Paul Baran had exactly the kind of credentials shared by fellow MR
editors Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. Like Sweezy, who once taught at
Harvard, Baran was an established academic who managed to hold on to a
teaching job at Stanford until his death by heart attack in 1964 at the
age of 54. He was established enough to have even co-authored an article
on the consequences of the Allied air assault on Germany with J. K.
Galbraith in 1947. Of course, some of their detractors might tend to
write off Sweezy and Baran as post-Keynesians to begin with.
And all three had jobs in Roosevelt’s administration. Baran was with the
OSS (the forerunner of the CIA!) for two and a half years and then moved
on to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (hence the article alluded to
above.)
Paul A. Baran was a Russian Jew whose father, a physician and Menshevik
supporter, who moved the family to Germany in 1920. Paul did his
undergraduate work in Germany, but earned his Economics PhD in Moscow in
1928 before moving back to Germany. After Hitler’s rise to power, he
found his way to the U.S. and taught at the New School before taking
military-strategic jobs in the Roosevelt administration. In 1949 he
became a professor at Stanford where he remained until his death.
In 1961, Baran wrote an article for Monthly Review on “The Commitment of
the Intellectual” that should serve as an inspiration for everyone:
"The desire to tell the truth is therefore only one condition for being
an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational
inquiry to wherever it may lead, to undertake 'ruthless criticism of
everything that exists, ruthless in the sense that the criticism will
not shrink either from its own conclusions or from conflict with the
powers that be.' (Marx) An intellectual is thus in essence a social
critic, a person whose concern is to identify, to analyze, and in this
way to help overcome the obstacles barring the way to the attainment of
a better, more humane, and more rational social order. As such he
becomes the conscience of society and the spokesman of such progressive
forces as it contains in any given period of history. And as such he is
inevitably considered a 'troublemaker' and a 'nuisance' by the ruling
class seeking to preserve the status quo, as well as by the intellect
workers in its service who accuse the intellectual of being utopian or
metaphysical at best, subversive or seditious at worst."
When Baran wrote “The Political Economy of Growth” in 1955, it was
clearly in the spirit of a “readiness to carry on a rational inquiry to
wherever it may lead.” This was a year in which the American Colossus
straddled the globe even more than it does today. Unlike today, however,
the promise of capitalist modernization was far more seductive. With the
10 year expansion following WWII, why would any developing country
refuse to follow the development path urged by the U.S.?
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/paul-baran-as-dependency-theorist/
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