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The Contradictions of a Contrarian: AndreGunder Frank

The Contradictions of a Contrarian: Andre Gunder Frank

April 25, 2005

ByJeff Sommers

Among academic activists I know the two names most frequently cited for inspiring us to pursue our

work are Noam Chomsky and Andre Gunder Frank. Yesterday we lost one of them in Andre GunderFrank. Gunder must have put, literally, thousands on that path, who in turn reached perhaps millionsof students in some fashion.

He was released from a decade long battle with several cancers on April 23, 2005 where in aweakened state he succumbed to pneumonia. Complicating matters were potent infectionsacquired in hospitals in the attempt to beat back his cancers. Indeed, Gunder's life, like most, yetmore than most, was characterized by struggle.

Gunder struggled in childhood, with an absentee, yet successful, father, who Gunder both missedand admired. Fleeing the persecution of leftists and Jews, of which Gunder's father was both, thefamily fled to Switzerland. His father went to California and sent for the family later, Gunderimagined him to have been suffering in poverty there, only to find a celebrity of Hollywoodscreenwriter of sorts in a convertible. Gunder suffered from loneliness, complicated by biochemically

rooted psychological issues that challenged him throughout his life. Conversely, he was handsomeas a young man and could be, in a sincere way, charming and disarming. Gunder was indeed alwaysfull of contradictions.

Gunder's education was as eclectic as the man. His learning was a mixture of public schools, eliteboarding academies and college at Swarthmore, to working across the US in timber mills, factories,and in sundry low-paid services. His intellectual abilities could not be ignored and from Swarthmorehe pursued Ph.D. study as an economist at the University of Chicago, at the counsel of his father.Gunder's life was a series of unlikely, and both tragic and humorous, circumstances. At Chicago hestudied briefly under Milton Friedman. "Uncle Miltie," as Gunder referenced him, clearly put into reliefall that was wrong with economics. Gunder quickly came to be known what, in the disparaginglanguage of economics, as an "institutionalist," who took his inspiration from the likes of ThorsteinVeblen and Gunnar Myrdal. Gunder was hardly innumerate, but rightly held, in the language of

Myrdal, that there was a "political element in the development of economic theory" that was farmore explanatory than the logic of late 19th mathematics in revealing the workings of economy andsociety. Gunder, therefore, began his own eclectic a-la-carte program of self-directed study atChicago that included much time spent with Anthropologists. Besides, as Gunder once related tome, the "girls were pretty." Gunder relayed that observation without the bravado of a sexist, but in ashy self-deprecating way. Gunder treated women with a combination of respect that was comprisedof one-part 19th century respectful gentlemen (at least the positive depiction of it) mixed with thedeep respect of a feminist who understood the struggle of women. In one of tens of jobs Gunderheld, 1999 brought him to Miami for a short-term academic position. Battling cancers for severalyears and understanding that the end was always near, Gunder indulged the small vice, and Isuspect connected to the memory of his father, of acquiring a convertible. My fondest memory of

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Gunder was driving along South Beach with Gunder sporting his guayabera and straw hat as headmired the scenery in all its dimensions. One could tell he recognized the irony and humor of it all.Filmed in black and white it could have been perfectly captured only by Fellini.

Gunder's dissertation at Chicago focused on Ukrainian agriculture. He had the privilege of spendingthe summer in Kiev to conduct research. While a young man there in the 1950s, his experiencesranged from teaching a young woman to swim the Dnieper to being caught up in the Cold War andcoming under suspect as spy. While a great respecter of the Soviet experiment at the time, Gunder

always followed the truth, and he labeled its agriculture a failure. From there, Gunder went on totravel throughout Latin America in the 1960s, and it was here that he made his contributions toDependency Theory. I recall asking him who he was reading at the time and he declared he had littlewith him, but the structures of unequal exchange and underdevelopment were like ether that wereobvious to anyone who dared breathe it in.

Gunder's politics reflected his experiences, hopes, and the limits of his knowledge. I recall aconversation with him in 1999 in which, as was customary of him to argue later in life, that no oneperson could have altered history, and that all those in power were merely reflections of largerstructural forces that selected them rather the reverse. I mostly share this unfashionable view, butsuggested that Henry Wallace might have prevented the Cold War had FDR not replaced him with

