Dependence and Freedom

A sweeping account of an intellectual tradition that redefined the relation between socialism and national liberation in the era of late capitalism.

Dependence and Freedom reconstructs an intellectual tradition that was formative in the Chilean road to socialism under the Allende government. Theories of dependence, in particular, shed crucial insights into the novel forms of international subordination and of political authoritarianism that ensued from conditions of advanced monopolistic integration in the capitalist world economy. Writing beyond the orbit of Western Marxism, intellectuals in this tradition redefined the idea of the democratic republic by framing the scientific development of the productive forces – led by skilled and devoted workers’ parties – to be a central precondition for popular and national liberation. Framed through the lens of political theory, the book shows that dependentistas also espoused an existentialist ethics of responsibility that developed in close connection with the rise of a mass movement for social change, and with transnational networks for antifascist struggle in the aftermath of the 1973 coup in Chile. In posing fundamental questions of strategy, of commitment, and of human freedom, dependentistas advanced a framework for the reunification of thought and action that speaks to the most pressing challenges facing critical theory today.