From: mkarim@moses.culver.edu Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 18:21:29 -0500

To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK

Subject: Cardoso, Frank, and achievement

A few days ago, one entry on the list caught my attention. If my memory serves me write, I think it was by Ted Goertzel. I apologize if I am mistaken. I also apologize for the delay in responding. Many of us participate in e-mail activism after whatever time we find after teaching, writing, and real life activism. And time is indeed a scarce commodity. The comment was a comparison between Andre Gunder Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The writer, in his attempt to make a comment about the practical implication of social research, commented that while Frank remains a lonely moral critique, Cardoso has become the president of Brazil. It is not an exact quote, but the implication is that Frank is condemned to intellectual isolation because he could not make the connection between social critique and practical action. On the other hand, Cardoso' success lies in his ability to capture the most prized political position in his country.

I think the comparison is an example of the kind of careless observations that that we need to be so careful about. While many of us disagree with the "stagnationist" version of dependency theory in Frank's early work, it is very unfortunate to ignore the fact that Frank's conceptualization of dependency, in spite of its shortcomings, caught the imagination of revolutionary intellectuals and activists all over the world. As young activists in Bangladesh, Frank's understanding of metropolitan capital and its intrusion in the periphery provided us with the framework that the ivory tower intellectuals in academia could not offer. And since when capturing political position is the criterion of intellectual honesty? Yes, we are critical sociologists largely because, no matter how we articulate it, our analytical frameworks are inseparable from a critical practico-moral awareness. But that does not mean that success in a political process, permeated with instrumental rationality, is the primary indicator of intellectual achievement? I don't know about the author, but Marx is my infinitely more favorable personality than Bismarck. I don't know enough about Frank's biography to say how "lonely" he is. This enormously powerful scholar (trained in economics, surprisingly, in University of Chicago, the bastion of conservative economics) was always more of a radical sociologist than anything else. He is recently retired from University of Amsterdam. No matter what intellectual fad becomes the war cry of the bored, isolated intelligentsia, Frank's contribution to our understanding of global inequality needs to be recognized.

About Cardoso. I respect Cardoso as a scholar. I think his contribution to the understanding of dependence and development was more accurate than Frank's and other members of the so-called "stagnationist" school. Cardoso (and Enzo Faletto, the Chilian scholar)'s historical-structural analysis is as important as ever. Having said that, let me also point out that while Cardoso's role as an intellectual is undeniable, his role as a politician is not nearly as meaningful. Cardoso and his "western-style" social democracy in the Brazilian context are epitomes of the failure of gradualitic/reformist politics in the semi-periphery. What has Cardoso done to resist the neo-liberal privatization strategy, ensure workers' rights, stop ecological destruction? His records on that issue actually makes Bill Clinton look pretty good. Cardoso and his social democracy utterly failed to make any qualitative change in the structure of the tri-partite alliance between metropolitan capital, the state, and local capital in Brazil. And yes, if you want my opinion, a lonely Frank is infinitely preferable to a Cardoso surrounded by the wrong crowd.

Manjur Karim | Culver-Stockton College Associate Professor of Sociology | 1 College Hill mkarim@culver.edu | Canton, MO 63435 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -