Theotônio dos Santos, one of the main authors of the Latin American Dependency School, has passed away. I had some minimal contact with him, seeing some of his talks as an undergraduate, and then at a few conferences were we could talk a bit more, including after I had published this paper.
When I was a student, I might add, I was basically taught that there were two dependency school traditions, and often the Marxist one, in which Theotônio and André Gunder Frank were the key figures, was seen, at my alma mater (the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) at least, as the lesser one, with the Structuralist school, of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, being the 'good' one. In retrospect, given the political views (and some of the economic views too) that Cardoso came to defend from the late 1980s onwards, with his adherence to Neoliberalism, I must conclude that my teachers might have been wrong.
An obituary in Portuguese here.
Graças aos esforços do Instituto de Estudos Latino-Americanos, além (é claro) de outros grupos de pesquisadores, os autores alinhados à teoria marxista da dependência tem vencido a "censura oculta" que se estabeleceu sobre eles no Brasil, e vários espantalhos criados sobre eles (alguns no livro do Mantega sobre a economia política brasileira) tem sido derrubados.
ReplyDeleteUm deles, o Ruy Mauro Marini, tem várias idéias compatíveis com a macroeconomia sraffiana.