Dependency in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: An Historian Objects

Abstract

The dependency theory, under assault from Right and Left, is scarcely sustainable. Impatience with Prebisch's panacea, import-substitution industrialization, gave birth to dependency. A new bogeyman, the multinational corporation, now preoccupies the scholar and polemicist. Paradigms of Corporatism and Structuration supply the ongoing situation for further refinements in Confusionism. But this is the language of economics and political science. Students of chrono-politics (history) may still wish to inquire whether the historical evidence on which the dependency theory was based is more enduring than its currency in modern social science. The issues are very much alive. It was scarcely reassuring to be told, quite recently, that “radical writers on dependency are engaged in much productive and inventive research.”