Andre Gunder Frank
Andre Gunder Frank (February 24, 1929 – April 23, 2005) was a German-American economic historian and sociologist who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.
Biography
Frank was born in Germany to Jewish parents, pacifist writer Leonhard Frank and his second wife Elena Maqenne Penswehr, but his family fled the country when Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor. Frank received schooling in several places in Switzerland, where his family settled, until they emigrated to the United States in 1941. Frank's undergraduate studies were at Swarthmore College. He earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1957 at the University of Chicago. His doctorate was a study of Soviet agriculture entitled Growth and Productivity in Ukrainian Agriculture from 1928 to 1955. Ironically, his dissertation supervisor was Milton Friedman, a man whose laissez faire approach to economics Frank would later harshly criticize.