Persona

Amin, Samir

1931-2018

He was born in Egypt and later studied in Paris, including under the radical structuralist economist Francois Perroux. His 1957 dissertation dissected and anatomized then-modish theories of development and economics, from modernization theory to marginalism. He substituted for such social science fiction an inherently hierarchical and inherently global world-system. After his schooling, he worked for the Egyptian government from 1957-1960 and the Mali government from 1960-1963. From 1963-1970 he was in Dakar, at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP). He left IDEP and founded the Third World Forum in 1973. His masterwork, eventually published as Accumulation on a World Scale, was a revision of his doctoral thesis and was a forerunner and a parallel founder of dependency theory, suggesting the radical notion of delinking. In later years, his focus became the ecological destruction wrought by monopoly capitalism, its inability to resolve the climate crisis, becoming a proponent of food sovereignty.

Ajl, Max. "The core of Samir Amin’s politics." 2018. https://africasacountry.com/2018/08/the-core-of-samir-amin.