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From: mkarim@moses.culver.edu
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 18:21:29 -0500
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Cardoso, Frank, and achievement
A few days ago, one entry on the list caught my attention. If my meory
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, wrting, 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 actvists 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 memebers 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
democarcy 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 startegy,
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 metropolital capital, the state, and local capital in
Brazil.
And yes, if you want my opinion, a lonely Frank is infinitely
prefereble to a Cardoso surrounded by the wrong crowd.
N.B. I hope it will make to PSN. How does it work? If the
moderators think a particular entry has its sociological focus, does it
automatically go to PSN?
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Manjur Karim | Culver-Stockton College
Associate Professor of Sociology | 1 College Hill
mkarim@culver.edu | Canton, MO 63435
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Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu