Political scientist Robert Packenham has died
A political science professor with a focus on Brazil, Packenham was unfraid to challenge the status quo in Latin American scholarship.
Robert A. "Bob" Packenham, an emeritus professor of political science best known as a critic of dependency theories of development that prevailed in the latter 20th century in Latin America and among U.S. scholars of the region, died Feb. 25, 2024. He was 86.
The author of two books and more than 30 scholarly papers and academic book reviews, Packenham was a faculty member in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences’ Department of Political Science for nearly 40 years.
His colleagues remember him as a truth seeker willing to make an unpopular argument in the service of rigorous thought and scholarship.
“Bob was honest and courageous, both as a scholar and as a human being,” said Stephen H. Haber, the A. A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor and professor of political science and of history in H&S. “He was intellectually uncompromising, but he had a big heart.”
From South Dakota to Palo Alto
Packenham was born Oct. 5, 1937, in Watertown, South Dakota. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, he received a master’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1959 and a doctoral degree from Yale University in 1964. A star student, Packenham consulted with two major nonprofit think tanks while in graduate school: the Brookings Institution, which focuses on public policy, and the Ford Foundation, a grant-making organization that aims to advance human welfare.
Packenham, whose primary country of interest was Brazil, joined the Stanford faculty in 1965 as part of an effort to expand international studies that was initially funded by the Ford Foundation.
In 1976, he published his first book, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton University, 1973), which focused on the role U.S. ideological assumptions played in U.S. policy in Latin America from World War II to 1968. Packenham argued that U.S. policymakers continued to assume that change was easily made and that economic development would bring democracy to the region, despite evidence to the contrary.
Second book made waves
Packenham began work on his next book soon after, but it wouldn’t be until 1992 that he published it.
That book, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies, (Harvard University Press, 1992) argued that ideology had influenced political science and policy stances related to free-market economic development approaches. At the time, the prevailing theory held that international trade caused lower income countries to become poorer than they would have been otherwise.
Packenham’s exhaustive sociological survey of the development and reach of this body of thought ultimately suggested that political scientists had adopted flawed approaches to scholarship because they had aligned themselves with left-leaning political goals. It was a controversial argument.
One critical reviewer called the book a “cri de coeur” denouncing dependency theory. However, the same reviewer praised Packenham’s “prodigious job surveying the dependency literature” and the usefulness of his classification of varieties of the theory. Positive reviewers went further, with one calling the work “a model of how to analyze texts carefully.”
“Bob Packenham, though a very private person, was a man of courage who was not afraid of going against the grain,” said Barry R. Weingast, the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and professor of political science in H&S. “His intellectual history of the dependency movement, as he labeled it, is still useful today.”
Over his career, Packenham was a visiting professor at several Brazilian universities; the Colegio de México, A.C., in Mexico City; and the College of London. But his home was Stanford, where he taught political economy and comparative government for decades. He also served on the editorial board at Stanford University Press in the 1990s.
Packenham is survived by his sister, Patricia Patton.
