World War II followed the pluralistic
Marshall Plan that grounded social order in individual interests and
interdependence, the roots of dirigiste planning in South Asia, as in the rest
of the Third World, lie mainly in the line of deterministic theories represented
by Positivism and Marxism. Despite a national commitment to dirigiste planning,
however, India retains substantial interstitial pluralism--pluralism within an
overall centralized system--that varies from state to state. This variation is
directly reflected in interstate variations in development success.
Pragmatic theory, such as that underlying the Marshall Plan, is committed to
seeing indigenous thought in its own terms and provides a far