From Embedded Autonomy to Counter-Hegemonic Globalization: A 60-Year Adventure in Exploring Comparative Political Economy

Abstract

I got hooked on sociology as a 20-year-old. Engaging with the world as a sociologist, together with colleagues, comrades, and students, has been immensely rewarding for six decades. My work has centered primarily on what were once called developing countries and now comprise the Global South. This article recounts my sociological adventures, from efforts to understand the world as I found it in the early 1960s to my responses to current reactionary trends. I start with my earlier work— Dependent Development (1979) and Embedded Autonomy (1995)—and then move to more recent efforts to construct paradigms of progressive twenty-first-century possibilities. I discuss, first, how a 21st century developmental state might incorporate deliberation and state-society synergies to expand human capabilities, and second, how an amalgam of global and national labor movements together with transnational advocacy networks might pursue a counter-hegemonic globalization capable of confronting global neoliberal capitalism.