125

Latin American Development Theories RevisitedA Participant Review

byAndre Gunder Frank

Bjorn Hettne Development Theory and the Three Worlds. (London: Longman/New York: Wiley, 1990) 296 pp.

Diana Hunt Economic Theories of Development: An Analysis of CompetingParadigms. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) 363 pp.

Cristóbal Kay Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevel-opment. (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) 294 pp.

Jorge Larrain Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism, andDependency. (London: Polity Press, 1989) 252 pp.

David Lehmann Democracy and Development in Latin America: Econom-ics, Politics, and Religion in the Postwar Period. (London: Polity Press,1990) 234 pp.

My intention here is not so much to review the above-listed books ondevelopment theory as to compare, classify, and situate them in the contextof recent history and theory. To do so, I shall distinguish the following rubrics:their treatment of history, their topical coverage, their classification oftheories and theorists, and the authors’ as well as my own critiques andevaluations of the development theories. In conclusion, I ask what all theseportend for future development.

Andre Gunder Frank is a professor of development economics and social sciences at theUniversity of Amsterdam. Frank, a citizen of Germany, received his Ph.D. in economics at theUniversity of Chicago. He has taught in departments of anthropology, economics, history,political science, and sociology at universities in Europe, North America, and Latin America.His recent work has been in the fields of world system history, contemporary internationalpolitical economy, and social movements. His early work was primarily on dependence and the&dquo;development of underdevelopment.&dquo;In addition to writing three of the books reviewed here, my friends Bjorn Hettne, David Lehmann,and Crist6bal Kay kindly also made valuable incisive comments on a draft of this essay. So didMarta Fuentes and Kunibert Raffer.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 73, Vol.19 No. 2, Spring 1992,125-1390 1992 Latin American Perspectives

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HISTORY

All five authors review the history of development theory since 1945.Hunt and especially Larrain also examine its history before 1945, but bothconfine themselves to development theory itself. Hettne, Kay, and Lehmannconfine themselves to the period since World War II. They make some effortto place and interpret development theory within the historical context thatgave rise to it. Hettne cites his compatriot Gunnar Myrdal’s observation thatmajor developments in economic thought have always been responses tochanging political conditions and opportunities. Kay and Lehmann make aneffort to demonstrate how these changing circumstances gave rise to changesin development theory, but they do not go far enough. This is a task that Ihave myself undertaken elsewhere, in an autobiographical vein (Frank,1991), and Celso Furtado, at least, has also recently written autobiographicalreflections on this period. We will occasionally return to this matter below.In the meantime, it may be appropriate to ask what recent changes in politicalconditions and opportunities have given rise to this spate of books ondevelopment theory. I have no obvious answer.

TOPICAL COVERAGE

These books, it should be stressed at the outset, are about economic, social,and political development theory, not about development economics. 0evel-opment economics is a branch of economics that is applied to problems ofdevelopment. Academic and practicing neoclassical and Keynesian econo-mists have scarcely recognized, much less accepted, the &dquo;developmenttheories&dquo; under review here as part of economics. They do not teach themand scarcely include them in their own reviews of &dquo;the rise and decline&dquo; ofdevelopment economics. For instance, The State of DevelopmentEconomics(Ranis and Schultz, 1988) includes (by noblesse oblige?) only one of thetheorists under review here, Raul Prebisch, who is by far the most establish-ment oriented theorist of them. According to the index of Economic Devel-opment : Theory, Policy and International Relations, published under theauspices of the establishment’s Twentieth Century Fund (Little, 1982),Prebisch is mentioned on all of 9, Frank on 2, Cardoso on 1, and the otherson none of this book’s 452 pages of review of the state of the art. If some ofthese latter and their theories have invaded Western academia, then they havedone so in and through departments of sociology and other social sciences,not through the economists’ departments of unblemished orthodoxy.

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TABLE 1

Main Topics Covered in Five Books on Development Theory

NOTE: Because the authors sometimes refer to essentially the same subject matter underdifferent names, this tabulation does the same. The amount of attention devoted to the various

topics of course differs from one book to another. Moreover, some authors also discuss othertopics; thus Hettne especially is wider-ranging (as per his title, which refers to &dquo;Three Worlds&dquo;).

