Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T01:16:32.366Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Power and Identity: Politics and Ideology in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. G. Merquior
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

TO THE AVERAGE EUROPEAN CONCERNED WITH, OR SIMPLY curious about, international politics and the Third World predicament, Latin America is a glaring compound of violent Machtpolitik, rampant demography and collective soul-searching. Uneasily torn between Western loyalties and the dismal realities of underdevelopment, the huge continent from Rio Bravo to Patagonia keeps featuring as the unhappy part of America – indeed, of the whole West (for Latin America, unlike Africa, is not just a lost possession of the West – rather, it is a Western projection, for all the obvious significance of its non-Western ethnic and cultural components).

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1984 , pp. 239 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See his article in Commentaire, vol. 5 no. 17, Spring 1982. The unequal exchange thesis is also cogently criticized in Nove’s, Alec The Economics of Feasible Socialism, London, 1983 Google Scholar.

2 Of course, it may very well work the opposite way. French and Italian labour in the hot late 1960s was far more restless than during the current slump. But then, a large part of Latin American workforces came from rural ‘reserve armies’ and were much more modest in their demands.

3 See Gellner’s, Ernest ‘From the Revolution to Liberalization’, Government and Opposition, vol. 11, no. 3, Summer 1976 Google Scholar, now also in his book Spectacles and Predicaments, Cambridge, 1979.

4 See Hirschman, , ‘The turn to authoritarianism in Latin America and the search for its economic determinants’, in Collier, David (ed.), The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, Princeton, 1979 Google Scholar.

5 Cf. Andreski, S., ‘Society, bureaucrats and businessmen’ in Capitalism, Socialism and the State, a special issue of Survey ‐ a journal of East & West studies ‐ vol. 25, no. 4, (113), Autumn 1980 Google Scholar.

6 For a consistent application of Weber’s concept of patrimonialism to the sociological analysis of Brazilian history, see Schwartzman, Simon, Bases do Autoritarismo Brasileiro, Rio, 1982 Google Scholar.