The process of development is characterised by painful transformations in political, social and economic structure. However, in the process of gaining greater mathematical sophistication, economics has lost much of its capacity to understand the complexities of development. This has also hindered the consideration of some of the major questions in development: How do transformations take place? How do economic, social and political structures interact? How can conflict over development paths be managed? The book explores these questions through the work of some of the most original economists of the twentieth century, all of whom wrote explicitly or implicitly about the process of socio-economic development: Michal Kalecki, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, and Raul Prebisch.