The article furthers the claim that many of the weaknesses of Marxist theory that constituted the starting point of critical approaches from Latin American dependency theory to world-systems analysis had been addressed in very similar terms as early as the 1900s. The focus is on intellectual debates in early twentieth-century Romania, especially as engendered by the theory of "forms without substance" as an alternative project of modernization for the periphery and the follow-up confrontation between the socialist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea and the Poporanist Constantin Stere on the issue of social and economic development.