Abstract

Dieter Senghaas' recent volume on the problem of underdevelopment represents one of the few actual efforts in Western European culture of the last twenty years toward understanding the problem of underdevelopment from a progressive perspective. This exception is all the more relevant since it comes from a German scholar, i.e., an exponent of a scientific climate which is definitely conservative and often openly reactionary. Starting from the empirical discovery of the existence of an unbalanced social division of labor in the world market (pp. 15 and 25), Senghaas is led to the repudiation of the Ricardian law of comparative costs and benefits (p. 27ff).