ABSTRACT
Cardoso and Faletto are probably the most important theorists of the dependency school. Their contributions were published at approximately the same time as Frank’s and show a sophistication and a complexity of greater enduring quality than that of Frank. Cardoso and Faletto developed analyses of several patterns of historical development (what they called a “historical-structural” approach) in which domestic economic processes emerging from the dependence on international markets had strong implications for class alliances and, in turn, political regimes and policies. Building on the periodization of economic dependency, analysts such as Furtado and Cardoso and Faletto saw important differences between economies that were dominated by foreign-owned “enclaves” and those that had an ownership that was primarily national. They suggested that different historical processes emerged from these two types of economies as they moved from an outward orientation toward import-substitution industrialization (ISI).
In the selection presented here, Cardoso and Faletto develop a series of paths, of which national populism was the most important, that emerged during the ISI period. They describe how the economic changes that came after the depression gave rise to new class forces—in particular, the emerging industrialists and the growing urban proletariat—that changed the character of national politics and the role of the state 150in the economic life of each nation. National populism was a historical period in which an alliance of the new bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the lower classes controlled the state, taking it away from the oligarchy that dominated during the export-oriented period. This state then pursued active economic policies designed both to protect national industries from foreign competition and to incorporate the lower classes into the economy and society.
As we will see, this populist period would become a crucial one for later analyses. Indeed, Cardoso and Faletto described the postpopulist period as one in which the “in-ward” oriented economic policies would lead to economic crises that could only be solved by “opening the market to foreign capital or making a radical political move toward socialism.” If the former path was chosen, as it was in most countries, the result would be an increasing “internationalization” of the Latin American market and the rise of a “new dependency.” In many ways this analysis foreshadowed the subsequent work of O’Donnell, which we present in our final section.
