Content area
Full Text
Paul Sweezy thought Andre Gunder Frank's Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (hereafter CU) would be a big hit. As the head of Monthly Review Press, a small but important publishing operation held together largely by his own efforts, Sweezy had to choose carefully the projects on which he would expend his and his small staff's limited time and energy. In the summer of 1964, manuscripts of the essays that would go into Frank's first and most influential book began pouring into Sweezy's office on West 14th Street in New York. Sweezy did not hesitate. He told his own copyeditor and close friend, the brilliant but emotionally troubled Jack Rackliffe, that Frank's work “amounts to nothing less than a complete reinterpretation of all Latin American history.”1
Frank's book did enjoy a degree of success in the years immediately following its publication in 1967. Monthly Review ran twelve printings of the two English editions, and the book would be translated into eleven languages.2 Without question, Frank made a name for himself among academics and intellectuals interested in Third World development in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Frank's ideas became the earliest representative of dependency theory to reach US audiences, and both contemporaries and historians have recognized his intervention as an important shift away from the consensus around modernization theory that reigned earlier in the decade. Moreover, the momentary popularity of Frank's influence extended beyond the academic subdisciplines of development economics and sociology. Painting the entire project of “aid” as little more than imperialism in a new guise, Frank's work resonated with many New Left intellectuals who saw similarities in the power dynamics Frank identified and those operating behind the war in Vietnam and America's racial order. When the 1960s student radicals influenced by Frank began their long march through the university they carried many of his ideas with them, which continue to reverberate through the academy, often in undetected ways.
Yet Frank's book quickly came under attack, and not just from the entrenched modernization theorists it challenged. Even intellectuals sympathetic to Frank's main premise—that the hierarchical structure of global capitalism created systemic barriers to development in peripheral states—found CU deeply flawed. By the mid-1970s Frank's work had generated two discernible lines...