The cold war and me

Editor's Note: Andre Gunder Frank's “The Cold War and Me” is a response to the symposium on “Asia, Asian Studies, and the National Security State,” that appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, nos. 1 and 2 (1997). Frank describes a personal trajectory that took him from Nazi Germany as a child to dependency theory and global historical studies under the tutelage of Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues, W. W. Rostow and the M.I.T. Center for International Studies among others in a life that has also led him at various times to Castro's Cuba, Allende's Chile and Brezhnev's Russia. His contribution reflects on intellectual and political trajectories that cut across the cold war divide in the last half of the twentieth century.

Abstract

For social scientists it is a sobering and useful exercise in self-understanding to attempt to see clearly how the direction of our scientific exertions, particularly in economics, is conditioned by the society in which we live, and most directly by the political climate (which, in turn, is related to all other changes in society)….Responding to that cue [from the sphere of politics], students turn to research on issues that have attained political importance….So it has always been. The major recastings of economic thought…were all responses to changing political conditions and opportunities.

—Gunnar Myrdal in Asian Drama

Notes

Editor's Note: Andre Gunder Frank's “The Cold War and Me” is a response to the symposium on “Asia, Asian Studies, and the National Security State,” that appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, nos. 1 and 2 (1997). Frank describes a personal trajectory that took him from Nazi Germany as a child to dependency theory and global historical studies under the tutelage of Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues, W. W. Rostow and the M.I.T. Center for International Studies among others in a life that has also led him at various times to Castro's Cuba, Allende's Chile and Brezhnev's Russia. His contribution reflects on intellectual and political trajectories that cut across the cold war divide in the last half of the twentieth century.