Investigating L.-J. Lebret as a pioneer of human development thinking and global development ethics

Abstract

Louis-Joseph Lebret (1897–1966) was a progenitor and co-founder of ‘development ethics’ as a self-declared field of research, public conversation and activism. He comprehensively articulated the fundamental notion that development should be conceived in terms of human values and that it differs from economic growth. Although the notion that development is notmerely economic growth had been sketched earlier by, for example,Marx or J.S. Mill (see, e.g. Lebret 1961, 447), Lebret went considerably further. He was explicit, for example, that American levels of income were neither feasible nor desirable globally and that ‘One can live humanly with much less’ (1957, 91). He warned that the term ‘development’ was being used in a grossly confused fashion: it was equated to economic growth, which was being treated as magical and that supposedly should never end. To counteract this, decades before the Human Development Reports, Lebret reviewed living conditions globally, for example, grouping the world into ten zones and describing them using radar diagrams to show a wide range of value-guided ‘output’ indicators such as undernourishment, sickness, illiteracy and (in his list) per capita income; plus what he considered negative indicators, like suicide and atheism. He reviewed also ‘input’ indicators like agricultural and financial organization, physical infrastructure, levels of industrialization, levels of training, etc. (Lebret 1958, 1961). He was guided by a theory of being human that provided criteria for ‘development’ and that allowed him to speak of ‘développement authentique’ (1961, 75), improved human well-being (‘mieux-être humain’) and being more (‘plus-être humain’), as well as of being less. Lebret was the first Christian theorist to give priority to problems of economic development, argued his biographer Lydie Garreau (1997, 423). Hewasmotivated by the neglect of the life realities and suffering of themajority of humanity in the hegemonic economics and politics of his time. This ledhimbeyondconcerns for charity and ‘social’palliatives addedon to an unchanged economic system, as were common in Catholic social practice, to a stress on radically new national and global social compacts for human solidarity (e.g. Lebret 1959). His work evolved from study and activism in the fisheries sector, first in Brittany and thenmore widely around France and Europe in the 1930s; to regional, urban and community development planning in France and then in several Latin American countries, in the 1940s and 50s; to worldwide challenges of socio-economic development, from the