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Volume 2, Review 4, 1996
Sing C. Chew and Robert A. Denemark, eds. THE UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF
DEVELOPMENT: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF ANDRE GUNDER FRANK. Thousand
Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1996. xv+427 pp. ISBN 0-
8039-72601, $58.00 (hardcover); ISBN 0-8039-7261-X, $27.95
(paperback).
Reviewed by
Stephen K. Sanderson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana,
Pennsylvania, USA
v. 8/12/96
This book belongs to a disappearing genre in today's
publishing world, a Festschrift for a distinguished scholar. It
is extremely difficult to get such books published today, I am
told, because of the economics of publishing. It is therefore to
the credit of the editors of this volume that they were able to
convince a respected publisher to undertake its publication.
Perhaps the publisher felt that this Festschrift would provoke
widespread interest because of the worldwide fame of its subject,
Andre Gunder Frank, one of the most fertile minds and productive
social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century.
The editors of this volume, Sing Chew and Robert Denemark, have
assembled Frank's complete bibliography at the end of the book,
and the numbers are staggering: a total of 880 items appearing in
27 different languages, which breaks down into 36 books in 126
different editions, approximately 600 versions of more than 350
different articles in periodicals, and 158 chapters in 134
collections.
Chew and Denemark have organized their volume into four major
sections, each corresponding to a major facet of Frank's work, and
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many distinguished scholars have contributed the dozen and a half
essays. In addition to these essays, there is an introduction by
the editors, as well as a very interesting and highly informative
intellectual autobiography contributed by Frank. In his autobiographical
sketch, Frank traces out his life beginning with his family's emigration
from Germany in 1933, when he was four years old, and its eventual
settlement in the United States. From there we learn of his
attendance at Ann Arbor, Michigan, high school, his undergraduate
studies at Swarthmore, and his graduate work in economics at the
University of Chicago.
Then we follow him to Latin America, where his dependency theory
was born, and then back to Europe, first to Berlin, and then on to
teaching posts in England and Amsterdam.
Now retired from the University of Amsterdam, he lives in Toronto
and devotes himself primarily to studying the economic evolution
of what he is calling his "5,000-year world system."
Part I, "On Development and Underdevelopment," contains
essays by Samir Amin, Eric Wolf, Philip Wagner, Otto Kreye, and
Herb Addo. Although a close friend and colleague of Frank's, Amin
does not hesitate to criticize him on a number of counts. For
example, he takes issue with Frank's 5,000-year world system and
its obliteration of the distinction among modes of production,
calling it "fundamentally erroneous and sterile" (p. 64). In this
context he asks whether, "if polarization has characterized the
world system for five thousand years, it must, so to speak, be the
consequence of some anthropological characteristics of the human
species transcending social formations" (p. 66). This seems to me
one of the most critical questions to ask of Frank's recent work,
and I would argue that the answer is yes. I wonder to what extent
Frank recognizes this extremely important implication of his work.
Kreye's essay, focusing on Frank's work on the debt crisis of the
Third World countries, declares that, contrary to much recent
argument, this crisis has not abated and in some ways has gotten
worse. Addo's contribution is built largely around the argument
that "developmentalism" -- which he doesn't really define, but by
which he seems to mean a package of ideas stressing the linear,
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progressive, and universal nature of history, and thus the
evolutionary imitation of the First World by the Third World -- is
a Eurocentric hoax and delusion. He also discusses some of
Frank's reversals of opinion, such as his abandonment of the idea
that delinking from the world-system is a possibility for Third
World countries, or his abandonment of all optimism for a
socialist transcendence of the capitalist world-system. Like
Amin, he is also critical of Frank's recent work, arguing that his
5,000-year world system is a "cruel joke." Addo concludes with
Frank, though, that we must recognize that full-scale industrial
development is open only to a few nations, an argument that seems
to me quite right. That being the case, the "future should be
open to allow in the serious consideration of multiple cultural
routes to modernity" (p. 145).
Part II, on peripheral regions, includes essays by Theotonio
Dos Santos, George Aseniero, and Samir Amin once again. Dos
Santos's essay is basically a sketch of the history of Latin
American developmental efforts, especially import substitution
industrialization. It is a useful essay, although it repeats
ideas likely to be very familiar to development specialists.
Aseniero's essay also covers very familiar ground, in this case in
regard to economic development in East Asia. He discusses, for
example, Japan's historical role in laying the foundations for
economic development in its two colonies, Korea and Taiwan, and
the role of U.S. aid and loans to these countries in their
developmental spurt since the 1950s. All this is familiar from
the work of Bruce Cumings and many other scholars. But Aseniero
also has a few new things to say. He sees Southeast Asian
countries such as Thailand as soon to be the "New NICs," and
regards China, the world's fastest growing economy in the last
decade and a half, as the nation that will spell the future of the
Pacific Rim. He also suggests, sensibly in my view, that on a
political level the People's Republic of China will disintegrate
as the result of its increasing incorporation into the capitalist
world-economy. Amin's second essay is devoted to the growing
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tragedy of Africa, the "Fourth World." In Frank's words, Amin's
argument is that the lemon was sucked dry and then discarded.
Africa's mode of incorporation into the world-economy was such
that an agricultural revolution was retarded for a century, and no
significant local bourgeoisie had a chance to form. Africa thus
continued to be the focus of the production of primary products at
the time that much of the rest of the Third World was beginning to
industrialize. Africa is now of little use to the First World, so
it has been almost entirely marginalized.
The third section of the book devotes itself to long-term
historical change, thus embracing Frank's most recent work.