Truman in 1944 in order to pacify conservative southern democrats. He grudgingly agreed that Ifound the one and only example of potential agency in world history, and late at night enjoyedlaughter at this. Of course, Gunder was an ardent supporter of Wallace in his 1948 run for thepresidency. Gunder was a forceful advocate of some Leninist ideas too when younger. I broughtGunder and Chomsky together in 1998 at Noam's office, as they both graciously agreed to serve onmy dissertation committee. One of Gunder's first utterances was, "you were right about myLeninism and I should have read the anarchist reading list you sent me thirty years ago." In hisfatalistic way, though, Gunder declared, "but I would not have listened anyway." This was Gunder withhis usual contradictions and honesty following a purer historical materialism, in which things don'thappen until the underlying conditions permit. The great irony is that nobody worked harder as anacademic to, as Marx put it, "change the world, not just understand it." He produced some 40books, 140 chapters in edited volumes, and over 300 hundred articles. His individual outputexceeded that of most mid-size academic departments in the US. None of this brought him money,and his writings caused him plenty of grief. But, his humanity pushed him forward to challengeinjustice just on the odd chance that history might be steered.

And, while Gunder's writings did bring trouble, as he pointed out, by comparative global standardshe was fortunate. He was not jailed or shot for deviating from the many "correct" doctrinesadvanced during the 20th century. But, those in authority considered his ideas dangerous. Hisfamous article in the Monthly Review on dependency theory in the mid-1960s was consideredsufficiently threatening to result in a letter to Gunder from the US Attorney General informing himhe would not be allowed reentry to the US. This decision was only overturned in 1979, when Senator

Ted Kennedy intervened to allow Gunder and Ernest Mandel to teach a seminar at Boston University.

This move to exile Gunder from the US deprived him of a comfortable academic career and resultedin an itinerant existence which was personally painful, but from which the rest of us benefited. Undertrying conditions, his output, both in terms of creativity and volume, was enormous. Yet, Gunder'slife was interesting. It included the suggestion by Che Guevara that he might consider serving asminister of Cuba's economy, to visits by the Soviet Ambassador to Mexico bearing the gift of diapers

for his new son, and a demanding global travel schedule to speak and work with those who appearedto be changing history; and after the "end of history" with Francis Fukuyama, to speak withacademics pursuing engaging work related to his new world historical investigations. Of course,Gunder understood the entropy of order and realized Fukyama's folly from the outset. While historyproved it could move backward, it certainly was always in motion, and there would be no equilibriumpoint at which it rested. The decline of US financial power and the resulting fall American mightsuffer from it was one the last subjects Gunder investigated.

Speaking of his children, Paul and Miguel, whom I never met, Gunder glowed with pride at theirsignificant accomplishments, and felt guilt over the unstable environment his life provided for them.He married Marta, who he met in Chile. This relationship brought him to Chile and Gunder played apivotal role in raising the consciousness of graduate students regarding development issues there.

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Many of them paid with their lives as the Soviets sold out Allende in the name of detente, and thedevilish duo of Nixon and Kissinger went to work on this autonomous democratic socialist Chileanrevolution. Many of Gunder's students were eliminated at the hands of Pinochet, with even morepeople there suffering at the hands of textbook economic experiments undertaken at the hands ofhis former teachers and students at the University of Chicago.

Regarding Marta, though, while I never met her, I sensed the relationship was powerful, and perhapstumultuous at times. After raising children, Marta engaged a period of feminist scholarship, which

Gunder joined. Speaking to Gunder's loyalty and family values, unlike our neoconservative preachersof virtues on the subject, Gunder spent the last years of Marta's life in her service as she slowly diedfrom cancer.

Continuing Gunder's string of challenges, 1993 brought the departure of Marta, and 1994mandatory retirement from the only stable job he ever had, his youngest son leaving home to enterthe world as an adult, the death of Gunder's dog, and the discovery of his own cancer. Not a banneryear. But, with his customary tenacity he rebounded and at an age in which most shift toshuffleboard and memories of the past, if they are lucky enough to have pensions for leisure.Gunder re-educated himself for an intervention into the field of world history, and the central placeof Asia in it. Gunder blindsided the field and forced a reevaluation of Eurasian studies and worldhistory. Characteristic of Gunder, his ideas were so powerful that they required either adopting them,or a forceful rejoinder. Once he entered a realm of ideas, he was not to be ignored. This new workculminated in such characteristically entitled works by Gunder, as The Centrality of Central Asia, andthis University of California paradigm-changing book, ReORIENT. The ensuing debate betweenGunder, and Harvard's economic historian David Landes, over the genesis of the development andindustrialization proved to be a veritable "thriller in Manila," with a concluding C-Span televiseddebate I organized on their behalf in 1998. Gunder became an honorary member of the "CaliforniaSchool" of Sinologists, establishing friendships with Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and others in the UCsystem. He also forged a relationship with Patrick Manning and his working group of graduatestudents in world history at Northeastern University. Additionally, he maintained a correspondenceof sorts with some 1500 people spanning 6 continents, according to his email address book. Gunderwas not going quietly.

