You have to appreciate a book that, in the course of a dozen pages, informs you that the prime cause of death of Argentines aged 10 to 50 is traffic accidents, while the prime cause of death among Colombian men is homicide. That sequence gives some sense of the varied terrain that Peter Waldmann, a German political sociologist, tries to survey and interpret in this collection of essays, and it also conveys how many phenomena he gathers under his titular rubric.The essays, given their disparate origins, hang together reasonably well but are not entirely integrated. In the introduction, Waldmann does a yeoman’s job to justify their arrangement. The book’s first section—probably of more interest to historians— contains four chapters that attempt to outline, assert, deepen, and defend the application of his core concept, “the anomic state” (an adjective borrowed from Émile Durkheim), to the political sociology of Latin America since colonial times. He discusses the failure of European models to take root in Latin America, constitutions, the rule of law, and alternative normative systems facing the region’s states. Scope, rather than depth and density, is in play here, but Waldmann manages to be informative and not just provocative.Waldmann asserts that Latin American states, since their foundations, have displayed an anomic (meaning not governed by norms or rules) relationship vis-à-vis the societies that they (purport to) govern. These essays may profitably be read against Claudio Véliz’s The Centralist Tradition of Latin America (Princeton Univ. Press, 1980). On the surface, the two works aver incompatible premises, but a deeper reading of the texts suggests that we have here a paradox and not a contradiction (Waldmann himself notes this contrast, pp. 14–15). Véliz correctly notes that Latin American states have historically sought an involvement in the societal order deeper than that found in, say, Anglophone polities. But Waldmann is correct as well, in a series of multiple assertions: (1) the reach of Latin American states has consistently exceeded their grasp, more so than in the European and North American cases held up for comparison; (2) this failure of reach is surely across the nation’s territory but not solely territorial; and (3) one reason for the state’s anomic relationship to society is the lack of true intermediary groups who can broker state-society relationships, which he counterposes to elite groups that merely use the state for their own ends (in this discussion he comes closest to a Durkheimian analysis). Thus, he argues, these states have never truly been able to govern society and social groups but rather have had to negotiate obedience from their presumed subjects or citizens. Elites, in their turn, see the state as a prize to be captured and used. Many have also viewed national constitutions in instrumentalist terms: not as core and foundational documents (the United States as contrast here) but as tools serving a whole series of other sociopolitical goals and hence subject to regular tinkering or wholesale rewriting (Waldmann uses Juan Bautista Alberdi’s 1853 Argentine constitution as the exemplar). The rule of law suffers a similar fate in the face of (literally) unmanageable social groups, especially elite social strata. Their views are pithily summarized in the adage, “For friends, everything; for enemies, the law” (p. 72).In the second half of the book, Waldmann ranges widely across specific cases. He includes a chapter on the region’s police, which a student could read as a strong introduction to contemporary patterns and issues on that neglected topic. Another chapter discusses the anomie afflicting Argentine society, using traffic behavior (following Guillermo O’Donnell’s lead) as an internationally comparative index of cultural orientations toward public life. He offers a rumination on Colombian violence that, while well done, adds little to that oft-interrogated issue. His final, quirky chapter on the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz understands this region as a place long outside the scope of state power but now recently brought partly under its purview.As I reflect upon Waldmann’s major themes and specific arguments, John Hall’s distinctions between the infrastructural and the despotic aspects of state power came to mind. If Waldmann is correct about the resistance of certain social strata, then even the apparent concentration of executive powers in monarchs, dictators, and presidents—even those recently dubbed as exercisers of “imperial presidentialism” by Gláucio Soares—cannot and do not govern in an unchallengeable (hence despotic) manner in Latin America. Yet neither do states have deep infrastructural power, the ability to extend their effective reach across the national territory and deep into the social order. All this paradoxically prevails in societies whose states have centralist pretensions. That final conundrum tells us why this book is worth our scholarly attention.
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Open Access
Feb 1, 2024
Evgeny Komlev 
