Osvaldo Sunkel, one of the last great figures of the original Latin American structuralist tradition, has passed away. A central figure at ECLAC, his work ranged from the structuralist theory of inflation and the historical-structural method to dependency, transnational capitalism, and environmental questions. Esteban Pérez Caldentey's biographical essay rightly presents him as an essential reference for Latin American economic thought, whose work remained concerned throughout with the specific historical and institutional conditions of development in the periphery.
Sunkel belonged to the extraordinary generation formed around ECLAC in the 1950s. His recent oral history for ECLAC is a wonderful account of that intellectual milieu: of studying development when there was barely yet a literature on the subject, and of the emergence of a genuinely Latin American way of thinking about development. ECLAC.
For me, the loss is also personal. One of the reasons I decided to study economics was reading Sunkel's little book on the historical process of development and underdevelopment while still in high school in Rio, assigned by the geography teacher, Clóvis Dottori. The idea that development and underdevelopment were part of the same historical process, not stages in a linear progression from one to the other, was a revelation. The industrialization of England, and the deindustrialization of India were part of the same process. That was in the 1980s.
In the early 2000s we invited Sunkel to a conference in Rio, and I was fortunate to get to know him more closely afterward. The book Esteban and I wrote together is dedicated to him. A major loss for Latin American economics, and for me the passing of someone whose ideas helped set me on the path I followed.
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