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Barry Levitt*
Emory University
*The author would like to thank Bianca Premo and Kirk Bowman for their helpful
feedback on this essay.
1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 311.
2. Ibid., 311–312.
3. Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality,
Culture, Structure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4. Important recent works include Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies
for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López, trans.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Román de la Campa, Latin Ameri-
canism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Walter Mignolo, Local Histo-
ries/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jean Franco, The De-
cline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2002). One anthropological work on Latin America that was read some-
what widely by political scientists over the past decade is Arturo Escobar, Encountering
Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
5. See Marc Howard Ross, “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis,”
in Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality,
Culture, Structure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
REVIEW ESSAYS 367
12. Instead, Seligson finds support for the impact of education and other elements of
the “conventional socioeconomic status explanation” for democracy in Central America
(287).
13. Ronald Inglegart and Christian Welzel, “Political Culture and Democracy: Ana-
lyzing Cross-Level Linkages,” Comparative Politics 35 (October 2003): 61–79.
14. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
15. It was also taken up by several widely-read authors; see Francis Fukuyama, Trust:
The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).
16. Jackman and Miller, op. cit.
17. Frederick Solt, “Civics or Structure? Revisiting the Origins of Democratic Quality
in the Italian Regions,” British Journal of Political Science 34, no. 1 (2004): 123–35.
18. Jan-Erik Lane and Svante Ersson, Culture and Politics: A Comparative Approach
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2002).
REVIEW ESSAYS 369
19. Ronald Inglehart and Marita Caballo, “Does Latin America Exist? (And is There a
Confucian Culture?): A Global Analysis of Cross-Cultural Differences,” PS: Political Sci-
ence and Politics 30, no. 1 (March 1997): 34–47.
20. In my own experience using this text in the classroom, US college students find
the comparative element helpful in understanding Latin American political thought.
370 Latin American Research Review
21. One modern political philosophy that garners a great deal of attention from Wiarda, in
this book and in his life’s work, is corporatism: a hierarchical relationship between a central-
ized state and officially recognized groups within society, organized in top-down fashion.
22. For example, Wiarda’s assertion that Latin America was “born feudal” and stayed
feudal has been a topic of vociferous debate among historians and historical sociolo-
gists such as Ernesto Laclau, Steve Stern, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others. Further-
more, Wiarda self-consciously chooses to focus on elite culture. Yet recent scholarship
indicates that, throughout history, non-elite Ibero-Americans had their own political
cultures too, distinct from—though always tied into—the power centers of church, crown
and landowner. Consideration of historical arguments offered by Sarah Chambers, Sergio
Serúlnikov, Steve Stern, Sinclair Thompson, Eric Van Young, and Charles Walker—and
these are exemplars of just the English-language authors writing in this vein—might
have broadened Wiarda’s perspective.
REVIEW ESSAYS 371
23. One example: “It is not at all clear, in the nineteenth century and later, if Latin
America wanted North American-style liberalism and pluralism” (143); see also pp. 25,
319, 322, and 357, among others.
24. See Adam Przeworski et. al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and
Well-Being in the World, 1950- 1990 (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2000); Rob-
ert Barro, “Determinants of Democracy,” The Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999):158–
83; Mark J. Gasiorowski, “Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event His-
tory Analysis,” The American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 882–97; Ross E. Burkhart
and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, “Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development
Thesis,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 903–10; Kenneth Bollen and Robert
Jackman, “The Economic and Noneconomic Determinants of Political Democracy in the
1960s,” Research in Political Sociology 1 (1985): 27–48; and many others.
372 Latin American Research Review
25. Charles Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of
Restless Nations (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967).
26. These trends may now be intertwined, but it seems to me that human rights were
already being internationalized when Keynesianism was still hegemonic in the North
and statist economic policies were more common in Latin America.
REVIEW ESSAYS 373
first for monetarist economists, then for exporters of human rights and
democracy. By contrast, Brazil’s palace wars were more internally ori-
ented; bar associations played a prominent role in opposing the 1964–
85 military regime, and thus local and national elite networks of lawyers
were able to make a comeback after democratization. Argentina exhib-
ited a milder version of this same trend. In Mexico, the Revolution had
pushed the “gentleman lawyers” out of the state and into the private
sector, but neoliberal reforms and the rise of firms specializing in inter-
national business law are allowing these elite networks to recoup their
influence.
In fact, across Latin America, national elites with “cosmopolitan” skills
are increasingly valued as international interlocutors and power bro-
kers. Business lawyers have gotten involved in electoral reform and an-
ticorruption efforts, and the World Bank is sponsoring the study of
governance in Latin America—more evidence of the synergies between
neoliberalism and discourses of human rights and the rule of law.27 But
this power to export legal and political culture is not absolute; for ex-
ample, international efforts at promoting judicial reform and the rule of
law in Latin America are “bound to be a limited success at best” (250).
The Internationalization of Palace Wars is a highly original and detailed
work, but is unfortunately hampered by disorganization and method-
ological fuzziness. Sections are roughly in chronological order, but chap-
ters leap from theme to theme and from North to South, with only
tenuous links among them. More seriously, the conclusions that the
authors draw about people and organizations often have an air of con-
spiracy theory. Lists of names and chronologies of events are presented
as if they were evidence of causal processes. Admittedly, it is extremely
difficult to do the kind of analysis that the authors have undertaken.
But there are models upon which they could have drawn, such as the
“ideas-in-politics” literature in political science and network analysis
in sociology. Nonetheless, this book embeds a wealth of detail about
twentieth-century transformations in Latin America within a fresh ap-
proach to larger global processes of change.
Unlike Dezalay and Garth, the contributors to Citizen Views of De-
mocracy in Latin America study political culture from the ground up, by
analyzing individual level attitudes, values and beliefs about what poli-
tics is and what it should be. Collectively, these authors seek to explain
how shared political cultures affect individual attitudes and behaviors
and the development of particular institutions—as well as how demo-
cratic practices and institutions, and their lived experience by citizens,
shape individual attitudes and shared cultural values. The contributors
27. The authors examine the role of NGOs and think tanks as well.
374 Latin American Research Review
28. Surveys by MORI international, July 1998. Other current cross-national survey
research projects being conducted in Latin America include the World Values Survey
and the Latinobarometer.
REVIEW ESSAYS 375
29. In defense of survey research, I would argue that these are empirical, rather than
theoretical questions, and might be resolved by reanalyzing the existing data.
376 Latin American Research Review