Because the five books reviewed here differ in their treatment of history,they also differ in their coverage of topics (Table 1). Hunt, Larrain, and tosome extent Hettne include more &dquo;classical&dquo; development theory. Kay andespecially Lehmann extend their coverage to more recent developments.They all overlap in their coverage of Economic Commission for LatinAmerica (ECLA) structuralism and dependence, but they treat it and classifyits authors rather differently.

Hunt begins with a general discussion of theoretical paradigms. Afterthat, she devotes three chapters to theoretical heritage and to classical andKeynesian theories. Then she goes on to the topics covered by all five books,beginning with ECLA structuralism. Larrain does something similar from amore Marxist perspective; he interposes a chapter on colonialism and impe-rialism before proceeding to structuralism. Hettne opens with two chapterson crisis and Eurocentrism in development thinking and then proceeds to the

128

voices from the Third World. Kay and Lehmann begin there during thepostwar era in Latin America.

VARIETIES AND CLASSIFICATION OF THEORIES/THEORISTS

The common focus of attention among all five books is Latin Americantheories of development and underdevelopment. The authors distinguishamong varieties of the dependency approach. Hettne, for instance, dis-

tinguishes under this heading (pp. 89-91) six &dquo;theoretical dimensions&dquo;:holism versus particularism, external versus internal causal factors, sociopo-litical versus economic analysis, sectoral/regional versus class contradic-tions, underdevelopment versus dependent development, and voluntarismversus determinism. Other authors make similar distinctions and sometimesothers that are to their particular liking.

The cast of characters that these books review varies in range, but it hasa common core in the best-known ECLA structuralists and dependentistas.Among the former, not surprisingly, Prebisch stands out and is followed byFurtado as a distant second most-mentioned structuralist. According to theirindices, Prebisch appears on 32 pages of Kay, 21 pages of Hunt, 9 pages ofLehmann, 7 pages of Larrain, and 4 pages of Hettne. The dependentistasreceive more attention. Among them, according to the books’ indices, AndreGunder Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardoso are the most cited theoristsreviewed: on 49 and 49 pages respectively (or 1 page in 5) of Kay, on 47 andon 38 (also 1 page in 5 or 6) of Larrain, on 23 and 9 of Hunt, and on 15 and11 of Hettne. Only Lehmann gives less attention to us than to the structural-ists, mentioning Cardoso and Frank each on 4 pages.

Some authors discuss the history and &dquo;origins of the dependency school&dquo;(Hettne, p. 82) or &dquo;the origins of dependency analyses&dquo; (Hunt, p. 198). In sodoing, they occasionally posit lines of influence among dependentistas,which seem to me curious, to say the least. Depending on whom they includeor exclude, the originators are identified as Prebisch, Baran, Frank, orCardoso. There is little dispute about the first two. Hunt and Larrain devotemore attention to the history of development theory and therefore also toBaran. Either Cardoso or Frank is dubbed the real father of real dependencytheory, and there is more dispute about the &dquo;originality&dquo; of these two,although perhaps I am overly sensitive to that! Moreover, Larrain (pp. 112,118, 125) calls dos Santos, Marini, and Gonzdlez Casanova &dquo;followers ofFrank.&dquo; I and perhaps they would agree about dos Santos and Marini (bothfriends and colleagues of mine since the University of Brasilia in 1963), but

129

neither Gonzdlez Casanova nor I would agree to all of this statement with

regard to him. Perhaps he was a later convert to dependence theory, but hewas a pioneer and my guide on internal colonialism. In his chapter on internalcolonialism, Kay discusses Gonzdlez Casanova, Stavenhagen, and Frank butrightly gives pride of place to the first two.

There are many dangers if not fallacies in post hoc attribution of earlylines of influence, particularly for the later historians, who were neitherparticipants in nor contemporary observers of the development of the theoriesand theorists they discuss. In this regard, a brief look back by a participantmay not be out of place. At a panel held at the 6th Congress of the BrazilianAnthropological Association in Sdo Paulo in 1963, I criticized my fellowpanel member Cardoso for his lack of a dependency perspective. Nonethe-less, when Fernando Henrique arrived in Chile as an exile from the militarycoup in Brazil in 1964, I received him at the airport and earned, he says, hiseverlasting gratitude. This was while I was writing my &dquo;Development ofUnderdevelopment in Chile.&dquo; This chapter was then read and critiqued byEnzo Faletto, as I later duly acknowledged in the preface of my Capitalismand Underdevelopment in Latin America. All this was long before he andCardoso began to work on their Dependence and Development in LatinAmerica (Cardoso and Faletto,1979, Spanish original in 1969) at the InstitutoLatinoamericano para Planificaci6n Econ6mica y Social (Latin AmericanInstitute for Economic and Social Planning-ILPES) in Santiago. However,we do not claim influence over the other(s). So why do nonparticipantobservers try to attribute it?