In Gunder's last decade, he rejected parts of his old politics and opened to new ideas. He discardedold dogmas in order to open himself to new ways of seeing the past and present. Yet, this was notdone in the self-promoting way of neoconservatives, especially of say, a Christopher Hitchens.

Gunder was free of the tendency to demonize those holding views he once more fully shared. OnMarx, I think it fair to say he shared his political economy analysis of the 19th century, but roundlyrejected Marx's faulty historical/anthropological analysis of stages of society.

Gunder was often ahead of the curve, too far ahead to serve him professionally. If in business hewould be termed an early entrant to a market too immature to accept his product. His trendforecasting was powerful, with the one exception, and it was a major one, of failing to see the abilityof national liberation movements to create an alternative to, for lack of a better term, capitalism.Gunder would not, of course, have used the term capitalism in his last decade. He thought the termlost all explanatory power through 101 definitions given it. By 1980 he published two books detailingthe neoliberal turn, by the obscure press of Holmes & Meier, and where it was taking the world. Thefirst book was Crisis in the World Economy. From the debt crisis and its impact on the Soviet bloc, toa return to a liberal economic order, Gunder reached and saw what by the 1990s we called

globalization. Frustrated by these two books' failure to resonate, he retreated from this work. Yet, helater returned to it with powerful new insights related to Michael Hudson's earlier analysis on the roleof the US dollar as an instrument of foreign policy and comparative advantage delivered by beingthe world's reserve currency. This was part of a larger reevaluation of the "rise of the West" thatlocated its origins only in the mid-19th century, rather than the 16th century of world-systems'theorists, of whom Gunder could once be counted among their number, especially of ImmanuelWallerstein, Samir Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi. Yet, the growing gap between the North and Southdemands a revisiting and rehabilitation of much of Gunder's thinking on dependency theory.

Yet, Gunder later came to see Western hegemony as weak and fleeting and already giving way to thetrend of the historic centrality of Asia in the world economy. Although, unlike earlier observers of this,such as Paul Kennedy who placed its emergence in Japan, Gunder rightly saw it in China. He began

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publishing articles on this topic and began a new book centered on the 19th century turn, which hewould have taken to the present. He only finished half of the 19th century book, which will be left tohis friends and colleagues to do. Gunder took on this last task of understanding "globalization" whilesuffering from the several cancers he battled the last decade of his life. He bravely shrugged offseveral surgeries, and the pain and complications they introduced. In addition to this suffering werethe drugs required to negotiate his cancers. These difficulties were amplified by this life-longbiochemical issues which made Gunder appear coarse to some, and led him to misperceive others,yet seemed somehow related to his gift for understanding the workings of the world as a global

system and the genuine empathy he could feel for others.

In his last years Gunder met Alison. They met in Florida in 1999. She knew of his illnesses andunderstood the relationship would be marked by his continuing decline, and her having toincreasingly undertake the burden of care for him. Gunder's charms and her depth of feeling for himwere such that they were a gift to each other, but also he became her struggle, one she bravely andloyally concluded to his end.

Gunder's talents were immense. His analytical powers were keen. He acquired command over ahalf-dozen languages--a talent he bequeathed to his sons. His work rhythm was punishing, and hisability to produce new perspectives unrivaled. His humanity was enormous and his kindnesshumbling. Yet, he could be very sharp tongued, as many a scholar and policymaker discovered.Gunder had little patience for those he thought generated misery or provided intellectual cover forit, especially those with the benefit of a good education and years enough to know better. Ironically,the most unique and gifted person I have ever met, was also the one who thought us all the mostsimilar and least able to affect change, yet also the most supportive of those trying to affect it.

Whatever few insights I have tendered usually came after reading something from Gunder thattriggered a new thought and either added to his contributions, or caused me to react against them.I only hope he is right and that there are others conditioned by the forces of history who will inspireat the appropriate time. While I admire many, I know of no others as original as Gunder Frank. Hewas singularly unique!

*The author had the privilege of knowing Gunder from their first encounter in 1997, and then Gunderserving on his dissertation committee, which included a valued friendship and cohabitation for 2months in Miami 1999 while he worked on my dissertation, completed in 2001. Many of hisreflections are rooted in memory and those of Gunder, and apologizes for any ensuing errors

resulting from committing them to writing above.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

URL:http://www.zcommunications.org/the-contradictions-of-a-contrarian-andre-gunder-frank-by-

jeff-sommers

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-contradictions-of-a-contrarian-andre-gunder-frank-by-jeff-sommers