Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005)

On April 23, scholars around the world received e-mails announcing the death of Andre Gunder Frank in Luxembourg at the age of 76. Hyperprolific and multilingual, Gunder produced over a thousand publications in 30 languages and was at work on his final book almost to the end, when the pain and fatigue of his multiple cancers made it impossible to continue. An intellectual provocateur who had more important ideas in a year than many of us will have in a lifetime, he also suffered ideological blind spots that adversely affected his analyses, causing him to dismiss the importance of culture and of the role of the individual in history. Kind, humane, and passionately committed to social justice and to human rights in defense of victims of repression around the world, he also voiced support at various times for horrendous regimes whose revolutionary purity he admired, for which he later offered mea culpas. He relished the thrust and cut of intellectual debate, often prefacing razor-sharp critiques with a self-deprecating “I dunno, but . . . .” His comments could be harsh, and over the years he alienated a number of friends, colleagues, and even governments, managing to be declared persona non grata by both Washington and Havana. Cuba never lifted its ban. Washington’s was lifted in 1979 when Senator Ted Kennedy intervened so that Gunder might teach a seminar at Boston University. The advent of e-lists created the perfect forum for his unfiltered criticism, and he generously engaged thousands of virtual colleagues in open global debates that raced ahead of professional journals, bypassing the gatekeepers of scholarly discourse.Gunder’s life had cinematic sweep. Born Andrew Frank in 1929 Berlin, the son of a leftist Jewish intellectual who chose exile when Hitler came to power, he was raised abroad in Switzerland and the United States. Gunder worked from adolescence as a liquor store clerk and beachcomber and later supported himself as a ditchdigger, dishwasher, fruit picker, construction and factory worker. A blue-collar scholar who knew manual labor and the authority of the boss, he later said that this was his real education. On his own at 15, he attended high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he competed in track. When sarcastic teammates nicknamed him Gunder, after a Swedish track star of the day (because he was last, not fast), he ignored their gibe and kept the name. Decades later he would drop the “w” from Andrew to become Andre Gunder. After graduating with honors from Swarthmore in 1950, he hitchhiked around the United States until, at his father’s urging, he applied to the University of Chicago economics department, where Milton Friedman became his advisor and nemesis. Although he took and passed his Ph.D. exams, his rejection of “Uncle Miltie” and his monetarism caused the economics department to banish him. Undeterred, he attended the University of Michigan for a semester and then reapplied to Chicago. Again stymied by Friedman, he dropped out to pass his days with the Beat crowd at San Francisco’s Vesuvius Café.Eventually Gunder returned to Chicago “by the backdoor” as a research assistant for the Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change. There he worked on a U.S. Army Office of Psychological Warfare project dealing with the Soviet economy, which led to his dissertation on Ukrainian agriculture. But it was his other research assignment, analyzing World Bank reports, that set his intellectual life course by turning him on to Raul Prebisch’s nascent theory of economic dependency and to Paul Baran’s Monthly Review article on the failure of global development, “The Political Economy of Growth.” Gunder’s iteration of dependency theory, woven from Prebisch’s concepts of center and periphery and Marxist-Leninist historical materialism, made a distinction between a lack of development (a preindustrial state) and underdevelopment (the product of capitalist exploitation), wherein imperialist nations of the industrial center maintained dominance over nations of the periphery by manipulating terms of trade and investment. This rejected the primary assumption of the developmentalist paradigm, to wit: development occurred when agrarian economies (variously labeled colonial, feudal, medieval, traditional, and so on) were replaced (modernized) by industrial capitalism. The capitalist system did not replace traditional economic and colonial social structures, said Gunder, but rather incorporated them by imposing a strict international division of labor with the collaboration of local elites in transferring surplus profits generated at the periphery to the center. Thus, he concluded, “the determinant factors in economic development were really social,” and the problems of equitable development (“Equity for whom? Efficiency for whom? Economic development for whom?”) were primarily political — and so more likely to be achieved by revolution than by reform.Activism and leftist politics defined Gunder’s professional and personal life. In 1960, three years after receiving his Ph.D. and while teaching at Michigan State University, Che Guevara invited him to advise Cuba’s new revolutionary government on dismantling its structures of economic dependency. The next year he left MSU to become a professor of anthropology at the University of Brasilia. Later he wrote of his decision: “I decided to be consequential.” By this time, he had met and married Marta Fuentes, a Chilean, and their son Paul was born in Rio de Janeiro just before the family left for Chile in advance of the U.S.