EducationObituaryAndre Gunder Frank
Prolific economist with a radical analysis of poverty and wealthAndre Gunder Frank, who has died aged 76 of cancer, was one of the most prolific and controversial development economists and sociologists of the postwar era. He was best known as an early exponent of dependency theory, which asserted that rich, developed countries gained from poor, under-developed countries so long as they remained in the international capitalist system. He wrote 40 books and nearly a thousand articles and other pieces.
Always ahead of his time, Frank stood tradition and received theory on their heads over a wide range of issues. Many of his analyses and predictions concerning the developing world have proved accurate: the persistence of poverty despite foreign investment and because of unmanageable debt servicing; the failures of national capitalism in developing countries and of Soviet-bloc and Chinese communism; and the negative effects of global capitalism.
He anticipated the reappearance of persistent structural economic crisis and imbalance on an international scale, and the ineffectiveness of Keynesian and fiscal stimulatory means to redress this; the polarising consequences of globalisation,giving rise to social movements for progressive change; and the simultaneous emergence of nationalist, ethnic and religious fundamentalist movements that may eventually undermine the democratic culture.
Central to his outlook was a rejection of Eurocentrism in favour of a humanocentric, world-historical perspective which views the west's global dominance as already passing.
Born in Berlin, Frank was the son of a pacifist novelist father, who sent him to a Swiss boarding school at the age of four to escape Nazi Germany. He joined his parents in Hollywood in 1941, going to high school there, and then in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The "Gunder" tag arose from a school jibe about his slowness compared to the Swedish runner Gundar Haag.
Frank became a Keynesian while studying at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, for his economics degree, which he gained in 1950, but by the end of his PhD (1957) at the University of Chicago, he had rebelled against his monetarist tutor Milton Friedman, and indeed against all development thinking of US origin. He rejected mainstream economics in favour of an "equity before efficiency" approach, focusing on the importance of social and political factors.
An early paper established the concept of "general productivity" (later known as "total productivity") and its centrality to measuring Human Capital And Economic Growth (1960). It was the 1967 publication of his essay The Sociology Of Development And Under-development Of Sociology and his first book, Capitalism And Underdevelopment In Latin America (also 1967), that catapulted him to international fame.
In 1960, he visited Cuba and then went on to Ghana and Guinea. He held posts at the University of Brasilia (1962-65) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City (1965-66), before becoming professor of sociology at the University of Chile, Santiago (1968-73).
Chile was the homeland of Frank's first wife, Marta Fuentes, whom he had married in 1962, and who shared his passion for social justice. His ideas started coming into favour after Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970, though when Frank, already persona non grata in the US for his support of the Cuban revolution, arrived in 1968, Allende, then president of the senate, had to meet him at the airport to prevent him being deported.
Following General Pinochet's military coup in 1973, Frank became a political exile again, this time returning to Berlin. He dedicated the next two decades to analysing the global crisis and the failures of neo-liberalism and Reagan-omics, with posts at the Max Planck Institute, Bavaria (1973-78), the University of East Anglia (1978-83), and the University of Amsterdam (1981-94).
From 1972, he turned increasingly to analysis of the global crisis of capital accumulation, addressing the disastrous onset of market ideology and the return of "efficiency before equity" in theory and policy. By then, he felt that development itself had "all but disappeared" from discussion, being replaced by "only economic or debt crisis management".
In the book he and I wrote together, The World System: Five Hundred Years Or Five Thousand? (1993), Frank questioned the usefulness of terms such as capitalism, feudalism or socialism, arguing that "too many big patterns in world history appear to transcend or persist despite all apparent alterations in the mode of production". One instance of such a pattern was the general shift in economic power from east to west, and back again, a subject addressed in Frank's penultimate and perhaps best work, ReOrient (1998).
This book, and its unfinished sequel, ReOrient The 19th Century, explored the historical method in new directions, again challenging received theory about the rise of the west and the supposed role of the market and free trade, as opposed to coercion and imperialism.
Despite the many causes for pessimism, Frank maintained that the disadvantaged of the world would act to protect their lives and interests. To the end, he believed that change for the better was possible. He was principled and uncompromising. Above all, he was courageous, and never afraid to be unpopular. He gave people the answers they needed to hear, not the answers they wanted to hear.
He is survived by his third wife, Alison, and by his sons, Paul and Miguel, from his marriage to Marta, who died in 1993.
ยท Andre Gunder Frank (Andreas Frank), economist and sociologist, born February 24 1929; died April 23 2005
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKaVrMBwfo9pbGilka58cYCOoKyaqpSerq%2B7waKrrpminrK0es6boK2tkae2pr%2BQ