Bringing freedom back to developmentalism: industrialisation as national independence

Abstract

Abstract Why is developmentalism as an economic school aimed at the industrialisation of peripheral nations? Based on a reading of key authors from both the ‘American System of political economy’ of the 19th century and the Latin American structuralist and dependency schools of the 20th century, this article suggests that the answer lies, not in an economic, but in a political dimension: to ensure the material basis for national freedom. To sustain this hypothesis, the article argues that there is a common implicit conception of freedom shared by Alexander Hamilton, Henry Carey and Friedrich List, on the side of the American school, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and Osvaldo Sunkel, from the Latin American school. This conception is heir to the idea of Machiavelli’s Free State, its core is the notion of liberty as non-dependency and collective autonomy and identifies in industrialisation the way for a periphery to be able to live without depending on the arbitrary will of foreign powers. This definition differs from both the liberal and capability conceptions of freedom and allows for the identification of forms of domination that occur between nations and through the global market that requires the peripheries to erect autonomous collective productive capabilities for their overcoming.