-backed coup of ’64 that deposed populist president João Goulart. He then managed to land a position as extraordinary professor at the National School of Economics of the National Autonomous University in Mexico, where son Miguel was born. Still the itinerant scholar, Gunder moved to Sir George Williams University in Montreal as a visiting professor of economics and history.Gunder and Marta often visited Chile, and in 1968 he took a professorship at the University of Chile, Santiago, teaching sociology and economics. With Salvador Allende’s election, he involved himself in Chile’s socialist economic reform, until the U.S.-backed military coup brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. Gunder and family fled to Germany where, with his citizenship, he obtained research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, followed by a series of temporary appointments. When a hostile official prevented him from obtaining a permanent position, he moved to England and joined the School of Development Studies at Norwich. He stayed there for five years, until in 1983 the corrosive effect of “soft” British racism on his family led him to accept a professorship at the University of Amsterdam. He remained there until his mandatory retirement in 1994, the year Marta died of cancer. Subsequently Gunder applied for 80 academic positions in North America, mainly in the United States. Short-listed for five, this immensely influential scholar received none, settling instead for a series of temporary positions.It is ironic that Gunder, who steadfastly denied the importance of the individual in shaping history, cast so long a shadow. Almost from the moment of its appearance as Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1967), his version of dependency theory became the dominant paradigm of Latin American studies. When Samir Amin and Giovanni Arrighi introduced him to Fernand Braudel’s acolyte, Immanuel Wallerstein, the self-styled “Gang of Four” blended Wallerstein’s synthesis of the general European economic crisis literature with Gunder’s interpretation of the core and periphery to give rise to world systems theory, revitalizing the field of world history. But Gunder soon moved far beyond dependency and the capitalist world system doing what he did so well — taking a paradigm (in this case one he had helped create) and turning it on its head and inside out. Inspired by Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), Gunder came to realize the modern capitalist world system was not the first one, but merely the latest evolution of a world system rooted in the late Neolithic period. He and his collaborator Barry Gills rejected traditional analytical categories of feudalism, capitalism, and socialism, as well as Marxist and Weberian civilizational typologies, as Eurocentric constructs that wrongly attributed the contemporary (and temporary) dominance of Europe to its “exceptionalism.” The rise of Europe, Gunder declared, was due to fortunate geography that put it in the best position to conquer America and extract its silver, with which Europe bought its way into a Sinocentric world system. This neobullionist position is eerily reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s monetarism, which he had rejected in his youth. Gunder carried these positions over into his greatest work, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Univ. of California Press, 1998), for which he received the first World History Association Book Prize and the PEWS Award of the American Sociological Association. Predictably, ReOrient generated immense criticism, led on the Right by David S. Landes, who replied by writing Wealth and Poverty of Nations (W.W. Norton, 1999), and on the Left by Wallerstein, who readily agreed that Eurocentrism was undesirable but recognized it as an empirical fact.Whether one agreed with Gunder or not, his powerful insights could not be ignored. Indeed, scholarly disagreement with him generated substantial bodies of work. I am particularly indebted to him in this respect. My own small career has been a dialogue with Gunder, and I think it is fair to say that this is also true of the work of Stephen Haber, Jeffery Bortz, and other proponents of new institutional economic history, whose point of departure and focus was the refutation of dependency theory. Despite Gunder’s flaws and what some consider his overreaching, his Gaia-like world system — with its unfathomable simplicity, expressed in his Yogi Berra–like Daoism: Simultaneity is no coincidence — is a great accomplishment that will influence scholarship for decades.Gunder continued to battle social injustice by writing and speaking against the U.S. war in Iraq and against the mal effects of uncontrolled, greed-driven globalization almost until the day he died. He is survived by his sons, Paul and Miguel, from his marriage to Marta and by his third wife, Alison Candela, whom he married in 2003. Gunder was an original, a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes, whose like we’ll not see again for many a day, if ever

Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Literature, Politics, and Exile Studies · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis