Reply To Howard J. Wiarda

Abstract

For a scholar, Howard Wiarda is quite polemicist. Unfortunately, his largely ad hominem attack ignores substance of my critique. A brief review of its thesis may clarify any misapprehensions which Wiarda's response might produced. Moreover, it will focus attention on fundamental difference that marks our debate: The perspective of class and its impact on our respective definitions of democracy and serious scholarship. My critique focused on Wiarda's of democracy in Latin America, as it was elaborated in his Corporatism and National Development in Latin America (1981) and The Continuing Struggle for Democracy (1980). I argued that his effort redefine democracy in context of Latin America's putative historic corporative traditions precludes any serious discussion of capitalist class privilege as a vital component of Latin America's modern authoritarian tradition. Wiarda denounces this critique as a serious scholarly analysis and exiles me to land of polemicists; he believes that do not impose their personal biases on their readers. He apparently equates serious scholarship with unbiased assessment of historical facts. But theory conduces to facts, not other way around; there is no independent body of facts to which diverse scholars can appeal. Thus, E. H. Carr (1961: 9) proclaimed that the facts speak only when historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give floor, and in what order or context. For me, central fact of modern Latin American history is that, for most part, region is dominated by capitalist social relations whose development requires concentration of productive resources and separation of productive laborers from material means of their own subsistence. However, Wiarda ignores this fact. In response to my charge that his writings, in effect, preserve power of property, he proudly claims to have never once written about property from any perspective. He appears not to understand that this is: (1) a preeminently