Dependency, Peripherality and Development

Abstract

Dependency theory had its roots in the crisis of US liberalism in the late 1960s (particularly associated with the war in Vietnam), the failure of many Third World societies to move in prescribed directions, and doubts about the credibility of social science’s claims to be neutral and value-free (Higgott, 1983, p. 9). Other influences included the Cuban revolution, de-Stalinisation and Maoism (Leys, 1977, p. 98). It was in part a critical response to modernisation theory’s assumption that ‘backwardness’ was the result of the isolation of LDCs from the rest of the world, rather than their exploitation by more advanced countries under various forms of imperialism (Phillips, 1977, pp. 7–8). The major contributors to what Foster-Carter (1976) has called a new paradigm in the study of development were Latin American Marxist economists such as Dos Santos, Cardoso, Sunkel and Faletto, non-Marxist Latin American economists such as Furtado and Prebisch, and North American neo-Marxists such as Bodenheimer, Petras, Magdoff and A. G. Frank (Ray, 1973, p. 6; O’Brien, 1975, p. 11; Higgott, 1978, p. 32).