9_Law and State_Volume 17

50 Johann Hellwege
world economic context. The deceptive self-assurance that progress could
be made and transferred from the social-technological perspective of the
western industrialized states has been challenged by looking at developmental
problems from the viewpoint of the countries of the Third World.
To the historian, many other notions which have been formulated as valid
knowledge within the scope of dependencia theories, with considerable
verbiage, often appear as mere truismus. “Structural heterogeneity” is
simply the temporal and concrete coexistence of different developmental
stages in various spheres of economics, society or politics — empirical
contemporaneousness of the non-contemporaneous. History has really
never been a matter of a straightforward, mathematical time. On the
other hand, the dependencia school does not provide an adequate explanation
of how the “structural heterogeneity” within present-day developing
countries differs from phenomena such as the complementaryfunctional
coexistence of the “rise of the western world” in the West and
of the Second Serfdom in the East in early modern Europe, or of the
contemporary coexistence of the northern Italian industrial landscape and
the Mezzogiorno. “Structural deformation” as a designation of concrete
historical deviations from construed theoretical-typological models, is only
a different form of circuitous argument, but just as banal8.
Dependencia theories ultimately stand or fall on the basic assumption
that capitalist development and underdevelopment are two sides of the
same coin. The hypothesis deduced from this, that, e. g., the present-day
western industrialized states never knew underdevelopment, so that precapitalist
western Europe was never confronted with problems comparable
to the difficulties of today’s developing countries, hardly stands up
to a historical analysis, although it can be seen that “underdevelopment”
ultimately is recognizable and definable only in comparison to “development
. Similarly, A. G. Frank has argued that Latin America became
capitalist with the Conquista and consequently never experienced feudalism.
His theory, which gave rise to vigorous and highly productive controversies,
can by explained rather more by reference to schematic rigorism
and an anti-modernization affect than to historical research. The
father of the idea” may in this case have been the desire to demonstrate
a strategy of revolution in Latin America which is said to be justified and
imperative within the framework of Marxist historical interpretation.
This is accomplished by regarding capitalism as an already completed
phase in Latin America, and the marginalized classes as the revolutionary
proletarian potential to whom the future belongs8. Just as dependencia
theories are, so to speak, powerless in the face of a phenomenon like the
evelopnicnt of the U.S.A. from colonial dependency into an industrial