The five authors classify and evaluate structuralist and dependency theo-rists and their theories rather differently. They conclude by evaluating thesetheorists and theories differently, as we will see below. However, our fiveauthors also label and classify the theorists and their theories differently tobegin with. I find this labelling and pigeon-holing particularly problematic,if only because I find myself particularly difficult to place. Only Lehmann,I think to his credit, simply takes people for what they are and disdains suchmisleading classifications. I reproduce their classification here as best I can(see Table 2).

There is agreement on dubbing the main ECLA people structuralists,except that Larrain calls Prebisch something of a modernizationist as well.Cardoso and Faletto, however, appear under both structuralist and depen-dentista labels. Perhaps there is some justification for this in that they wrotetheir Dependence and Development at ECLA’s ILPES. Moreover, as one ofour authors stresses, they did entitle their book &dquo;development&dquo; and not&dquo;underdevelopment.&dquo; The other main dependentistas, however, appear all

130

TABLE 2

Classification of Development Theories/Theorists by Various Authors

NOTE: Abbreviations are as follows: Lar, Larrain; Het, Hettne; Hnt, Hunt; Ref, reformist; Mx,Marxist; Neo-Mx, neo-Marxist; Non-Mx, non-Marxist.

over the lot. They are categorized according to each of the five author’s owntheoretical, that is political or ideological, taste. To begin with, the authorsset up different categories: &dquo;Reformist&dquo; and &dquo;non-Marxist&dquo; dependentistasseem to be similar if not the same, and of course the &dquo;non-Marxist&dquo; categorymakes sense only by reference to a &dquo;Marxist&dquo; one and then only if the authorregards these categories and distinctions as important in their own right. Tocomplicate matters still more, Hunt insists on the further distinction between(real orthodox) Marxism and (not really kosher) neo-Marxism. Thus Frank,Marini, and dos Santos are variously labeled non-Marxist, Marxist, andneo-Marxist. In this case-indeed probably in all cases-the label pigeon-holes the author himself much more than the &dquo;theorist.&dquo; Thus, Hunt deniesmy Marxism and recalls that I myself have long ago claimed not to be aMarxist. She does not recall, however, that in the same breath or sentence Ialso said that I am not a non- or anti-Marxist. The point is that these categoriesobscure more than they clarify.

131

This point may be further illustrated through participant observation.Theotonio dos Santos and I are always put in the same bag, but theseclassifiers may not know our agreements and disagreements very well. Wehave been friends and, on and off, colleagues since 1963. (We were at theUniversity of Brasilia together in Jango Goulart times and later at the Centrode Estudios Socioecon6micos in Chile in Allende times.) In 1963, when Iwrote my first dependentista things in Brazil, Theotonio had no such ideas.He later acquired and developed them on his own. However, Theotoniocriticized my theory as &dquo;functionalist&dquo; and my politics as unrealistic. On theother hand, I thought of my ideas as much more &dquo;revolutionary&dquo; than his andregarded him, his writings, and his political practice as consistently reformist.Another case is related in my autobiographical essay The Underdevelopmentof Development (1991). In this regard, I remember my argument withOsvaldo Sunkel, another CEPAL (ECLA) stalwart with first structuralist andthen dependence positions. Osvaldo insisted (in the late 1960s) that his andmy positions were the same, and I insisted that they were not. The irony isthat after repeated other meetings between us, two decades later Osvaldo nowclaims that we no longer share our by now changed views, and I think thatwe now do.

Anibal Quijano and I have been friends since 1962 and were neighbors inChile in 1968. We have had similar and shifting agreements and disagree-ments. So have Cardoso and I since 1963, which we last reviewed and revisedtogether in 1990. I could go on and on in the same vein.

