Pillars of the Republics: Early Monuments and the Politics of Memory in the Post-Colonial Americas

Abstract

When trying to explain the success of democracy in the United States in 1831 Tocqueville used the comparative method in singling out the most important explanatory factors. He concluded that it were not the natural circumstances like absence of envious neighbors or the availability of natural resources which decided about success or failure of democratic institutions. According to Tocqueville, Latin America boasted the same favorable preconditions and yet he noted: “There are no nations upon the face of the earth ... more miserable than those of South America”. If we translate “customs” into the modern term of political culture we can see that Tocqueville’s explanation is still very much in currency in the social sciences. Indeed, historians of Latin America have frequently argued that the problem of the comparative underdevelopment of the region in part has to be explained by the resistance of traditional socio-cultural structures to modernization. According to this point of view, traditional attitudes and mentalities helped to perpetuate a political culture that proved an obstacle to democracy from the very start.