Justice, Ethics and Liberation: The Struggle of Andre Gunder Frank

Abstract

The work of Andre Gunder Frank has been, over the last three decades, much criticized and little understood. Indeed, reactions to his work have often varied from shock to fear because he boldly challenges longstanding ostensible truisms about development, modernity and progress. His criticisms evolved and emerged over a lifetime of scientific analysis and his own experiences with oppression, persecution and being viewed as an enemy or a deviant. Despite the fact that over the course of his lifetime, many of his observations about politics, economy and society were proven correct and citations to his social science research exceed those of many Nobel Peace Prize recipients, it was not until recently that he was honored as the first distinguished scholar of the International Political Economy Section of the International Studies Association as well as a festschrift on the year of his retirement from the University of Amsterdam. The festschrift represents a tribute to Andre Gunder Frank's research and scholarly contributions. Along with noteworthy colleagues from academic departments in economics, politics, history, anthropology and sociology honoring him in the festschrift, Frank's work also gained the attention of religious groups and influenced their protests against injustice. In their daily work, these groups included Frank's consistent objections to the unjust distribution of benefits and burdens, rights, responsibilities, deserts and needs in the world. His contribution to academic knowledge is indisputable and many of his concerns with injustice have been acknowledged and incorporated in the programs and protests of religious groups all over the world. At a time of almost uncritical acceptance of dominant economic assumptions and ever-increasing disparities between core and dependent nations, however, many people still consider his ideas to be too provocative, anti-modern and deviant. For this reason, it is timely and crucial to examine the utility of some of Frank's work for the study of injustice with comprehension rather than political prejudice. Frank's work is richly suggestive - from deviance to development to modernity to the World Bank. Even his most recent claim, that the world economic system in really a few thousand years old rather than a few hundred, challenging most mainstream social science research which relies largely on Eurocentric perspectives on history inspires its own exposition. Our examination of his work, however, will focus on its relationship to justice, ethics and liberation because of the sympathy certain politically active religious ecclesiastics and liberation theologians manifest for his work in spite of deviant portrayals by other groups. Of course, this discussion will include Frank's explicit as well as implicit objections to facades of justice. Justice that is not informed by spiritual and material conditions and social relations that are historically specific is often nothing other than injustice or ethnocentric prescriptions for fairness - justice for just-us, rather than for everyone. Frank objects to attempts to develop all people, nations, states, and even nature under any one homogenous model, the monolithic model which can tolerate no deviation. His objections to the dynamics of dependency and marginalization, and to the capital over-accumulation of core nations also are examples of his concerns with injustice that have been acknowledged and re-presented by religious groups. Extensions of his work are useful for current research on social movements and the study of indigenous peoples.(1) Before turning to a more detailed analysis of his work, let us begin with a brief biographical account, his depiction as a deviant, and how certain deviants (i.e. political deviants such as Frank) fight injustice.(2) The Making of a Political Deviant Frank was in his teens when he arrived in the United States with his father during World War II. He subsequently went to high school and college there. …