The Rise and Fall of Dependency Theory

Dependency theory is one of the influential approaches which exerted a dramatic impact on social and political thoughts as well as developmental and sociological theories of the mid-twentieth century for two decades. It had a huge impact on both theoreticians and politicians of developing countries who saw their ties with capitalist world as the main cause of backwardness and underdevelopment and concluded that the only remedy is to sever the ties. This article is an attempt to show that dependency theory has had a historical nature; it rose to prominence in a special historical context and had the ability to explain the developments of the time. However, historical and universal developments undermined its foundations, and its Marxist and non-Marxist followers abandoned the once-prominent theory and formulated new concepts to explain the new conditions of the world. In other words, overt and covert changes in its founding-father's thinking framework marked the end of dependency theory era.