To repeat, these classifications say much more about the authors them-selves than they do about the theorists they (mis)classify. In particular, theclassification reveals something about Jorge Larrain. He takes Marxism,including his own, seriously and therefore classifies none of the above, exceptperhaps Warren, as a Marxist.

For some of these authors there is even doubt about who is a dependentista.Kay (p. 156) calls me &dquo;a reluctant and short-lived dependentista&dquo; who stoodby dependence only from about 1970 to 1972. Commenting on a draft of thisessay, Kay writes, &dquo;My main point is that retrospectively it is more appropri-ate to view your work within the world-system theory. In this sense my phraseis actually meant as a compliment.&dquo; Kunibert Raffer comments in turn, &dquo;I donot see why one should split dependencia and World System Analysis in theway he [Kay] does, i.e., opposing one to the other. In my view they are bothpart of the same line of thought.&dquo; I agree with Raffer. Moreover, in 1965 Iwrote that &dquo;if we are to understand the Latin American problematique wemust begin with the world system that creates it and go outside the self-imposed optical and mental illusion of the Ibero-American or national frame&dquo;

132

(Frank, 1969: 231). In the 1965 preface to my Capitalism and Underdevel-opment, I also referred to &dquo;the capitalist system on an integrated world scale&dquo;(1967: xi).

For this reason and for others, I think that Kay’s assessment is not welltaken. My 1963 manuscript was already entirely on dependence in the worldsystem. Dependence was the red thread running through my books writtenin the mid-1960s. Dependence defined my never published reader on under-development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which I edited with SaidShah in 1967-1969 (summarized in Frank, 1984); the reference, of course,was to dependence within the world capitalist system. The word &dquo;depen-dence&dquo; was part of the title of my book with Cockcroft and Johnson, done inthe mid- to late 1960s but not published in Spanish until 1970 (see Cockcroft,Frank, and Johnson, 1972). Dependence also appeared in the title of myLumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment: Dependence, Class and Politicsin Latin America (1972), written in 1968-1969 and firstpublished in Spanishin 1970. Incidentally, this book also dealt with differences in &dquo;internal&dquo; classand politics! Moreover, part of my allocution in 1972 was &dquo;Long live

dependence and the class struggle!&dquo; I meant, of course, that the fact of

dependence would have a long life, and it has in the 1980s debt crisis, witha vengeance. But in the 1970s, many wrote untimely obituaries for it. As tothe &dquo;class struggle,&dquo; I was both right and wrong: Right in that it was to becomemore acute in the growing world economic crisis, wrong in that the exploitedwould challenge the exploiters more; it turned out the other way around. Byearly 1974, I was predicting that military regimes and states of emergencywould become the order of the day all over the Third World (see Frank,1981 a), and, unfortunately, I was right (see Frank, 1981b).

CRITIQUES AND EVALUATIONS

Each of the five authors also offers critiques and evaluations of structur-alism and especially of dependence theory. Kay and Larrain devote a chapteror special section to critiques and evaluation. They often also review thecritiques of other writers (mainly from the North) as well as their own. Otherauthors present their own critical evaluations along the way. Structuralism isexamined critically by all five, but most of their critique is reserved for anddirected at dependence.

Kay sets out seven &dquo;shortcomings of structuralism and dependence anal-ysis&dquo; : excessive emphasis on terms of trade and unequal exchange and onunderdevelopment as caused by dependence, idealist visions of the (espe-

133

cially socialist) state, inadequate accounting for the constraints and costs ofrevolution, inadequate commitment to civil society, insufficient microlevelstudies, and failure to consider a variety of capitalist and socialist paths ofdevelopment.

Larrain is less catholic and more Marxist. In a chapter entitled &dquo;Depen-dency and Historical Materialism&dquo; he examines 15 differences betweenMarxism and dependence theory. In a brief and perhaps inadequate summary,he consider dependence theory: (1) tautological; (2) theoretically weak, notrooted in any deductive theory; (3) contradictory; (4) ideologically determin-ist ; (5) a form of &dquo;Third Worldist&dquo; ideology; (6) lacking a proper theorizationof capitalism; (7) static, economistic, and mechanistic; (8) incorrect in itsassumption of the monolithic structure of imperialism; (9) stagnationist; (10)incorrect in its explanation of underdevelopment in terms of the draining ofsurplus; (11) dubious in its approval of socialism; (12) tied to nationalcapitalism; (13) vitiated by lack of empirical evidence or empirical fallacy;(14) ideologically negative with respect to Marxism; and (15) functionalistand teleological. To my mind, of the five authors Larrain provides the mostrigorous and consistent examination of these theories. However, both hisexposition and his evaluation are vitiated by his own narrow conception ofand commitment to Marxism. He regards this as his strength; I regard it ashis weakness.

