Samir Amin: Pioneer on the Rise of the South – Presented by Dieter Senghaas. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice No. 16 (Cham – Heidelberg – New York – Dordrecht – London: Springer-Verlag, 2014).

ISBN (Print): 978-3-319-01115-8
ISBN (Online/eBook): 978-3-319-01116-5
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01116-5

More on this book
Order Form
Order this book on the Springer Website
Order electronic version and individual chapters

On this author
On this book

Important Links on Samir Amin
Selected Videos with Samir Amin
Books by Samir Amin in French

Samir Amin’s comprehensive scientific bibliography is here

Samir Amin: Pioneer of the Rise of the South

Samir Amin (Egypt/France) is a leading intellectual on underdevelopment and the critique of capitalism. Dieter Senghaas (Germany) presents him as a Pioneer of the Rise of the South. These texts by Samir Amin have been selected for the purpose of encouraging readers to learn more of his work in tracing the historical trajectory of capitalism, which has consistently produced polarization at the global level. Thus the dominated peripheries cannot hope to catch up with the social organization prevailing in the dominant centres. Hence the impossibility of global capitalism being stabilized in its peripheries has resulted in the long decline of capitalism coinciding with successive waves of active involvement by the peoples of the South to shape a new world, potentially embarked on the long road to socialism. Amin presents this major conflict of the 20th century and identifies the new challenges that the system now faces in the 21st century. His analysis is conducted in terms of historical materialism and should be a useful tool for activists struggling for socialism. Their progress cannot be separated from that of the emancipation of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples.
This book includes in Part 1: 1 Biographical Notes; 2 Bibliography. Part 2 offers 4 key texts on the Theory of Historical Capitalism: 3 Theoretical Model of Accumulation and Development in the Contemporary World; 4 Unity and Change in the Ideology of Political Economy; 5 Is Social History Marked by Overdetermination or Underdetermination? 6 Multipolarity in the 20th Century. Part 3 on the Contemporary Challenge analyses 7 The Center Will Not Hold: The Rise and Decline of Liberalism; 8 The Countries of the South Must Take Their Own Independent Initiatives; 9 The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative; 10 Land Reforms: Desirable Land Tenure Reforms in Africa and Asia; 11 Transnational Capitalism; 12 Africa 50 years of Independence; 13 Aid; 14 Emergence and Lumpen Development, 15 Synthesis.

Samir Amin: Theory is History. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice No. 17. Texts and Protocols No. 9 (Cham – Heidelberg – New York – Dordrecht – London: Springer-Verlag, 2014).

ISBN (Print): 978-3-319-03815-5
ISBN (Online/eBook): ISBN 978-3-319-03816-2
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-978-3-319-03816-2

More on this book
Order Form
Order this book on the Springer Website
Order electronic version and individual chapters

This book focuses on a central concept that “Theory is History”, as the theory of capitalism can only be formulated on the basis of an analysis of its history. In contrast, bourgeois thinking replaces the analysis of historical capitalism with an abstract theory without any links to reality. “Economics”, which is the theory of an imaginary system, then becomes an apologia intended to give legitimacy to the behaviour of the owners of capital. The author pays special attention to the globalization of the law of value. The individual chapters illustrate the author’s thesis by focusing on the links between capital and land ownership, between modernity and religious interpretation, and on questions of the global expansion of capitalism, particularly the ways it has evolved in certain countries, in this case Russia and China. This anthology supplements the author’s previous work, centred on the rise of the South—his reading of capitalism focusing on its imperialist nature.

Content Level » Research

Keywords » Globalized Values - Ground Rent - Historical Capitalism - Imperialist Rent - Roads of Development - Third World Forum

Related subjects » Political Science

Table of contents
The globalised law of value.- Capitalism and ground rent.- Modernity and interpretations of religions.- Re-reading the post war period.- Historical capitalism; accumulation by dispossession.- The two paths of historical development; the contrast between Europe and China.- Russia in the world system; geography or history?.- China, the emerging nation.

Samir Amin (Egypt/France), was born in Cairo as son of an Egyptian father and a French mother (both medical doctors). He spent his childhood and youth in Port Said, where he attended a French High School and obtained a Baccalauréat (1947). He studied in Paris (1947-1957) with degrees in political science (1952),statistics (1956) and economics (1957). His PhD thesis (1957) was on: The origins of underdevelopment - capitalist accumulation on a world scale but retitled The structural effects of the international integration of precapitalist economies. A theoretical study of the mechanism which creates so-called underdeveloped economies. He worked in Cairo (1957-1960) for the government's "Institution for Economic Management". He was an adviser to the Ministry of Planning in Bamako (Mali) (1960-1963). In 1963 received a fellowship at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP), where he worked until 1970 besides being a professor at the university of Poitiers, Dakar and Paris (of Paris VIII, Vincennes). In 1970 he became director of the IDEP, which he managed until 1980. In 1980 Amin left the IDEP and became a director of the Third World Forum in Dakar.