Origins of the dependency theory: trajectories, actors, and institutions

Abstract

“Dependency” has been, at different epochs, a central theme in the Latin American intellectual field. It emerged strongly during the second half of the 19th century, around the discussions on “Mental Emancipation” and “Second Independence”. It continued in the 1920s with the cosmopolitanism/ nationalism debate, and reappeared in the late 1950s with the decolonisation movements and liberationism. It developed as a sociological issue and theory of social change in the Chilean academic field between 1964 and 1973, under the impulse of a sustained policy of consolidation of the scientific system and higher education. It was during these years that the socialist government of Salvador Allende was democratically elected and Santiago became the hub of a dynamic regional academic circuit. In this chapter, we propose to analyse, from a socio-historical perspective, the conditions of emergence of the Latin American School of Dependence (Blomstrom and Hettne, 1990) and the particularities of the social space in which this knowledge was produced.