Lawrence E. Harrison - Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case

Underdevelopment
Is a State of Mind

The Latin American Case
Updated Edition

Lawrence E. Harrison

Copyright 1985 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College
New Introduction copyright 2000 by Lawrence E. Harrison

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The hardback edition was previously catalogued by the Library of Congress as follows:

Harrison, Lawrence E.

Underdevelopment is a state of mind.

Bibliography: p.

1. Latin AmericaEconomic conditions1945

2. Economic developmentSocial aspects 3. Culture.

4. Economic developmentPsychological aspects.

I. Title

HC125.H384 1985 330.98'0038 85-9117

ISBN 1-56833-147-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-56833-147-8

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

I am indebted to a large number of people who have contributed to the realization of this book, principally by criticism but often with their encouragement.

Several have focused on individual chapters: Robert Angyal, Arturo Cruz, Jack Harris, Eduardo Lizano, Toms Pastoriza, Len Tenembaum, and Bernardo Vega. Several others have read the entire book and provided me with helpful comments: Shirley Christian, Luigi Einaudi, Amy Firfer, Georgie Anne Geyer, James Goodsell, Neil Isaacs, Annik LaFarge, Michael Novak, Lawrence Pezzullo, Carlos Rangel, Reese Schonfeld, Michael Scully, Francis X. Sutton, and Sidney Weintraub.

I am particularly indebted to the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, which provided me with an ideal setting for writing the book for the better part of two years. The comments and encouragement of Samuel Huntington and Dwight Perkins were of particular importance. Evelyn Brew did a magnificent job in typing the manuscript. Chet Haskell played a key role in the Centers decision to publish the book, and Virginia Livingston skillfully shepherded the manuscript through the publishing process. And it was the Center that located Nancy Macmillan to do her superb job of editing.

I am above all indebted to Jorge Domnguez, who studied the entire manuscript and whose scholarly insights, criticisms, challenges, and encouragement were invaluable.

Finally, I owe a special debt to my wife, Polly Fortier Harrison, whose decision in 1971 to pursue graduate work in anthropology, whose subsequent professional career in development anthropology, and whose insightful comments on the manuscript have all played an important part in the evolution of my thinking on the relationship between culture and development.

Not all of the people mentioned above agree with everything the book says. I alone bear the full responsibility for that.

Lawrence E. Harrison

To Polly, Julia, Beth, and Amy

Underdevelopment is not just a collection of statistical indices which enable a socio-economic picture to be drawn. It is also a state of mind, a way of expression, a form of outlook and a collective personality marked by chronic infirmities and forms of maladjustment.

Augusto Solazar Bondy
A Peruvian Intellectual

It is a clich, but it is worth repeating: The world looks vastly different in 1999 from the way it looked in 1985, when Underdevelopment Is a State of MindThe Latin American Case was first published. And so does Latin America.

The Soviet Union still existed in 1985, although Mikhail Gorbachevs rise to power in that year would soon lead to both the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the USSR. Economic distress associated with the oil-price shocks and the debt burden brought Latin America to a crossroads that would lead to the supplanting of military governments by elected officials in all countriesincluding Pinochets Chile and Sandinista Nicaraguaexcept Cuba. That same crossroads led to the displacement of inward-looking, protectionist, and often statist economic policies by outward-looking free market policies. And the same crossroads substantially spelled the end of the mistrustful and conflictive United States versus Latin America dumbbell relationship that had dominated the Hemispheric dialogue during the sixties, seventies, and a good part of the eighties.

Those decades were the heyday of dependency theorythe near-dogma that the Third World, Latin America in particular, was exploited by First World imperialism, above all Yankee imperialism, through the world market and the multinational corporations headquartered in the First World. Not only did this explain the relative poverty of the Third World. It also explained authoritarianism in Third World politics: The dictators were allegedly installed and supported by the imperialists in collusion with their Latin American bourgeois lackeys. The imperialists were also engaged in a campaign to perpetuate the privilege of their bourgeois lackeys and thwart the aspirations of the masses for social justice. The Sandinista anthem captured the emotional intensity of the dependency victims:

Lucharemos contra el Yanqui, enemigo de la humanidad!
(We will fight against the Yankee, enemy of humanity!)

A decade after Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind was published, Mexico, among the most stridently dependencista and anti-Yanqui countries in the region, would be locked in an embrace with the United States and Canada through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). And the president of Brazil would be Fernando Henrique Cardoso, formerly a For many years, dependency theory was the dominant interpretation of Latin Americas condition in the Latin American Studies Association, the organization of U.S. Latin Americanist scholars, and contrary views were often treated with intolerance.

But today, dependency theory is dead. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore embraced the world market and foreign capital and, far from being exploited, vaulted from the Third World to the First World in three decades, and there they remain, even after the Asian Crisis, from which they have recovered far more rapidly than most observers expected. Authoritarianism, poverty, and injustice were, after all, chronic in Latin America long before the United States became involved in the region. Social injustice in Latin America, as measured by inequitable income distribution, is among the most extreme in the world to this day.

Largely unnoticed in U.S. academic circles, an inward-looking theory that focuses on cultural values and attitudes, consistent with the thesis of Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind, may gradually be filling the explanatory vacuum left by dependencys collapse. Recently, Latin America has taken the lead in articulating the theory and contriving initiatives to convert the theory into actions designed not only to accelerate economic growth but to fortify democratic institutions and promote social justice. But culture theory also has advocates in Africa and Asia.