Having finished the book, I can at least see Gunder Frank's logic and even his motivation for writing the text. This brings two things to my mind. The first is that in thinking through his argument, it has made me question what I assumed to be fairly settled understandings of world history and, especially the development of modern, western capitalism. These were such commonplaces that it had never entered my mind to question them—because I never had reflected on what I thought. In a way it wasn’t that difficult to accept that Europe and America were so marginal until 1800, that they inspired little contemplation on the part of China or India, that they were only able to participate in the economy at all because they found some silver just sitting around on another continent, because I had never really investigated what took place “Before European Hegemony.” But, on the other hand, I was surprised to feel how difficult it was to accept that argument. It seems that, even though I had never really considered it, I simply assumed that everyone was on an equal tier across the planet and the West just started doing a few things better and others did them a bit worse, until we got to where we are now.
I think Frank is well aware of this Eurocentric predilection—which, I’m sure, has an analogous mental construct in the non-European world (at least that which hasn’t taken on the worldview Fanon talks about in Black Skins, White Masks—and part of his project, surely, is to shift our understanding of the past 2,000-5,000 years so that it is more “holistic.” As Peter and I discussed, this is especially important at the time he is writing because of the triumphalist narratives being proffered by people across the political spectrum. This is one of his audiences. It seems that it is also not an audience with whom he would find it difficult to reason. As noted above, by focusing almost totally on macro-economic issues at the global, regional and occasionally national level, he frames the discussion in terms that would make Neo-liberals proud. Trying to decipher where his loyalties lie in this regard leads me to my other initial conclusion.
As problematic as it may be for me to think in terms of understanding what actually motivates an individual subject, Frank seems to push this way beyond problematic. Though I am sure that it goes with the
In chapters 2-5—which use mostly contemporary terminology to talk about inflation, terms of trade, balance of trade, etc.—he projects all of these ideas into the past with little consideration of how it would have been understood. This is more of a science studies complaint, along the lines of Bruno Latour, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some evidence that, for instance, someone before Adam Smith in 1776 had a notion of inflation. We can look back and see that there was a certain type of monetary crisis in the way that we define it, but to attribute a response to it as the product of a rational understanding of the event is something that should be done with many reflective caveats on the part of the analyst. This is a position that Frank is unable to take, so he transhistoricizes neo-classical models of economics, naturalizes the “response” of not only individuals, but entire regions or “civilizations” as rational in that framework, and assumes that all the data it has taken the hundreds of analysts he has drawn on hundreds of years to collect was readily available to most people at the time. In a way, this assumption goes along with his assertion that rationalism isn’t exclusively European. (He actually says that European rationalism had little to do with their rise in the world economy. Dussel, on the other hand, says that it is a product of that rise—though his timeline makes it necessary for this rise to have occurred earlier than Frank would now allow. It is a bit of a contradiction for Frank to use that the neoclassical cum monetarist understandings of economics and econometrics as his tool for understanding this while simultaneously claiming their cultural roots had nothing to do with it, but only from a certain perspective: he seems to care little about how agents operate or with what logic.)
Here, I am not so much questioning his evidence or his argument about the primacy of
This is the real argument that he is making. It is an argument that he has been having with Perry Anderson and other historians for at least 30 years. It also has important implications for realist International Relations. Thus, in terms of the field, this book has two important arguments to make. With
This theory about the way history should be investigated begins by posing itself as an additional tool, but ultimately rejects any vertical type of understanding of development. One of the main culprits in this regard, from Frank’s perspective, is Marx and anyone working in the Marxist tradition who tries to outline different socioeconomic developmental stages on the way to capitalism. When Frank begins writing,
I take Frank’s argument very much to heart and think he is basically right about the need to consider development holistically and horizontally. I can also see the problems with the not-so-subtle Darwinism lurking beneath the surface of
Here I also think Frank has much to say to statists who want to attribute development to endogenous causes alone. This includes many of the Monetarists and neo-classical economists who are in charge of the leading organizations for international development (with the focus on the “national”). Much of this literature is based on an understanding of the rise of the west as something that it created within its borders. This is only possible when one doesn’t look to hard beyond them or think too much about what was happening elsewhere before it took place. Frank is right to call them to task for having a different understanding of both development itself and the scope one should use in considering what drives it.
This is, perhaps, where Frank’s argument is the strongest—if only he didn’t try to provide any evidence. In addressing the way one could look at he development of history, he tries to use the example of how a series of 17th and 18th century recessions can be connected on a global scale to revolutions in
This is the second goal of the chapter—though one that Frank seems to do completely reflexively. Instead of using an old school Darwinist understanding of internal national development, he uses a more modern understanding of economic cycles. The problem is that it doesn’t do much more than replicate the error he accuses Anderson and other of using a fancier set of assumptions. Looking at the period of 1400-1800 for the whole world economy makes sense in terms of this horizontally integrated history, but when he starts talking in terms of Kondrieff cycles—which are supposedly as transhistorical as Perry Anderson’s stages of feudalism—seems to forget a major component of all of the preceding chapters: most of the period of 1400-1800 can only be accounted for by an economic development exogenous to any predictable cycle, namely, that Europeans pillaged the resources (including the land) and enslaved the labor of several continents that were not integrated into the world system before that time (it should be noted that Oceania barely figures into Frank’s history) Unless one can expect this every few hundred years, it doesn’t seem very reasonable to think about this in terms of a rational cycle. (I would also note that the only time when something seems to happen because of a historical accident is when the east “falls” an event for which Frank gives little reason and only sees it as a coincidence that the West was rising at the same time. He points to the loss of trade by
So there are issues I have with this book. Not because it doesn’t give a good reason to think about an alternative or additional historical methodology, but because it wants to say that it is the ONLY method. This is just contradictory. After outlining the problems with having one dominant framework for interpreting history, Frank is asking us to simply exchange one for the other. He wants antithesis when what we need is synthesis. In addition to the macrohistorical focus on economics, why not have some discussion of the transfer of culture? Habermas, for instance, discusses the coffeehouse as a place where many of the practices of the rising bourgeoisie were honed into the democratic ideal that eventually (re?-)emerges in the 17th or 18th century. Frank talks about the virtual equilibrium in the transfer of scientific/technological knowledge—why not think about other forms of culturally or socially developed knowledge which surely rode alongside goods in their transfer. The answer, in my opinion, is that that would take too much work.
Most of Frank’s final chapter consists of complaining that more people don’t try to do this kind of macrohistory because it is simply too hard. But he is still thinking too small—and overlooking the answer his own method would give to this. Because he is mired in hundreds of years of Eurpean rationalism and egotistical scholarship, both of which have only become intensified in recent years, he simply calls everyone else who isn’t doing this work ideological and, basically, bad scholars. Here he is using the model that he critiques throughout the book: what he really should be asking is what does the macroeconomic structure have to do with this and how can we change that. This is where his argument would really have some effect. Because as necessary as this scholarship is, it will never be possible so long as the model of rewards for academic and intellectual work is based on the market model wherein one must: 1)publish complete, self contained arguments in a short amount of time; 2)assert ones own authority and ability above all others and think of scholarship in terms of competition; and 3) Worry more about furthering one’s own career even at the expense of producing or contributing to a broad field of knowledge. Though Marx may have been “wrong about everything” as Frank says, until more of us are willing and able to suffer our carbuncles in destitution for decades at a time to produce a body of work, few will be able to surpass his scholarship.
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