Frank, Andre Gunder (1929–2005)

ANDRE GUNDER Frank was a German economist, historian, and polymath with wide-ranging interests and ideas. He lived and taught at universities across Europe and America, having become used to migration as a way of life when his family fled Germany upon Adolf Hitler's rise to power. His intellectual imagination was characterized by the same desire to cross borders and find new connections that had eluded previous observers. His principal contributions were in the fields of structural dependency and world systems theory.

In Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, Frank contributed to the emergence of structural dependency theory, which was also exciting economists such as Raul Presbisch. He too pondered the issue of [Page 395]why some countries were able to dominate the economic activities of others and answered the question by proposing that for a variety of power and politically related reasons, central countries were able to control peripheral ones and ensure that their commodity trade was always conducted on unfavorable terms with the manufactured goods produced in the center. Hence, through accumulation of resources as prescribed by capitalism, the periphery remained perpetually underdeveloped.

In The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? Frank was part of the attempt to relocate the center of world history away from the West and to question the extent to which large-scale, extremely long-run core-periphery structures could be discerned in global history. In ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Frank argued that the focus on European and Western history was misplaced ethnocentrism. Instead, it should be recognized that until the fortuitous discovery of American silver and the Atlantic slave trade, Western nations were peripheral to the international trading system, which had for centuries been centered on China.

As a result, all existing Western views of development must be incorrect and reinvented. His views were always in the minority in academic articles and his opinions were often dismissed out of hand by some of those whom he considered to be old-fashioned ethnocentrists. In any case, the type of macroanalytical multivariate global history with which Frank was concerned is always vulnerable to charges on methodological bases, since so many variables could be considered and because data are so frequently incomplete. Nevertheless, a number of his previous collaborators and friends rushed into print with highly critical reviews, which he also sought to rebut with some relish.

In one of his last important publications, Frank wrote a two-part article in the Asia Times entitled “The Naked Hegemon,” in which he argued that the economic policies of the neoconservative George W. Bush administration were so ruinous for the American economy that they would inevitably undermine the grandiose foreign policy it was simultaneously transacting and of which Frank also disapproved. These were just part of a voluminous research and writing output of hundreds of articles, book chapters, reviews, essays, and other scholarly letters. His enormous output was, according to those who knew him, matched by his appetite for life, friendship, and debate. He was married to the social activist and author Marta Fuentes, who died in 1993.

...