The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America

Abstract

This stimulating collection holds the history of Latin America up to variety of social theories, asking how regional specialists might apply these constructs, and how the latter might be modified in view of Latin American experience.Leading off part 1, “Creating an Economy,” Jeremy Adelman considers the new institutionalism, which studies how institutions—from law to informal practice—can reduce transactions costs, and which asserts that stable property rights are essential for economic progress. Adelman welcomes the growing Latin Americanist literature in this school, but faults new institutionalism for ignoring actors’ pretransaction bargaining power.Paul Gootenberg considers Alexander Gerschenkron’s Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, which emphasized the substitutability of institutions in the development of European economies. Gerschenkron found an heir in Albert Hirschman, who stressed developmental sequencing, but not stages. Gootenberg treats several comparative historical studies, though I don’t recognize my own, since he sees as its “central point” a “transmission” of structuralism from Romania to Latin America, an interpretation I rejected (Crafting the Third World, 1996, p. 222).Steven Topik examines the work of Karl Polanyi, best known for The Great Transformation (1944), which argues that the creation of a world market was as fundamental to the creation of the modern economy as the contemporaneous industrial revolution. Polanyi believed the self-regulating market was a fiction, and would not have approved of neoliberalism, but his influence on Latin American studies has been minimal.Veronica Montecinos and John Markoff are more concerned with economic actors than ideas. They argue that in recent decades neoclassical economics has not only overwhelmed its rivals but that its Latin American practitioners have increasingly replaced lawyers in powerful political positions. The authors consider networks relevant to the success of “technopols,” including ties formed in U.S. graduate schools and international financial agencies.In part 2, “The State and Democracy,” Fernando López-Alves examines Charles Tilly’s hypothesis that the nation-state in early modern Europe was the result of the interaction of revolution and state-building, and considers how this approach might apply to Argentina and Uruguay. López-Alves sees Tilly’s military-based coercion as crucial in South American state formation during the last part of the nineteenth century.Alan Knight examines the modern Mexican state from a Marxist perspective. He considers the “relative autonomy” of the state from class interests—problematized by Friedrich Engels and developed by Nicos Poulantzas. Knight notes that such autonomy waxed and waned as governments responded to international trends in the capitalist economy, but suggests Mexico might also be examined in a Tillyan framework, in which the state primarily serves the interests of its functionaries.Jorge Dominguez treats the early work of Samuel Huntington. In Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), Huntington stressed weak institutionalization, particularly of party structures, as a major obstacle for developing polities, and later hypothesized that political development was a reversible process. Dominguez believes that writers on dependency and bureaucratic authoritarianism should have heeded Huntington’s message on political parties.Samuel Valenzuela reassesses Barrington Moore’s thesis for Chile, where Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy has been applied by U.S. political scientists. Valenzuela’s thorough knowledge of Chile’s suffrage history allows him to challenge the Moore-derived notion that the landed elite, as embodied in the Conservative Party, were antidemocratic. He shows that, in order to blunt secularization and gain a religious peasantry’s support, Conservatives championed universal male suffrage from 1874. Landowners did not derive their income primarily from agriculture, and therefore didn’t have to extract surplus from inquilinos, as Moore’s thesis would imply.Part 3, “Living and Belonging,” begins with Miguel Angel Centeno’s theoretical essay examining “socialized self-discipline,” universally associated with modernity, but usually judged to be feebly developed in Latin America. Centeno shows how discipline is instilled through four institutions: prisons, armies, factories, and schools. It is hard to understand why he excludes churches from his critical disciplinary institutions, since these were overarchingly important for Weber.Robert Levine writes about Michel de Certeau, a Jesuit linguist and social theorist. De Certeau studied “resistance in everyday life to structures of domination.” But since he wrote little about Latin America, Levine largely has to speculate how this French theorist would have regarded discourses of Latin American regimes.Claudio Lomnitz’s closing article considers Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism in Imagined Communities, and best illustrates the promise of the editors’ approach. Anderson defines nationalism as “a specific form of communitarianism . . . [shaped by] print capitalism and colonial statecraft,” and holds that nationalism arose in the colonial world and spread to Europe. In his critique, Lomnitz shows the historical ambiguities of nación, and believes “Spanishness” over four centuries alternately focused on religiosity, descent (“race”), and geographic range. Lomnitz uses the Mexican case to challenge a theory partly based on Latin American data.One wonders why Weber’s “sultanistic” regimes theory, developed by Juan Linz and Houchang Chehabi, wasn’t included, but this volume is nonetheless wonderful fare to serve in graduate seminars.