World Society Approaches to Development

Abstract

Ever since the early 1960s, social scientists from very different disciplines tried to explain why some societies grow faster, have a more egalitarian distribution of incomes, a better social development, and more stability than other societies. In the political science and sociology debate in progress in the Western world about the international system, it was — among a variety of possible explanations — dependency and world society arguments that gained considerable acceptance (Russett, 1983a; Weede, 1985a). Dependencia and world system/society theories have in common put the main blame for stagnation, inequality and repression in the South on the workings of the international system since its beginnings with the discovery of the American continent in 1492. Small but influential subgroups of international scholarship notwithstanding, whose world society argument is based on military threat from the outside, most of the dependence schools (Roehrich and Zinn, 1983) share some basic agreement on the predominance of economic over other causal development factors, and quite a few accept in principle some categories of Marxist/neo-Marxist political economy, including theories of imperialism.