The Contradictions of a Contrarian: Andre Gunder Frank

AMONG ACADEMIC ACTIVISTS I KNOW, THE TWO NAMES MOST FREQUENTLY CITED for inspiring us to pursue our work are Noam Chomsky and Andre Gunder Frank. (1) In April, we lost one of them in Andre Gunder Frank. Gunder must have put literally thousands on that path, who in turn reached perhaps millions of students in some fashion. He was released from a decade-long battle with several cancers on April 23, 2005, when in a weakened state complicated by potent infections acquired in hospitals he succumbed to pneumonia. Gunder's life, like most, was characterized by struggle. He struggled in childhood, with an absentee, yet successful father, whom Gunder missed and admired. Fleeing the persecution of leftists and Jews, of which Gunder's father was both, the family took refuge in Switzerland. His father then went to California and sent for the family later. Gunder imagined him to have been suffering in poverty there, only to find a Hollywood screenwriter, a celebrity of sorts, driving a convertible. Gunder suffered from loneliness, complicated by biochemically rooted psychological issues that challenged him throughout his life. Conversely, he was handsome as a young man and could be, in a sincere way, charming and disarming. Gunder was indeed always full of contradictions. Gunder's education was as eclectic as the man. His learning combined a mixture of public schools, elite boarding academies, and college at Swarthmore, with job experience across the U.S. in timber mills, factories, and in sundry low-paid services. His intellectual abilities could not be ignored, and, at the counsel of his father, he pursued Ph.D. study as an economist at the University of Chicago after graduating from Swarthmore. Gunder's life was a series of unlikely circumstances, both tragic and humorous. At Chicago he studied briefly under Milton Friedman. Uncle Miltie, as Gunder called him, clearly put into relief all that was wrong with economics. Gunder quickly came to be known, in the disparaging language of economics, as an institutionalist, who took his inspiration from the likes of Thorstein Veblen and Gunnar Myrdal. Far from innumerate, Gunder rightly held, in the language of Myrdal, that there was a political element in the development of economic theory that was far more explanatory than the logic of late 19th-century mathematics in revealing the workings of the economy and society. Therefore, Gunder fashioned his own eclectic program of self-directed study at Chicago, which included much time spent with anthropologists. Besides, as he once related to me, the girls were pretty. Gunder relayed that observation without the bravado of a sexist, but in a shy self-deprecating way. Gunder treated women in a manner that combined the considerateness of a 19th-century gentlemen (at least the positive depiction of it) with the deep respect of a feminist who understood the struggle of women. One of his innumerable jobs brought Gunder to Miami in 1999 for a short-term academic position. Having battled cancer for several years and sensing that the end was always near, Gunder indulged the small vice, which I suspect was connected to the memory of his father, of acquiring a convertible. My fondest memory of Gunder was driving along South Beach with him sporting his guayabera and straw hat as he admired the scenery in all its dimensions. One could tell he recognized the irony and humor of it all. Filmed in black and white, it could have been perfectly captured only by Fellini. Gunder's dissertation at Chicago focused on Ukrainian agriculture. He had the privilege of conducting research during one summer in Kiev. While a young man there in the 1950s, his experiences ranged from teaching a young woman to swim the Dnieper River, to being caught up in the Cold War and coming under suspicion as a spy. Though he respected the Soviet experiment at the time, Gunder always followed the truth, and he labeled its agriculture a failure. …