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Andre Gunder Frank (1929–2005) was a sociologist, political scientist, and world historian active in the debates surrounding dependency theory and world systems theory during the late twentieth century. He was born in Berlin, but his family fled Germany following Hitler’s rise to power. He lived in Switzerland for a time as a youth until his family immigrated to the United States in 1941. Frank attended Swarthmore College and received his doctorate in economics in 1957 from the University of Chicago, where he completed a dissertation on Soviet agriculture under the supervision of the noted free market economist Milton Friedman.

Frank taught at several American universities before moving to Latin America in 1962, where he took a position as professor of sociology and economics at the University of Chile. Frank was part of the intellectual circles in Chile at the time that assisted in the social and economic reforms inaugurated by the democratic socialist president Salvador Allende. Allende would later be overthrown in a coup by conservative general Augusto Pinochet, who turned to the free market economic policies of the so-called Chicago school (Frank’s former colleagues) to modernize and develop his nation.

During this period, modernization theory was the dominant paradigm in the social sciences explaining economic history and the relative lack of development of the so-called third world. Modernization theory argued that the third world’s economic and social difficulties resulted from a lack of capitalist institutions, the weakness of their internal markets, and their lack of involvement in global trade. For modernization theory, the key to third world development was strengthening the internal market and developing an export based economy rather than one based on subsistence peasant agriculture.

Frank quickly became a leading dissident against modernization theory. Attending conferences across Latin America, he argued that the third world had been integrated into the capitalist economy from its outset and that the underdevelopment of these countries was written into the very global nature of capitalist development itself. In a sense, the third world’s backwardness was precisely the reason the West was modern and advanced. According to Frank, a structural imbalance was built into the global capitalist system that created the geographic disparity of wealth between the third world and the developed countries.

During the 1960s, Frank and several colleagues began to formalize this view. A new school of dependency theory—to which Frank was a major contributor—quickly became an influential methodology among dissident and left-wing scholars in the social sciences across the globe.

Following the Pinochet coup, Frank fled to Holland, where he found an academic position at the University of Amsterdam. During the 1970s and continuing until his death, he would play a key role in the development of world systems theory, a social science paradigm that argues the world has been unified in a global social and economic system since at least the sixteenth century and that social and economic events in one region have effects throughout the system. In this field, Frank proved to be just as controversial as he was in his earlier work. He argued that the world system actually arose in antiquity rather than in the so-called long sixteenth century. He also authored a controversial book arguing for the central importance of Chinese civilization in the world system. Western Europe’s global dominance, he argued, was a relatively recent and temporary phenomenon that would likely be surpassed by a new era of Asian—and specifically Chinese—hegemony in the not too distant future.

Frank was a voluminous author who wrote numerous books and articles. His influence was felt most profoundly in the 1960s and 1970s through the key role he played in the development of dependency theory. However, his work in world system theory, while controversial, is an important point of reference for world historians today.

Bibliography:

Chew, Sing C., and Robert A. Denemark. The Underdevelopment of Development: Essays in Honor of Andre Gunder Frank. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996.
Frank, Andre Gunder. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review, 1969.
Lumpenbourgeoisie Lumpendevelopment: Dependence, Class and Politics in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review, 1973.
Re-orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
World Accumulation: 1492–1789. New York: Monthly Review, 1980.
Frank, Andre Gunder, and Barry K. Gills, eds. The World System: 500 Years or 5000? New York: Routledge, 1996.
Seers, Dudley. Dependency Theory: A Critical Reassessment. London: Pinter, 1981.