William McNeill contributes an essay, originally published as the
preface to the Frank- and Gills-edited collection, THE WORLD
SYSTEM: FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OR FIVE THOUSAND?, in which he
indicates strong support for Frank's notion that the role of
economic exchange was a critical stimulus to developmental trends
in world history. However, he wants to make networks of economic
exchange dependent on even larger networks, what he calls
"communication nets." Barry Gills' essay in this section, "The
Continuity Thesis in World Development," is one of the best in the
book, and serves as an excellent summary of his work with Frank on
the 5,000-year world system. The central idea in this work is
that the ceaseless accumulation of capital can be dated to 5,000
rather than 500 years ago and that this process is the key
developmental process of world history. Gills and Frank are
actually making a kind of evolutionary argument in which capital
accumulation is the driving engine not only of economic evolution,
but of social evolution in general. What Gills and Frank have
done is, essentially, to "out-Wallerstein" Wallerstein. In the
1970s Immanuel Wallerstein changed the thinking of a great many of
us by insisting that capitalism did not develop in the late
eighteenth century, but arose as early as the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. As bold as this claim was in 1974 (when
volume one of THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM appeared), for Gills and
Frank it is not nearly bold enough. They want to go much further
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back in time and farther out in space to locate the basic elements
of capitalist exchange.
Gills and Frank are certainly on to something, and they make
an excellent case for the unjustified neglect of "capitalistic"
economic processes throughout world history. In his essay in Part
III, Christopher Chase-Dunn argues that Frank's work on the 5,000-
year world system represents "the most significant turn that
Frank's thinking has ever taken" and "that the inclusion of a much
greater time depth in world system analysis has the potential to
generate a new and much more powerful theory of historical
evolution" (p. 246). I couldn't agree more. Gills and Frank may
go too far in seeing capital accumulation as THE central
developmental process of world history, but that it is A central
process is becoming clearer and clearer. But we must be cautious.
As Chase-Dunn points out, processes of commodification were
important in the ancient and medieval worlds, but they were not
DOMINANT in those worlds, having become so only since the
sixteenth century. And this points up the essential difference
between Chase-Dunn's world system approach and that of Gills and
Frank: Chase-Dunn wants to retain the idea of modes of production,
whereas Gills and Frank want to abandon it as meaningless, and
Chase-Dunn thus wants to theorize historical transitions between
modes of production, an activity deemed worthless by Gills and
Frank. And this difference has an important consequence: with
his collaborator Thomas Hall, Chase-Dunn has engaged in a
systematic comparative analysis of modes of production, a route
completely closed off to Gills and Frank. Only time will tell who
is right in this debate, but it is extremely difficult to believe
that the economic processes of the past 500 years are just
quantitative extensions of processes that have gone on for
thousands of years. As Chase-Dunn points out, Frank seems to have
moved "toward a timeless and endless model of historical
repetition. Gunder Frank has become a Hindu" (p. 248).
The final essay in Part III breaks significantly from the
others. This essay, by Albert Bergesen, sets forth a provocative
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argument for the existence of art cycles that run parallel to
hegemonic cycles in the modern world-system. Bergesen claims that
during periods of hegemony art tends toward abstract, classic, and
idealized forms because these forms express the order, balance,
and symmetry created by a hegemon. By contrast, during periods of
interstate rivalry, art turns toward realism and emphasizes the
particular and the many. Bergesen actually moves on to formulate
the notion of a complete artistic cycle that passes through four
stages: hegemony, hegemonic decline, interstate rivalry, and
hegemonic ascent. He outlines three basic artistic cycles from
1500 to the present, drawing connections between particular
artistic forms and the stage of the hegemonic cycle. I found this
analysis extremely interesting and provocative, but there are
problems that cannot be overlooked. First of all, the connection
between economic stages and artistic forms is very loose. For
example, Bergesen relates the Rococo period (1700-1750) to British
hegemonic ascent, but was Britain ascending to hegemony this
early? A second problem concerns Bergesen's identification of
hegemonic powers. He completely ignores the widely-regarded Dutch
hegemony of the seventeenth century, treating this period as one
of interstate rivalry, and substituting instead the Hapsburg
Empire as the first hegemon. Bergesen tells us that he is among
those who regard the Dutch as never having been hegemonic, but he
provides no explanation or justification for his view.
The final section of essays concerns social movements and
social justice. There is an essay by Gerrit Huizer, one by Pat
Lauderdale on Frank as a "political deviant," another on women's
interests by Virginia Vargas, and a concluding essay by Immanuel
Wallerstein suggesting some remedies for underdevelopment. I
found Wallerstein's essay the most interesting of these final
four. Here Wallerstein tries to suggest short-run, middle-run,
and long-run strategies for transforming the current world-system
into something else.
As we all know, editing a collection can be a difficult task,
and when that collection is a Festschrift the task is usually even
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more difficult. The biggest problem in any collection is getting the essays to cohere into a single whole, and when the collection is honorary in nature the problem is not only attaining integration, but also getting the essays to have real intellectual substance. The editors of this volume have succeeded admirably in achieving both ends. The book is very intelligently organized, as each major section is built around a major dimension of Frank's work. And most of the contributions have something of real substance to say. Who should read this book? All those concerned with the modern world-system, with the strikingly different levels of economic development within that system, and with the general problem of long-term historical change that preceded the formation of the world-system that is called modern. I am one such person, and I found reading the book a real pleasure. I know there are many other such persons out there, and they should read it too. [Page 7]
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