Theotônio dos Santos Junior (November 11, 1936 – February 27, 2018) was a Brazilian economist and sociologist. A leading Marxist theorist of Latin American underdevelopment, he was one of the principal formulators of dependency theory and, later in his career, an advocate of world-systems theory.
Born in Carangola, Minas Gerais, dos Santos was politically active as a student in the early 1960s and helped found the Marxist organization Política Operária (POLOP). Following the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, he went into exile, first in Chile, where he directed the Centre for Socio-Economic Studies (CESO) at the University of Chile and, together with Ruy Mauro Marini, Vânia Bambirra, and Andre Gunder Frank, developed the classic texts of dependency theory, and later in Mexico, where he taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He returned to Brazil in 1980 under a general amnesty and subsequently became a titular and then emeritus professor at the Fluminense Federal University, while also serving from 1997 as coordinator of a UNESCO–United Nations University chair and research network on global economy and sustainable development known as REGGEN.
Dos Santos's 1970 article "The Structure of Dependence," published in the American Economic Review, became one of the most widely cited statements of dependency theory in English. He was a co-founder of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences and later president of the Latin American Sociological Association. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 2018 of pancreatic cancer.
Early life and education Dos Santos was born on November 11, 1936, in Carangola, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. From 1958 to 1961 he studied sociology, political science, and public administration at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, graduating in 1961; while there, he published his first book, Quem são os inimigos do povo? ("Who Are the Enemies of the People?", 1962), which examined class conflict in Brazil and connected proposals for basic social reform to socialism. He went on to graduate study in political science at the newly founded University of Brasília, completing a thesis on the social classes of Brazil in 1964.
At Brasília, dos Santos joined a study group on Karl Marx's Das Kapital together with fellow students Vânia Bambirra and Ruy Mauro Marini, and took courses from the visiting sociologist Andre Gunder Frank. The four later became known as the "quartet" whose ideas formed the nucleus of dependency theory.
Political activism and first exile Dos Santos was active in Brazilian left-wing student and labor movements from his time at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. In 1961 he was among the founders of the Marxist Revolutionary Organization–Workers' Politics (Política Operária, or POLOP), formed from the merger of several small revolutionary groups, including dissidents from the Brazilian Communist Party. He served for a time as the organization's general secretary but broke with a faction that turned to armed rural insurgency inspired by the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara, arguing instead for building a mass political movement.
Following the military coup of 1964, dos Santos went underground and, in 1965, after a military court in Minas Gerais sentenced him in absentia to 15 years' imprisonment for rebellion, sought asylum at the Chilean embassy. He arrived in Chile in 1966, where the sociologist Florestan Fernandes and Eduardo Hamuy, director of CESO, helped him obtain a research position there.
Exile in Chile and the rise of dependency theory At CESO, part of the University of Chile's Faculty of Political Economy, dos Santos reassembled the "quartet" from Brasília: Bambirra joined CESO in 1967, and dos Santos persuaded Marini to relocate his own exile from Mexico to Chile, where he joined CESO in 1970; Frank had already taken a position at the University of Chile's sociology department in 1968 and moved to CESO in 1971. Dos Santos became CESO's director.
In 1967 dos Santos organized a research team on relations of dependency in Latin America, and in 1968 the team produced a short report that is regarded as one of the foundational texts of dependency theory, containing an early version of his classic definition of dependency as a conditioning relationship in which some economies can expand only as a reflection of the expansion of other, dominant economies. He briefly joined Salvador Allende's Socialist Party after Allende's election in 1970, though he never held a leadership position within it.
In 1969 dos Santos was a visiting professor at Northern Illinois University, and in December of that year he presented a paper, "Imperialism Viewed from the Underdeveloped Periphery," to the American Economic Association's annual meeting in New York, on a panel chaired by Paul Sweezy. The paper was published the following year in the American Economic Review as "The Structure of Dependence," which became his best-known text in the English-speaking world.
When the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in the 1973 coup d'état, dos Santos, as CESO's director, was among 95 people the military junta ordered to surrender to the Ministry of Defense; he was the only foreigner named. He took refuge for five months in the Panamanian embassy in Santiago before leaving Chile for a second exile, in Mexico.
Second exile in Mexico Dos Santos arrived in Mexico City in 1974 and joined the Institute for Economic Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In 1976 he became coordinator of the doctoral program in the Faculty of Economics, a post he held until his return to Brazil in 1979, and he also taught political science and philosophy at UNAM. During this period his research shifted toward the dynamics of the world economy, and, working alongside Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Samir Amin, he began developing what became his version of world-systems theory. With Celso Furtado and others, he co-founded the Association of Third World Economists, whose first congress was held in Algeria in 1976.
