Fishing for Leviathans? Shifting Views on the Liberal State and Development in Peruvian History

Paul Gootenberg

doi:10.1017/s0022216x12001204

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the shifting conceptions of the state and development through recent waves of Peruvian historiography. The broad structuralist-dependency interpretations of the 1970s and 1980s gave way to a more diffuse and creative ‘political turn’ during and after the 1990s. These changing historical ideas, which still defy synthesis, relate to distinctive global conceptions and phases of economic liberalism, the changing perceived role of states in development, and the integration and social disciplining of a vastly unequal Peruvian nation. Aspects of these Peruvian historical debates may help to shed light on similar controversies through much of the region.

Highlights

This essay examines the shifting conceptions of the state and development through recent waves of Peruvian historiography
I leave it to readers to decide whether its extremity makes Peru an apt empirical case for generating larger insights about the broader historiography of economic liberalism in Latin America
Developmentalist historical interpretations, needless to say, leaned heavily on implicit recipes as to what the new national states and elites of Peru or Latin America should have done in the decades following independence

Summary

Fishing For Leviathans?

Developmentalist historical interpretations, needless to say, leaned heavily on implicit recipes (or prescriptive teleologies) as to what the new national states and elites of Peru or Latin America should have done in the decades following independence These ideas, such as building more diverse national economies or even joining the industrial revolution, reflected the robust sense of what ‘had to be done’ inherited from s-style economic developmentalism, before the doubts sown by radical critiques of it in the s and the rapid rise of neoliberalism in the s. The main tension in these past state-seeking interpretations was between historical social scientists who deemed that countries like Peru had never experienced a true, deep, unfettered ‘liberalism’, and those who deemed that liberalism in a ‘post-colonial’ setting (to tap the later terminology) had penetrated Peru but was a wrong, misguided or inauthentic path to sustained national development. What we see is largely a turn to ‘politics’ or ‘political culture’, to use Nils Jacobsen’s revived term, in understandings of the Peruvian and Latin American state

Paul Gootenberg

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