Pensadores Rebeldes, By Cristóbal Kay, Santiago de Chile: Ediciones UDP, 2023. 195 pp. $26.00 (paperback). ISBN: 978-956-314-578-6

Abstract

Professor Emeritus, Cristóbal Kay, is a Chilean-British political economist. His long academic career has focused on two closely related areas of research: the analysis of agrarian transformations in Latin America and the history and debates surrounding development models in this region. Kay has become a leading authority in both fields, with major works including Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, a book originally published in 1989 and which has had several subsequent reprints (Kay 1989), survey articles on the Agrarian Question written with A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010a, 2010b), seminal papers analysing the phenomenon of new rurality (Kay 2008, 2009a) and works combining the two areas of research (Kay 2006, 2009b).

Pensadores rebeldes (Rebel Thinkers) is his latest book to date. It contains six articles that Kay published in various journals over the previous two decades. These are reviews in which he analyses the work and lives of renowned Latin American and/or Latin Americanists intellectuals within Kay's two fields of work. These thinkers challenged the academically and politically dominant theories of their time. The book consists of six chapters, each devoted to a particular thinker, organised in two main thematic parts. The first part analyses four authors who shaped what has been termed Dependency Theory(ies), a paradigm developed in Latin America that challenged developmentalist and modernisation theories. It should be remembered that the latter theories maintained that poverty in peripheral countries was due to the fact that they were at earlier stages of development than those already achieved by central countries. From this point of view, underdevelopment was not due to political and economic inequality between the global South and North, nor to unequal income distribution. Therefore, peripheral countries could overcome underdevelopment by imitating the historical process experienced by industrialised countries. In the mid-20th century, this was the hegemonic view in the bloc of liberal democracies (Rostow 2012 [1960]; Parsons 1966).

The first author reviewed is Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986), who turned the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) into a benchmark for economic policies under the Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) strategy. With ECLAC as his flagship, Prebisch introduced the debate on development/underdevelopment into the Latin American political and social agenda, and beyond. The book then focuses on thinkers from a later generation: Brazilian economists Celso Furtado (1920–2004) and Theotônio dos Santos (1926–1974) and André Gunder Frank (1929–2005), an economist of German and American nationality who was closely involved with Latin America as an intellectual and activist. These authors radicalised development theory by emphasising the political nature of the productive transformation needed to tackle underdevelopment.

The second part of the book consists of its last two chapters, devoted to two authors who worked in the field of agrarian studies: the American economist Solon L. Barraclough (1922–2002) and the Dutch anthropologist Willem Assies (1954–2010). Both made notable contributions to central issues on the academic and political agenda of their time: Barraclough on the impact of Latin American agrarian reforms; Assies, a writer from a later generation, on the role of rural Indigenous societies.

The six authors reviewed in Kay's book have in common that they rethought Latin America's role in the global context by confronting hegemonic paradigms. Their selection owes much to reasons of opportunity: The texts were commissioned by different editorial teams of academic journals. However, it is not a random choice. These requests were made because Kay had a direct or indirect personal or intellectual relationship with these thinkers. This connection allows us to understand the ‘kitchen’ of theories and ideas, that is, the personal and contextual factors on which they were created and evolved.

It could be argued that there are many other intellectuals who have played an equally significant, or even more significant, role than those reviewed in the book. For example, in the development of Latin American dependency theory (or theories), there are other authors such as Aníbal Pinto, Ruy Mauro Marini and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for whom there is no biographical review in the book, although they appear repeatedly in the biographies of others. However, Kay's objective is not to present a history of rural development or studies, but rather to reflect on these areas of research based on a few authors. Thus, for example, the two final sections allow Kay to review some of the debates that dominated Latin American rural studies at the end of the last century, and he does so by comparing the thinkers to whom the reviews are formally dedicated (Barraclough and Assies) with other authors, either on the role of agrarian reforms (e.g., Alain de Janvry) or the great theoretical frameworks of universalist pretensions (liberalism and Marxism). The six thinkers reviewed are an excuse that allows Kay to weave a tapestry in which he exposes topics that he considers relevant and that, at the same time, have most influenced his own work.

This is one of the main features of the book. Kay not only summarises the essential elements of the thinking of these six intellectuals. It is not an encyclopaedic work or a manual on counter-hegemonic Latin Americanist thought in the second half of the last century. On the contrary, throughout the book, there are constant references to the personal and/or academic relationship he had with them. It is a very personal book, which, without being autobiographical, is self-reflective.

Faithful to this idea, the book is not a simple biographical exposition of authors, although formally it is presented as such. Pensadores rebeldes has an internal structure based on two lines of argument. The first is the author's desire to relate the works of these intellectuals to the political context in which they developed and to their life journeys. Kay senses that the three elements are closely related: For many of the authors presented, their biographical development is the result of the political upheavals experienced by Latin America in the second half of the 20th century, and their biographical development and political context directly influence their works. The most obvious case is possibly that of André Gunder Frank, whose epistemological shift (which led him to criticise his previous works) coincided with his definitive return to Europe after Pinochet's coup d'état (1973), after decades of living, researching and engaging in politics in Latin America. But Kay also links the development of Celso Furtado's thinking to his participation in the last three Chilean governments prior to that same coup d'état, which were of very different political persuasions, or that of Theotônio dos Santos with his exile to Chile after the advent of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964).

The second line of argument in the book is that the ideas put forward by these authors are far from being anachronistic or outdated. On the contrary, Kay argues that these ideas permeate the current academic and political agenda, even if they are not always explicitly cited. The interest in Prebisch, Furtado and Gunder Frank lies not only in the notable social and political influence they had at the time or in the fact that they formed a school of thought. Their interest stems from the fact that their main finding remains valid: That poverty in the South is due to an unbalanced and unequal global development model in which Latin America plays a subordinate role. Dependency theory persists, Kay asserts, albeit mutated or overshadowed by other debates.

Pensadores rebeldes is, therefore, a book aimed at remembering the origins of current ideas and debates, in which many Latin Americanists remain engrossed without realising that they are nothing more than updates of ideas and debates that have been with us for three quarters of a century. Without this exercise in memory, we may fall into unnecessary repetition.