Andre Gunder Frank

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Andre Gunder Frank (Berlin, February 24, 1929 – Luxembourg, April 23, 2005) was a German economic historian and sociologist who was one of the founders of the Dependency theory and the World Systems Theory in the 1960s. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.

Frank was born in Germany, but his family fled the country when Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor. Frank received schooling in several places in Switzerland, where his family settled, until they emigrated to the United States in 1941. Frank was educated at Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1957 after writing a dissertation on Soviet agriculture entitled Growth and Productivity in Ukrainian Agriculture from 1928 to 1955. Ironically, his dissertation supervisor was Milton Friedman, a man whose laissez faire approach to economics Frank would thoroughly criticize in the future.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Frank taught at American universities. In 1962 he moved to Latin America, inaugurating a remarkable period of travel that served to confirm his peripatetic tendencies. His most notable work during this time was his stint as Professor of Sociology and Economics at the University of Chile, where he was involved in reforms under the government of Salvador Allende. After Allende's government was toppled by a coup d'état in 1973, Frank fled to Europe, where he continued to take up a series of positions. In 1994 he retired as emeritus professor at the University of Amsterdam.

During his career, Frank taught and did research in departments of anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, political science, and sociology, in nine universities in North America, three in Latin America, and five in Europe. He gave countless lectures and seminars at dozens of universities and other institutions all around the world in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Dutch. Frank wrote widely on the economic, social and political history and contemporary development of the world system, the industrially developed countries, and especially of the Third World and Latin America. He produced over 1,000 publications in 30 languages. His work in the 1990s focused on global world history. He undertook this later work at several institutions, but had perhaps the closest connection to the now defunct World History Center at Northeastern University. He returned to his analysis of global political economy in the new millennium inspired by a lecture he gave at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (SSE Riga). In 2006 SSE Riga received Andre Gunder Frank's personal library collection and set-up the Andre Gunder Frank Memorial Library in his honor, with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

He was married to Marta Fuentes, with whom he wrote several studies about social movements, and they have two sons. Marta died in Amsterdam in June 1993. Frank died in 2005 of complications related to his cancer under the care of his third wife, Alison Candela.

[edit] Works and ideas

Frank was a prolific author, including 40 books. He published widely on political economy, economic history, international relations, historical sociology, and world history. One of his most important early works is Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America while in his later career he produced works such as ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age and (with Barry Gills) The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand. Frank's theories center on the idea that a nation's economic strength, largely determined by historical circumstances--especially geography--dictates its global power. He is also well known for suggesting that purely export oriented solutions to development create imbalances detrimental to poor countries. Frank has made significant contributions to the World Systems Theory (which, according to him, should be rather called the World System one). He has shown that the World System formation took place not later than in the 4th millennium BCE, that is well before the "long 16th century" (as was believed, for example, by Immanuel Wallerstein). He also insisted that the idea of numerous "world-systems" did not make much sense (indeed, if there are many "world-systems" in the world, than they simply do not deserve to be called "world-systems"), and we should rather speak about one single World System.