State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible

Abstract

This book is a significant and welcome addition to the literature on state formation. As is true of any ambitious collection of essays, it provides an opportunity to consider how scholarly treatment of a subject has evolved since the last landmark study in the field — in this case, since the publication of Everyday Forms of State Formation (1994), edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent. If that 20-year-old volume was notable for its argument that state formation could be studied from a cultural and popular perspective emphasizing the “negotiation of rule,” the book presently under review illustrates the multiplicity of approaches and perspectives employed by scholars today. The authors in Miguel Centeno and Agustin Ferraro's volume — an array of 19 historians and historically oriented social scientists — share inspiration from a range of theorists, including Michael Mann, James Scott, Charles Tilly, and Lawrence Whitehead, but they do not share an overarching interpretive paradigm.In their introduction, the editors delineate several forms of state power that provide the basis for dividing the volume into three main sections. The first group of essays focuses on the state's economic and territorial power, an approach that emphasizes issues of political economy well established in the literature on state formation. The second section examines the state's “infrastructural” capacity, which includes “the organizational and technical power to process information, build organizational structures, and maintain transportation and communication systems” (p. 11). The third section (perhaps the most diverse) features essays focused on state legitimacy and on elites' (including bureaucrats') efforts to project particular representations of the nation. Thus the nation making referred to in the volume's title is treated as one dimension of state formation — though a crucial one, as the editors note in their concluding essay. These three categories of state power, of course, are not mutually exclusive in practice; some of the most engaging essays could be placed in more than one category. The wide range of factors encompassed in these categories also serves as a useful reminder that it is overly simplistic to think of a particular state as merely weak or strong; rather, as a state changes over time, its capacity may grow in some areas but atrophy in others. One of the virtues of this collection is that the contributors consistently view the state as multifaceted and dynamic rather than monolithic or reified.Numerous provocative themes and connected ideas emerge from these essays. One example is the tension between systems of patronage and attempts to expand the state's bureaucratic and fiscal capacity. Ricardo Salvatore argues that Argentina's expansion of public education by an expert bureaucracy in the late nineteenth century led, ironically, to the school system becoming a source of patronage and rent-seeking behavior thereafter. Exploring similar themes, Claudia Herrera and Ferraro examine the opposition between a political culture of clientelism and efforts to create a modern “tax culture” in Argentina and Spain (p. 157). Iván Jaksić's study of Andrés Bello's contribution to the development of educational institutions and civil law in Chile highlights the ways that respect for bureaucratic expertise and the separation of powers contributed to political stability and legitimacy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Expanding this picture of state capacity and legitimacy in postindependence Chile, Sarah Chambers argues that the courts received and sympathetically resolved cases brought by a broad swath of society, though the judicial system appears to have become more exclusionary later in the nineteenth century. This issue of Latin American states' inclusionary and exclusionary practices arises throughout the volume. Alan Knight observes that in Mexico both the Porfirian state and its revolutionary successor went through inclusionary and exclusionary phases, while contributions by Hillel Soifer and Nancy Appelbaum explore the mostly exclusionary effects of Peruvian education and Colombian cartography, respectively.Readers' reaction to this volume will naturally reflect their own research interests and theoretical inclinations. Some might ask whether scholars' previous success in bringing bottom-up social history into discussions of state formation — as exemplified by Joseph and Nugent's volume — has been slighted in favor of an overly narrow focus on the state itself. Others might conclude that, given Centeno and Ferraro's choice to highlight issues of state capacity, more sustained attention should have been devoted to governments' inability to raise greater domestic revenues — a failure with negative implications for all other state powers. Despite such objections, this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary volume deserves a large audience. It has more than enough theoretical and empirical substance to make it required reading for anyone interested in the Latin American state.