_____________ Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira teaches at Fundação Getulio Vargas, São Paulo. http://www.bresserpereira.org.br lcbresser@uol.com.br FROM ECLAC AND ISEB TO DEPENDENCY THEORY Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira Abstract. In the 1950s, two groups organized around ECLAC, in Santiago, Chile, and ISEB, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, innovated the thinking on Latin American and Brazilian societies and economies. ECLAC mainly criticized the law of comparative advantages and its underlying imperialist views; ISEB focused on conceiving the national-developmentalist ideology for economic growth. The idea of a national bourgeoisie was key in both approaches. The Cuban revolution, the economic crisis of the 1960s, and the military coups in the South Cone, however, made room for criticism of these ideas by dependency theory. By rejecting the possibility of a national bourgeoisie, dependency theory that had developed from this criticism also rejected the possibility of proceeding with the national revolution that was essential to economic growth. In the 1950s, ISEB intellectuals, reflecting upon the industrial and national revolution process that had been under way since 1930, conceived the national-bourgeois or national- developmentalist interpretation of Brazil and Latin America. At the same time, ECLAC intellectuals outlined a criticism of the law of comparative advantages, laying the economic groundwork for the policy of industrialization with active state involvement and formulating the structuralist theory of inflation. 1 These two intellectual groups lived in a social and political context that, ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, had doubted liberalism and mounted ideological criticism against it, depicting it as an instrument on behalf of more developed countries — the UK and the US in particular — and laying odds on national states playing a leading role in the pursuit of economic development. As such, they assigned responsibility for the region’s underdevelopment not only to a lag due to the merchant colonization of Latin American, but also to the imperial center’s interest in keeping developing countries as producers of primary goods, understanding that development should be the fruit of a national strategy designed with the involvement of national bourgeoisie and state technicians. Their theories provided theoretical support for the great development 1 For this reason, ECLAC economists are often referred to as ‘structuralists’. Besides, however, they were developmentalists, as were ISEB’s intellectuals.