Andre Gunder Frank

Immanuel and Me With - Out Hyphen

Contribution to a Festschrift in Honor of
Immanuel Wallerstein	
edited by Giovanni Arrighi & Wally Goldfrank				
JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH 
vol VI, Nr. 2  Summer-Fall 2000

This essay is my personal and intellectual tribute to Immanuel Wallerstein. It takes the form of my also personal intellectual account of our first independent, then joint, and again increasingly separate journeys through the maze of the world [-] system with and without a hyphen. Imagine our relations as a horizontal Y shaped rope. It begins in strands that in the 1960s run parallel and then become intertwined during the 1970s and 1980s until the, or at least some, strands separate again in the 1990s to go off in increasingly different directions like a horizontal Y. Why?

My answer is both circumstantial and personal in which the personal choices and trajectories are driven primarily by world and local political circumstance. Of course, my account reflects my own perspective on this story. However it also includes other colleagues and friends of Immanuel and me, in particular our co-authors [in several books and edited volumes] Giovanni Arrighi and Samir Amin, with whom I can check this account. Others, alas, are no longer with us.

Our Parallel Development in the 1960s

Significantly, all early world-systematizers previously worked in and on the 'Third World,' which led to our subsequent collaboration and friendship. Immanuel, Terence Hopkins, Giovanni Arrighi, Otto Kreye, Samir Amin and Herb Addo worked in or on Africa, and the latter two were born there. My 'dependency' colleagues, like Theotonio dos Santos, and I of course worked in and primarily on Latin America. Our respective and also common personal commitments to and scholarly cum political experiences In various parts of the Third Word are therefore inescapable antecedents and components of the development of the world-system [henceforth WS] perspective/approach/theory/analysis. Indeed, I recalled in my contribution to the festschrift for Theotonio dos Santos (Lopez ed. 1997), to which Immanuel and Samir also contributed, that Theotonio did so from a Latin American perspective because as he said the Third World losers have to analyze the workings of the WS and imperialism for themselves and cannot just let the WS winners use their own triumphalist platform to write WS history FOR them (see dos Santos 1978, 1993 among many others).

Indeed, in some cases the insistence on the WS capitalist structure/ accumulation/ development/ history WHOLE world pie actually preceded the detailed analysis of African, Latin American, or Brazilian dependent slices of the pie. Thus, it was Samir Amin's 1957 doctoral dissertation that was then elaborated into his ACCUMULATION ON A WORLD SCALE, which was published in French in 1970 and in English in 19xx. Only after his dissertation did Samir write a number of dependence type works on Africa. Giovanni Samir and I met in Paris in 1968/9, and Samir visited me in Santiago in 1971, where I introduced him to Theotonio and other dependentistas, Samir then invited us and others to a major international conference he organized in Dakar in 1972 to introduce dependency theory to Africans. But with his agreement, some of us also smuggled some nascent WS theory and analysis in as well.

Working in Latin America I had pleaded for an analysis of the 'world system' [without a hyphen] since the mid-1960s and in 1970 presented a 150 page paper on "the development of a theory and analysis adequate to encompass the structure and development of the capitalist system on an integrated worlds scale" to a conference in Lima. Further expanded, that became two complementary books written in Chile before the 1973 military coup and published in 1978, WORLD ACCUMULATION 1492 - 1789 and DEPENDENT ACCUMULATION AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT

However still in Chile in 1973, I also received, welcomed and marveled at the manuscript of Immanuel's MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM. It came with a request from the publisher, I supposed at Immanuel's suggestion, to write a blurb for the dust jacket. I gladly did and wrote: The first and only serious, comprehensive and successful attempt to advance an analysis and explanation of the early development of a world economy, the understanding of which is essential for the proper appreciation of all subsequent development. This book should become a classic immediately upon publication.

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK University of Chile.

Immanuel and I working independently but parallel, and some extent Samir who also helpfully commented on mine, had written about the development of the same world capitalist system from its origins in Europe between 1450 and 1500 and its spread from its West European center to incorporate more and more of the world overseas. Our treatment was similar not only of center-periphery relations but also of West-East European relations and their impact on such 'minor' controversial issues as the 'second serfdom' in Eastern Europe. One major difference between our books was that Immanuel's much more erudite and detailed one ended in 1640, while my more superficial one went on to 1789, which Immanuel would do in his second volume. Another major difference was that Immanuel focused more on the center/ periphery/ semi-periphery structure of the system, while I devoted more effort to identifying the cyclical dynamic of the system and how especially the recurrent long economic crises of capital accumulation modified the geographic extension and economic structure of the world capitalist system. In his volumes II and III, Immanuel would then devote increasingly more attention to this cyclical dynamic and its structural consequences as well.

Our Common Development in the 1970s and 1980s

It should therefore not be surprising that henceforth in the 1970s and 1980s some of our work became intertwined, although our circumstances and styles remained very different. We collaborated at conferences, co-authored books, and Immanuel published articles of mine in his REVIEW, even after we started to disagree. At dozens of conferences that we both attended, no matter what the issue - and there were many , Immanuel and I were now mostly in greater agreement with each other than either of us was with anybody else. Among these have been the more than a dozen International Conferences on World-Economy sponsored by his Braudel Center, the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and the first Max Planck and then Starnberger Institut of Otto Kreye whom I introduced to Immanuel when I was a visiting fellow there in 1974/5. Three members of each of the institutes, eg. Terry Hopkins, Giovanni and Immanuel for his institute plus Samir and myself were the original inner sanctum. We were joined at almost every conference by Theotonio, Anibal Quijano from Peru and the German/Venezuelan Heinz Rudolf Sonntag, representing Latin America, Amiya Bagchi, Kinhide Mushakoji and Pu Shan from Asia and a more changing cast of characters from Africa and Europe. And as the site of the conference moved around the world the local organizer invited additional 'regional representatives' for each occasion. My late wife Marta derisorily compared us with the "Canasta Club" of always the same old ladies in tennis shoes who go around to each other's homes to play, except that we went around the world to do so, from Germany to France and Italy, to Senegal, Brazil, Venezuela, India and Japan.

Our world-systemic historical interests, then as always, included concerns with 'the present as history' to use the bon mot of Paul Sweezy, who then published several of our products on contemporary affairs at Monthly Review. Immanuel initiated a long 'Kondratieff' cycle research group at his Fernand Braudel Center and devoted a whole issue of REVIEW (II,4,Spring 1979) to its research hypotheses. Giovanni Arrighi had already persuaded me...