Samir Amin
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Samir Amin (b. 3 September 1931) is an Egyptian political author. He currently lives in Dakar, Senegal.
Amin was born in Cairo, the son of an Egyptian father and a French mother (both medical doctors). He spent his childhood and youth in Port Said; there he attended a French High School, leaving in 1947 with a Baccalauréat. From 1947 to 1957 he studied in Paris, gaining a diploma in political science (1952) before graduating in statistics (1956) and economics (1957). In his autobiography Itinéraire intellectuel (1990) he wrote that in order to spend substantial time in "militant action" he could devote only a minimum of work preparing for university exams.
Arriving in Paris, Amin joined the French Communist Party (PCF), but he later distanced himself from Soviet Marxism and associated for some time with Maoist circles, and even influenced future leaders of the Khmer Rouge for some years. He also published with other students a magazine, Étudiants Anticolonialistes. In 1957 he presented his thesis, supervised by François Perroux among others, originally titled 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.
After finishing his thesis, Amin went back to Cairo, where he was from 1957 to 1960 manager of Études de l'Organisme de Développement Économique. Subsequently Amin left Cairo, to become advisor in the Ministry of Planning in Bamako (Mali) from 1960 to 1963. In 1963 he was offered a fellowship at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP). Until 1970 he worked there as well as being a professor at the university of Poitiers, Dakar and Paris (of Paris VIII, Vincennes). In 1970 he became a chief 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.
He has written more than 30 books including Imperialism & Unequal Development, Specters of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions, Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder and The Liberal Virus. His memoirs were published in October of 2006.
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[edit] Main books by Samir Amin
- (1957): Les effets structurels de l’intégration internationale des économies précapitalistes. Une étude théorique du mécanisme qui a engendré les éonomies dites sous-développées (thesis)
- (1964): L’Egypte nassérienne
- (1965): Trois expériences africaines de développement: le Mali, la Guinée et le Ghana
- (1966): L’économie du Maghreb, 2 vols.
- (1967): Le développement du capitalisme en Côte d’Ivoire
- (1969): Le monde des affaires sénégalais
- (1969): The Class struggle in Africa
- (1970): Le Maghreb moderne (translation: The Magrheb in the Modern World)
- (1970): L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale (translation: Accumulation on a world scale)
- (1970, with C. Coquery-Vidrovitch): Histoire économique du Congo 1880-1968
- (1971): L’Afrique de l’Ouest bloquée
- (1973): Le développement inégal (translation: Unequal development)
- (1973): L’échange inégal et la loi de la valeur
- (1973) Neocolonialism in West Africa
- (1974, with K. Vergopoulos): La question paysanne et le capitalisme
- (1975, with A. Faire, M. Hussein and G. Massiah): La crise de l‘impérialisme
- (1976): L’impérialisme et le développement inégal (translation: Imperialism and unequal development)
- (1976): La nation arabe (translation: The Arab Nation)
- (1977): La loi de la valeur et le matérialisme historique (translation: The law of value and historical materialism)
- (1979): Classe et nation dans l’histoire et la crise contemporaine (translation: Class and nation, historically and in the current crisis)
- (1980): L’économie arabe contemporaine (translation: The Arab economy today)
- (1981): L’avenir du Maoïsme (translation: The Future of Maoism)
- (1982, with G. Arrighi, A. G. Frank und I. Wallerstein): La crise, quelle crise? (translation: Crisis, what crisis?)
- (1982): Irak et Syrie 1960 - 1980
- (1984): Transforming the world-economy? : nine critical essays on the new international economic order.
- (1985): La déconnexion (translation: Delinking: towards a polycentric world)
- (1988): L’eurocentrisme (translation: Eurocentrism)
- (1988, with F. Yachir): La Méditerranée dans le système mondial
- (1988): Impérialisme et sous-développement en Afrique (expanded edition of 1976)
- (1989): La faillite du développement en Afrique et dans le tiers monde]
- (1990) Transforming the revolution: social movements and the world system
- (1990): Itinéraire intellectual; regards sur le demi-siecle 1945-90 (translation: Re-reading the post-war period: an Intellectual Itinerary)
- (1991, with G. Arrighi, A. G. Frank et I. Wallerstein): Le grand tumulte
- (1991): L’Empire du chaos (translation: Empire of chaos)
- (1991): Les enjeux stratégiques en Méditerranée
- (1994): L’Ethnie à l’assaut des nations
- (1995): La gestion capitaliste de la crise
- (1996): Les défis de la mondialisation
- (1997): Critique de l’air du temps
- (1999): Spectres of capitalism: a critique of current intellectual fashions
- (2000): L’hégémonisme des États-Unis et l’effacement du projet européen
- (2002): Mondialisation, comprehendre pour agir
- (2003): Obsolescent Capitalism
- (2004): The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World
- (2005 with Ali El Kenz) Europe and the Arab world; patterns and prospects for the new relationship
- (2006) Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World
[edit] Some writings by Samir Amin available on-line
The American Ideology [1]
Third World Forum: An interview with Samir Amin [2]
Imperialism and Globalization [3]
Empire of chaos challenged: an interview with Samir Amin [4]
Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a global failure [5]
U.S. Imperialism, Europe, and the Middle East [6]
India, a Great Power? [7]
Imperialism and Globalization [8]
World Poverty, Pauperization & Capital Accumulation [9]
U.S. Hegemony and the Response to Terror [10]
Empire and Multitude [11]
A Note on the Death of André Gunder Frank (1929-2005) [12]
The Political Economy of the Twentieth Century [13]
Africa: living on the fringe [14]
The lesson of Kampuchea [15]
[edit] Writings about Samir Amin
- Aidan Forster-Carter: The Empirical Samir Amin, in S. Amin: The Arab Economy Today, London 1982, pp. 1 - 40
- Duru Tobi: On Amin’s Concepts - autocentric/ blocked development in Historical Perspectives, in: Economic Papers (Warsaw), Nr. 15, 1987, pp. 143 - 163
- Fouhad Nohra: Théories du capitalisme mondial. Paris 1997
- Gerald M. Meier, Dudley Seers (eds.): Pioneers in Development. Oxford 1984