Return to Brazil
Dos Santos returned to Brazil in January 1980 after being granted amnesty. He became a founding member of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), led by Leonel Brizola, and unsuccessfully ran for governor of Minas Gerais in 1982 and for federal deputy in 1986. He later followed Brizola into the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) after a split within the PDT.
Academically, dos Santos rejoined the University of Brasília in 1988 under Brazil's amnesty law, and in 1985 he was awarded a doctorate in economics by notório saber (a credential recognizing scholarly distinction, roughly equivalent to a doctorate) from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. In 1992 he won a public competition for the position of titular professor of economics at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Niterói, and in 2009 he became professor emeritus in its political science department. From 1997 until his death he served as president and coordinator of the UNESCO–United Nations University Chair and Network on Global Economy and Sustainable Development, known by its Portuguese acronym REGGEN, whose seat he later moved to the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He also served as president of the Latin American Sociological Association, sat on the executive council of the Latin American Association of Science and Technology Policy, and was a consultant to the Latin American Economic System and to the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris.
In 2010, ahead of that year's presidential election, dos Santos published an open letter to former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso criticizing Cardoso's account of his own presidency and disputing his claim to sole authorship of dependency theory. He was also critical of the economic policies of the Lula government, signing an economists' manifesto in 2003 calling for a change in economic policy.
Dos Santos received the 2013 World Marxian Economics Award from the World Association for Political Economy. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the Ricardo Palma University and the National University of San Marcos, both in Lima, Peru, as well as by universities in Argentina and Chile.
Death Theotônio dos Santos died on February 27, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro, at age 81, following treatment for pancreatic cancer.
Dependency theory Dos Santos is best known for his contribution to what came to be called "new dependency," an analysis of the period after World War II in which multinational corporations became the dominant force shaping the economies of peripheral countries. Working alongside Ruy Mauro Marini, Andre Gunder Frank, and Vânia Bambirra during the late 1960s, he argued that the underdevelopment of Latin American and other peripheral economies was not a pre-capitalist condition to be overcome through modernization, but was itself produced by those economies' subordinate insertion into a world capitalist system. In his classic formulation, dependency exists when the economies of some countries can expand only as a reflection of the expansion of other, dominant economies, an arrangement he held could have either positive or negative effects on the dependent country's development but which fundamentally kept such countries in a backward and exploited position.
Dos Santos was particularly concerned with technological dependency: because peripheral countries generally lacked a domestic capital-goods sector, they had to import machinery from dominant countries, which he argued perpetuated foreign control over their economies even as industrialization proceeded. He rejected the possibility of an alliance between the "national" industrial bourgeoisie and the working class of the kind advocated by center-left and communist parties, arguing that Latin American industrial bourgeoisies were too closely tied to foreign capital to pursue an independent, nationalist course of development, and that only an alliance led by the working class could break the ties of dependency. He characterized the region's political choice as one between socialism and fascism.
Dependency theory spread through Latin America, the United States, and Europe in the early 1970s, but the collapse of Allende's government in Chile in 1973, which had drawn heavily on dependency ideas, was followed by growing criticism of the theory, and few scholars today treat it as a rigorous formal theory rather than as a broad conceptual and political orientation toward the global division of wealth.
World-systems theory and "planetary civilization" Beginning with his second exile in Mexico in the 1970s, dos Santos moved away from a primarily Latin American focus toward an analysis of the capitalist world economy as a whole, drawing on Kondratiev waves of long-term economic cycles and collaborating with Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Samir Amin. Unlike Frank, who came to prefer world-systems theory outright, dos Santos continued to use the concept of dependency alongside world-systems analysis for the rest of his career.
In his later writing, notably in the book Desenvolvimento e civilização: homenagem a Celso Furtado (2016), dos Santos developed the concept of a "planetary civilization," which he argued would need to be pluralist and democratic in order to provide the institutional basis for a transition to a higher stage of global development founded on social justice and tolerance for diversity.
REGGEN In 1997 dos Santos became coordinator and later president of the Network on Global Economy and Sustainable Development (Rede de Economia Global e Desenvolvimento Sustentável, or REGGEN), a UNESCO–United Nations University chair and research network on globalization, sustainable development, and economic development. Under REGGEN's auspices he organized international seminars bringing together scholars including Wallerstein, Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi.
Selected works