for posting to WSN and/or wherever you deem appropriate
thanks
agf
ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
University of Toronto
96 Asquith Ave. Toronto, Ont. Canada M4W 1J8
Tel:416-972 0616 Fax:416-972 0071
e-mail: agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca
"Thanx" was my one word response to "The Political Economy of the
World-System Section [of the American Sociological Association]
hereby confers the 1997 Award for a Career of Distinguished
Scholarship to Andre Gunder Frank. Presented August 11, 1997 by
Terry Boswell, [outgoing] PEWS Chair, on behalf of the section"
on an engraved plaque. I now beg to use this medium to add a few
more words of thanks for this conferral to Terry and my other
good friends, and especially to my friendly enemies, and other
colleagues in PEWS.
To begin with, I echo my old friend Sid Mintz who put his own
1996 lecture to the American Anthropological Association into
plain English by translating their "distinguished" to his own
"extinguished." That seems all the more apt for me after our
incoming PEWS chair and also old friend, friendly enemy and two
time/ing co-author Giovanni Arrighi at the same ASA meetings
first dissected Development Theory into its constituent trinity
of Western modernization and dependence theses, world-system and
post-modernist anti-theses, and then discarded them all in favor
of East Asian regionalism.
For my extinguished part, I am once again jumping from all of the
above's leading edge off the edge to none of the above. I have
been discarding one post-modern layer after another from the
dependent modern/izing world-system onion. The first step was to
discard the the emperor's indigestible modernization theory peel
and replace it with dependent development of underdevelopment.
The next layers to go were the underdevelopment of development in
the capitalist world-system. Then I dropped Wallerstein's only
world-like five hundred year world-system hyphen in favor of a
real five thousand year world system. My also friendly enemy
Chris Chase-Dunn baptized it the central world system to convey
parentage by my world system and David Wilkinson's Central
Civilization. At the same ASA meetings my also old friend Jose
Bell Lara nicknamed it simply the expanding world system. That,
my also old friend and some times co-author but now increasingly
friendly enemy Immanuel Wallerstein says, just emasculates all of
the old onion instead of helping give it new body as my now
extinguished self pretends. But I contend that since the old
world expanded beyond my friend Janet Abu-Lughod's thirteenth
century world system and became whole/ly global with the
incorporation of the 'new' world, it also becomes necessary to
study and try to transform global 'development' through the
globology of my also friend Al Bergesen, who initiated this PEWS
round in the first place.
Being more extinguishedly simple minded and therefore not so
adept at any fancy ology, I deny that globalization is only
recent, instead find globalism long since, and prefer just
dealing with the global whole. And simply extinguished as I now
am, I see Braudel's old European world-economy and Wallerstein's
modern world-system, as well as the REnewED rise of Arrighi's
East Asian region as constituent parts and functional
transformational processes of global "development" if any, in
which these 'economies,' 'systems,' and 'regions' only trade
structural positions in an unending cyclical game of musical
chairs. Now the sun is again appearing full circle around the
globe to rise and shine in the East while the Western 'modern
world-system' is developing underdevelopment even to its core. So
to avoid also extinguishing the development theory of political
economy of the world system [with or without hyphen] not to
mention all of us succumbing altogether to the end of history in
the coming anarchy of the clash of civilizations, the title of my
forthcoming and yet probably also already extinguished book
proposes instead to seek and promote unity in diversity in The
Global Economy in the Asian Age: ReORIENT.
Thanx again
Gunder Frank