Lehmann is the least wedded to any preconceived notion or schema.Instead of evaluating one theory in terms of another, he examines his cast ofcharacters as they cross the stage of history. If he evaluates them at all, hedoes so against the &dquo;empirical&dquo; test of history itself. All of the authors makesome reference to &dquo;empirical&dquo; evaluation of dependence theory, but only Kayseems even to be aware of the American &dquo;school&dquo; that puts dependencetheory and its predictions to empirical and statistical tests. Perhaps that is justas well; for those who like them, these tests tend to confirm both the existenceof dependence and the propositions of its &dquo;theory,&dquo; whereas for those whodon’t, they disconfirm even the existence of dependence!

In the evaluations of the dependentistas, by and large Cardoso comes offbest. The authors like it that Cardoso allows for growth or &dquo;development,&dquo;industrialization, class, and &dquo;internal&dquo; differences as against exclusive &dquo;ex-ternal&dquo; determination. Indeed, Cardoso insists that there are only &dquo;situations&dquo;of dependence and no dependence &dquo;theory&dquo; to encompass them all. Thus heis seen as conducting the best concrete analysis of concrete reality. Bambirra,who does the same thing, is mentioned only by Kay, who was her colleague atthe Centro de Estudios Socioecon6micos (CESO). I am presented as the mostsuperficial and schematic and I come off by far the worst. I get minuses on

134

all the points for which Cardoso gets pluses. But I often wrote the same thingsabout industrialization, class, and internal differences. Larrain (pp.193-194)writes that &dquo;many of the criticisms just outlined [by Larrain, previously] arequite compelling and adequately fit the first group of dependency theoriesrepresented by Frank, Wallerstein, Emmanuel, and Amin. However... sucha critique becomes grossly unfair when applied generally,&dquo; especially toCardoso and to some extent to Warren. However, Larrain (p. 195) regardsWarren as too determinist on the opposite, that is, the developmentalist, side.Lehmann shares some of this criticism of my writings but suggests (p. 28)that nonetheless

Frank is an extraordinary, perhaps unique case in intellectual history, and thenit-picking polemics surrounding his work have obscured its real significance.He should be treated not as an interlocutor but as a phenomenon, a social fact.What is extraordinary is that a person writing in this paranoid and intemperatestyle, the antithesis of the dispassionate academic, should have had such aprofound influence both within and outside the university.

However that may be, the problem with these evaluations is that theyconcentrate too much on comparing one theory with another and even onjudging their theoretical or ideological purity. Rather than ruminating abouthow this or that dependentista or his theory rate on highly (in all senses ofthe word) academic criteria of purity, it seems better to subject them to thetest of history as Lehmann does: to inquire what policies these theoriesgenerated or supported, and how successful they were. What it all comesdown to is that there was really not much difference among these theorists,ranging from Prebisch, who headed ECLA and founded the UN Conferenceon Trade and Development (UNCTAD), to Frank, whom Emmanuel de Kadthas called &dquo;an academic Che Guevara.&dquo; In terms of their practical application,all of the these theories failed the test of history in the 1970s and 1980s. Forthat reason, Prebisch and Frank, at the two &dquo;extremes,&dquo; have amended theirpositions in each other’s direction.

As Kay (p. 156) notes, I wrote as early as in 1972 that &dquo;dependence[theory] is dead,&dquo; at least as a guide for practical political policy in LatinAmerica. Our five authors and others are writing their belated postmortemstoday. I think it is fair to say, however, that they are not doing so on thestrength of their own and others’ successful nitpicking at the theoretical, notto mention ideological, weaknesses of structuralism and dependence. Rather,these &dquo;theories&dquo; and their associated policies have been defeated by morepowerful opponents. Politically, General Pinochet has done this by force ofarms in Chile, the main locus of the germination, birth, development, andapplication of both structuralism and dependence theory. Economically, the

135

world economic crisis and especially its severe 1973-1975 and 1979-1982recessions have rendered these theories inapplicable as recipes for practicalpolitical policy. The same underlying economic conditions have also pro-vided fertile ground for the (re)birth of neoliberalism to supplant Keynesian-ism, structuralism, and dependence theory on the reformist and would-berevolutionary left (Frank, 1981a, 1981b, 1984). Alas, the right has had noth-ing better or even new to offer; neoliberalist monetarism and supply-sidetheory were no more than warmed over &dquo;neo-&dquo;classical theory, disinterredfrom its half-century old grave.

