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The Underdevelopment of Development: Essays in Honor of Andre Gunder Frank
Taking stock of political and economic development in the world today, this book re-examines development in an era of rapid social change, and reflects the work of an intellectual giant, Andre Gunder Frank. Gunder Frank deconstructed conventional development economics and modernization theory, creating dependency theory. Today dependency theory has been replaced by world systems analysis - the view that national and regional economic (and political) development cannot be seen in isolation; states are part of a global economy that, in a sense, dictates and limits action.
This is an excellent synthesizing volume on the state of development studies. Although a great part of its purpose is to pay tribute to its intellectual father, the book presents a clear, logical and organized view of world systems analysis.
- GenresEconomics
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First published January 29, 1996
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December 21, 2024
At this point I’m gonna start logging the readings I had to do for school because if I don’t finish the reading challenge for the year I’ll shame myself, no I’m not cheating
My response paper for class:
Born in 1929 in Berlin, Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian, known prominently for his text “The Development of Underdevelopment”. This theory traces how the world economic system of dependency and underdevelopment did not come about as a transitional stage, but rather because of the relationship between empires “metropolis” and their lowering “peripheries”. He writes that often it is a generally held idea that economic development, for example in the scale of American hyper-capitalism, occurs as the height of succession of capitalist stages. Presumably then, it is assumed that the underdeveloped countries of today are still somewhere in this succession, “…sometimes depicted as an original stage of history, through which the now developed countries passed long ago”. p.106
His argument upsurfs the “winners and losers” assumption of viewing the economic state of globalization under capitalism, that “dual society” within underdeveloped states as well exist as stepping points into diffusing capital from a national capitalist metropoles. Pointing out the ignorance in how lacking the education of the reality of how colonialism has impacted underdeveloped countries,
“Since the historical experience of the colonial and underdeveloped countries has demonstrably been quite different available theory therefore fails to reflect the past of the underdeveloped part of the world entirely…our ignorance of the underdeveloped countries history leads us to assume that their past and indeed their present resembles earlier stages of history of the now developed countries.” p.105.
With a Marxist framework, the theory rejects that people in the “underdeveloped” world are directly responsible for the “failure” of their societies lesser development. Instead, he suggests that Western nations have deliberately been responsible for their underdevelopment. Frank believed that the development of periphery countries is not possible within the global capitalist system, as long as metropolis empires base these nations as satellites, they will suffer in the system.
You know, in reality there’s only so many of these response papers that I can write, trying to find some new way or interesting point to give to these texts before I just feel like writing a mild journal entry. A lot of us in this class are terribly aware of what’s going on around us, how a lot of things led us to this. We stay up late to try and get the readings done, we wake up early to get to class, see another video on our phones about genocide on the way there, and then sit politely for a discussion. When reading Frank’s text, I was thinking a lot of my experience growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical church in the Midwest of the states. My church and school were combined, and multiple times each year members from the church who were are missionary trips/residencies in African, South American, and South Asian countries would give large presentations about their “life-changing” and “God-pleasing” work in “underdeveloped third world countries”. These presentations would be met with such praise for the people who had been “brave” to go to somewhere where the “lord needed his word spread further”. As kids in the private religious system, we were encouraged to see this as the highest standard of devotion to the the Christian god, going as far as you could to essentially perpetrate colonial practices in the form of white-savior-evganelical-Christian ideal of the world. Within these circles, there is no regard or acknowledgment at all for the cycles of exploitation that have been pushed onto these countries, instead it’s all washed off into some vague notion that these countries suffer because they are not as “Christian” as “God-fearing” America. The cycle just continues and continues.
My response paper for class:
Born in 1929 in Berlin, Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian, known prominently for his text “The Development of Underdevelopment”. This theory traces how the world economic system of dependency and underdevelopment did not come about as a transitional stage, but rather because of the relationship between empires “metropolis” and their lowering “peripheries”. He writes that often it is a generally held idea that economic development, for example in the scale of American hyper-capitalism, occurs as the height of succession of capitalist stages. Presumably then, it is assumed that the underdeveloped countries of today are still somewhere in this succession, “…sometimes depicted as an original stage of history, through which the now developed countries passed long ago”. p.106
His argument upsurfs the “winners and losers” assumption of viewing the economic state of globalization under capitalism, that “dual society” within underdeveloped states as well exist as stepping points into diffusing capital from a national capitalist metropoles. Pointing out the ignorance in how lacking the education of the reality of how colonialism has impacted underdeveloped countries,
“Since the historical experience of the colonial and underdeveloped countries has demonstrably been quite different available theory therefore fails to reflect the past of the underdeveloped part of the world entirely…our ignorance of the underdeveloped countries history leads us to assume that their past and indeed their present resembles earlier stages of history of the now developed countries.” p.105.
With a Marxist framework, the theory rejects that people in the “underdeveloped” world are directly responsible for the “failure” of their societies lesser development. Instead, he suggests that Western nations have deliberately been responsible for their underdevelopment. Frank believed that the development of periphery countries is not possible within the global capitalist system, as long as metropolis empires base these nations as satellites, they will suffer in the system.
You know, in reality there’s only so many of these response papers that I can write, trying to find some new way or interesting point to give to these texts before I just feel like writing a mild journal entry. A lot of us in this class are terribly aware of what’s going on around us, how a lot of things led us to this. We stay up late to try and get the readings done, we wake up early to get to class, see another video on our phones about genocide on the way there, and then sit politely for a discussion. When reading Frank’s text, I was thinking a lot of my experience growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical church in the Midwest of the states. My church and school were combined, and multiple times each year members from the church who were are missionary trips/residencies in African, South American, and South Asian countries would give large presentations about their “life-changing” and “God-pleasing” work in “underdeveloped third world countries”. These presentations would be met with such praise for the people who had been “brave” to go to somewhere where the “lord needed his word spread further”. As kids in the private religious system, we were encouraged to see this as the highest standard of devotion to the the Christian god, going as far as you could to essentially perpetrate colonial practices in the form of white-savior-evganelical-Christian ideal of the world. Within these circles, there is no regard or acknowledgment at all for the cycles of exploitation that have been pushed onto these countries, instead it’s all washed off into some vague notion that these countries suffer because they are not as “Christian” as “God-fearing” America. The cycle just continues and continues.
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