There is a familiar rhythm to Latin America’s economic narrative: each reform is hailed as a turning point, each administration promises a take-off, and each crisis is later explained as a deviation from a supposedly sound path. Antunes de Oliveira’s Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias does not merely offer another iteration of this well-rehearsed genre; it challenges the very frameworks that have long defined what counts as progress or failure. This is not a book about what went wrong, but about why the criteria for “going right” were flawed from the outset.
The central argument displaces the assumed polarity between neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism. These are not opposing strategies, but parallel expressions of a shared developmental imaginary. Both rest on the promise of capitalist convergence with the Global North. Neoliberalism advocates market liberalization as the route to growth and global integration. Neodevelopmentalism centers the state as the instrument of industrial policy and redistribution. Each treats underdevelopment as a technical deviation to be corrected through reform. Neither questions the global hierarchies that constrain the very process they aim to activate.
Both approaches rely on idealized visions—either of market rationality or of state capacity. Policy failure is explained retroactively through the language of insufficiency: too much or too little intervention, weak implementation, or adverse external shocks. What remains unexamined are the structural conditions that make coherence impossible.
Antunes de Oliveira offers a nuanced empirical account grounded in the trajectories of successive governments in Brazil and Argentina. Despite variation in rhetoric and emphasis, the policy logic remains intact. Administrations alternate between liberalization and state activism, yet they continue to rely on the same institutional tools—state-owned banks, subsidized credit, tax exemptions, and protectionist incentives—first consolidated under military rule. These instruments are not deployed to restructure production but to manage distributional coalitions and stabilize political alliances.
In market-oriented governments, this takes the form of fiscal discipline and deregulation, accompanied by discretionary interventions hidden behind technical language. In state-oriented projects, the same apparatus is repurposed for politically expedient spending and firm-level incentives. The result is fiscal opacity, institutional fragmentation, and the reproduction of volatility.
Instead of being pursued as a strategic reordering of economic relations, development is reduced to a vocabulary for governing crisis and mere institutional design, while dependency is simultaneously reinterpreted as a temporary obstacle. As a result, the models reproduce the very dynamics they claim to overcome.
Rather than generate transformation, these tools are absorbed into a logic of compensation. Policy becomes reactive, driven by the demands of coalition maintenance and electoral survival. The underlying structure remains unchanged. Economic volatility is not corrected but absorbed. Each cycle reinforces the institutional constraints it inherits. The failure to deliver sustained growth or redistribution does not prompt reconsideration of the model; it is rationalized as incomplete reform.
From this perspective, the language of development does not describe an achievable horizon. It operates as a legitimating discourse. It frames dependency as a problem of internal adjustment, displacing attention from the international reproduction of subordination. Developmental goals become diagnostic devices used to identify shortcomings in execution, rather than indicators of structural limitation. The problem is not the absence of policy coherence, but the expectation that such coherence is possible under conditions of dependency.
What the analysis foregrounds is the role of international hierarchy in shaping domestic possibility. Development is not the outcome of sequencing or institutional fine-tuning, but the product of conflictual social relations embedded in an unequal global system. The binary between developed and underdeveloped obscures this. The notion of catch-up—whether via markets or states—reproduces the assumption that convergence is possible, and that divergence must be corrected. In doing so, it sustains the very asymmetries it claims to address.
The conceptual intervention lies in the redefinition of development itself. Rather than a linear path or a normative destination, development is treated as the contingent outcome of struggles over state capacity, access to resources, and international constraints. Uneven and combined development replaces the convergence model, offering a framework in which divergence is not failure but form. Under this lens, dependency is not a historical stage but a persistent condition that structures the reproduction of peripheral capitalism.
The analysis does not ask how to govern better under conditions of crisis. It begins from the recognition that crisis is not an exception to be managed, but the normal mode of peripheral reproduction. Development, in this context, is not the solution—it is the name given to the problem.
This reframing shifts the debate from policy choice to epistemological framing. Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina challenges the developmental common sense that has long dominated Latin American political economy. It rejects the assumption that growth and redistribution can be delivered within the existing global order. It illustrates how political projects—however oppositional in tone—are absorbed into the reproduction of dependency through the very institutions meant to overcome it.
The book does not prescribe alternatives. Its contribution is diagnostic: to reveal how crisis is misrecognized as deviation, when it is the routine outcome of a model that displaces structural antagonisms into technocratic discourse. Policy tools remain constrained by international subordination and domestic inequality, and their repeated deployment under different ideological configurations yields the same results. What appears as failure is the system working as designed.