Of course, our authors also find structuralism and dependence theoriesand policies wanting in practice during the past two decades, but they do sofor different and sometimes strange reasons. True to her subtitle, Hunt con-tinues to focus on the &dquo;competing paradigms.&dquo; Larrain still holds high thestandard of Marxism. Kay (pp. 197ff., 225, 226) examines &dquo;the Latin Amer-ican contribution in perspective&dquo; and in his &dquo;final remarks on developmenttheory and options&dquo; says that &dquo;reform or revolution is still the paramountdevelopment dilemma&dquo; (for my earlier review of Kay’s book, see Frank,1990). On the other hand, some of these authors also examine or at least touchon such real-world issues as the new international economic order, the newlyindustrialized countries, and the ideological triumph and near universalapplication of neoliberalism. All of these authors express serious reservationsabout this neoclassical development. However, they make little attempt toexplain the difference between &dquo;model&dquo; newly industrial development inEast Asia and newly industrial underdevelopment in Latin America. The best,indeed the only satisfactory, attempt that I have seen on this score is Deyo’s(1987), especially Peter Evans’s contribution &dquo;Class, State, and Dependencein East Asia: Lessons for Latin Americanists.&dquo; Incidentally, it is curious thatEvans’s own 1979 contribution to the study of dependent development inBrazil does not merit any mention in the index of any of the five books onthat subject under review here. It does, however, appear in Kay’s list ofreferences, and he also favorably quotes Evans’s article in Deyo’s (1987)collection.

For all their differing critiques of structuralism and dependence, Hunt,Kay, and Larrain express few reservations about development theory itself.If these development theories are not quite satisfactory, the first two hope forbetter but still similar ones in the future; Larrain harks back to similar andperhaps worse ones from the past. Only Hettne and especially Lehmannexpress serious reservations about any fundamental shortcomings of theseand similar theories of &dquo;national&dquo; development in or, indeed, of &dquo;develop-ment&dquo; itself, and not even they find any of these theories especially wanting

136

in the service of our &dquo;better half,&dquo; women. But my wife, Marta Fuentes, longago and many other women since have seen and even taught me that (in herwords) &dquo;development is bad for women.&dquo; No structuralist or dependentistaever took the trouble to find out that dependent development is especiallybad for women. No dependentista ever proposed another sort of developmentthat would have been better for women. (My own still very limited discussionof this problem is in Frank, 1991.)

In brief summary, very few of the often extremely esoteric academicand/or very interested political critiques identify the real weaknesses ofdependence &dquo;theory.&dquo; These have, however, become part of my own laterauto-critique: First, real dependence exists, of course, and more than ever,despite arguments to the contrary. However, dependence &dquo;theory&dquo; and policyhave never answered the question of how to eliminate it and how to pursuethe chimera of nondependent or independent growth. Second, dependenceheterodoxy has nonetheless maintained the orthodoxy that (under)develop-ment must refer to and be organized by and through (nation-state) societies,countries, or regions. This orthodox tenet turns out to be wrong. Third,although I turned orthodoxy on its head, I maintained the essence of the thesisthat economic growth through capital accumulation equals development.Thereby, the socialist and dependence heterodoxies were caught in the sametrap as development orthodoxy, and any real alternative definitions, policy,and praxis of &dquo;development&dquo; were precluded. Fourth, in particular, thisorthodoxy incorporated the patriarchal gender structure of society as a matterof course. However much I may personally have been against male chauvin-ism, I thereby prevented examination of this dimension of dependence.

