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Edgar J. Dosman. The Life and Times of Raúl Prebisch, 1901-1986. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2008. Pp. 624. ISBN-13: 9780773534124 (hb). CAS49.95; US$49.95.
Regardless of its content, the publication of Edgar's book Life and Times of Raúl Prebisch will astound Latin Americans - left, right and centre alike.
Prebisch and his ideas should have clearly ranked as a discussion theme par excellence among our intellectuals, not least within the general field of LatinAmerican intellectual history. Unfortunately, however, the mere mention of his name by an author in Latin America over the last twenty-five years was tantamount to that author being blacklisted, at least within academic circles. Somewhat paradoxically the forces that have acted to dissuade investigation of Prebisch's legacy are both reflective and representative of the very asymmetry in power and resource allocation that Prebisch fought to reduce for much of his life. It is true that some among the 'left' had dispatched him to the archive of failed 'bourgeois reformists' because his work on 'our' peripheral and asymmetrical place in the world economic order never had, nor ever will have, anything to offer. But such an obviously crude and partisan assessment alone does not justify the lack of historical interest in Prebisch's life or his ideas.
In view of this, Dosman' s book provides historians with a welcome, if somewhat belated, record and assessment of the man's life. While it does not remove all the misinterpretations of Prebisch's work, which is partly due to the vast period covered and the biographical rather than theoretic focus of the book, it nevertheless represents a very important beginning. It reveals Prebisch as a man who regarded duty and responsibility as the public servant's paramount virtues, but also as a man (i) who gained a reputation among...