Scholarly discussion of the fate of the Third World has long been domi­nated by North American and European authors. Yet in recent years the writings of Third World social scientists have often been creative, and are worthy of more attention in the United States. This book makes the work of three outstanding Latin American sociologists readily available to the English-reading public: Gino Germani of Argentina (who has moved to Harvard University); Pablo Gonzalez Casanova of Mexico; and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil. Their major writings are summarized, and then interpreted in the context of material from extensive interviews with the authors. In these interviews, the authors explain the events--personal, professional, and political--that have had major influence on their thought. Their views range from Germani's synthesis of orthodox European and American sociology, as adapted to his detailed empirical studies of the modernization of Argentina and other countries in this hemisphere, through Gonzalez Casanova's interpretation of the forces of exploitation, internal as well as external, that dominate the Mexican political system, to Cardoso's influential revisions of Marxist theory to deal with the basic situation of dependency that shapes the range of options open to the Latin American countries, especially Brazil. These "inside" views of the devel­opment process often sharply diverge from the dominant opinions among "outsiders." By understanding the differences, readers in the United States can gain direct insight into Latin American social reality, and can find ways of improving North American social science by bringing to the surface some unstated assumptions. One theme common to all three authors is their concern with issues that arise from policy debates: they focus on questions of practical import, rather than abstruse theoretical models. Yet they use sophisticated tools of social science that go beyond ideological rhetoric, and thus discipline political argument with scholarly rigor.

Upon its publication in 1989, this was the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Latin American School of Development and an invaluable guide to the major Third World contribution to development theory. The four major strands in the work of Latin American Theorists are: structuralism, internal colonialism, marginality and dependency. Exploring all four in detail, and the interconnections between them, Cristobal Kay highlights the developed world’s over-reliance on, and partial knowledge of, dependency theory in its approach to development issues, and analyses the first major challenges to neo-classical and modernisation theories from the Third World.

Hofman, a researcher with the Chile-based Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, uses growth accounting methods and previously unavailable long-term series data to assess the economic performance of the region during the century from a comparative and historical perspective. In particular he compares Latin American economies to those of advanced capitalist economies, to newly industrialized economies, and to Spain and Portugal because of the historical ties. He looks at the reasons for the poor or negative growth during the 1980s and the apparent recovery in the 1990s and at such problems as debt, income inequality, high inflation, cyclical instability, and political and policy instability. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

At the end of World War II, several Latin American countries seemed to be ready for industrialization and self-sustaining economic growth. Instead, they found that they had exchanged old forms of political and economic dependence for a new kind of dependency on the international capitalism of multinational corporations. In the much-acclaimed original Spanish edition (Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina) and now in the expanded and revised English version, Cardoso and Faletto offer a sophisticated analysis of the economic development of Latin America. The economic dependency of Latin America stems not merely from the domination of the world market over internal national and "enclave" economies, but also from the much more complex interact ion of economic drives, political structures, social movements, and historically conditioned alliances. While heeding the unique histories of individual nations, the authors discern four general stages in Latin America's economic development: the early outward expansion of newly independent nations, the political emergence of the middle sector, the formation of internal markets in response to population growth, and the new dependence on international markets. In a postscript for this edition, Cardoso and Faletto examine the political, social and economic changes of the past ten years in light of their original hypotheses.