TOWARD THE FUTURE

For his part, Hettne (chapters 5-7) goes on to consider &dquo;Dimensions ofAnother Development,&dquo; &dquo;Transcending the European Model,&dquo; and &dquo;Reori-entations in Development Theory.&dquo; Lehmann devotes more than the secondhalf of his book to examining and welcoming the move from dependency todemocracy, the return of the Church to center stage, social movements, andbasismo, or development mobilization from below. This extension of theirreviews from the by now shopworn Latin American theories of developmentand underdevelopment to another development and its &dquo;theory&dquo; is the mostnovel and, I believe, the most useful contribution of these books.

Hettne reviews world-system theory, on the one hand, and the &dquo;small-is-beautiful&dquo;/&dquo;self reliance&dquo; approaches of the Dag Hammarskj6ld Founda-

137

tion, Marc Nerfin’s Foundation for Development Alternatives, and others, onthe other. He also devotes attention to ethnodevelopment (Stavenhagen,1986) and ecodevelopment (Redclift, 1987) but still none to differentialdevelopment for women and not much to the needed change in genderrelations. However, he finds that &dquo;no General Theory of development hasappeared and perhaps one never will&dquo; (p. 241) and that &dquo;indigenization [ofdevelopment theory] in fact stands out as a precondition for universalization&dquo;(p. 243).

I have myself written under the title &dquo;The Underdevelopment of Devel-opment&dquo; (Frank, 1991) that development is either an attribute of the wholeof what Hettne calls the &dquo;globalized&dquo; world system or indigenized communaldevelopment on a local level to whatever extent that is possible in the faceof the obligatory participation in the global world system. Hettne (p. 145)observes that &dquo;radical delinking has now been ruled out as more or lessimpracticable by all camps.&dquo; &dquo;National&dquo; development without delinkingturns out to be a chimera. What is left for &dquo;development&dquo; is indigenousself-help on the basis of avoiding the worst and trying to do the best we can.Hettne finds that &dquo;there can be no fixed and final definition of development,only suggestions of what development should imply in particular contexts&dquo;(Hettne, p. 2, emphasis in the original).

Lehmann follows particularist and indigenous self-help developmentfarther still. First, especially through the writings of Guillermo O’Donnell,he examines the Latin American state in the 1960s, its bureaucratic authori-tarianism in the 1970s, and its redemocratization in the 1980s. He welcomesthe latter but notes its limitations. Then, he devotes a long chapter to thedevelopment of liberation theology out of a marriage of old and new Churchdoctrine with Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (Christian Base Communities).Paulo Freire, Gustavo Guti6rrez, and Leonardo Boff have been their promot-ers and high priests. The strength and hope of this other development is intheir communally based and other social movements and nongovernmentalorganizations. (Marc Nerfin observes that they should not be negativelycalled &dquo;non-something&dquo; but rather positively named for the people 3’ organi-zations that they are). Lehmann tries to count them - up to 80,000 in Braziland 1,400 in Santiago, Chile, alone. He coins the term basismo from theSpanish base (which means more than the English &dquo;base&dquo;).

Lehmann entitles his last chapter &dquo;Basismo as if Reality Really Mattered,or, Modernization from Below.&dquo; He correctly observes the preponderance ofwomen and their less hierarchical (more democratic?) organization in hisimmediately preceding, more expository chapter on social movements, buthe makes no direct reference to women and also none to their increasingly

138

feminist grassroots demands in this more theoretical chapter (!) on basismo.He also notes and sounds the alarm about international dependence onforeign nongovernmental organization money (which he identifies in manymovements), grassroots support, and nongovernmental organizations; hecalls this financial and sometimes organizational dependence &dquo;the Achillesheel of much basista activity&dquo; (p. 189). Even so, he finds the real roots andhope of more democracy and another kind of development in these socialmovements. I have come to the same conclusion (Frank, 1991). Fuentes andFrank (1989) and Frank and Fuentes (1990) see these social movements asexercising what we call &dquo;civil democracy&dquo; in civil society. If there is anyhope for &dquo;development,&dquo; that is where it is in reality, and that is where it mustbe developed and later reviewed in &dquo;theory.&dquo; Amen! t

REFERENCES

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Enzo Faletto1979 Development and Dependence in Latin America. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Cockcroft, James D., Andre Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson1972Dependenceand Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy. Garden City,NJ: Doubleday.

Deyo, Frederic C. (ed.)1987 The Political Economy of New Asian Industrialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Evans, Peter1979 Dependent Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Frank, Andre Gunder1967 Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly ReviewPress.

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