although at times quite thin, there does appear to be a common thread of agreement running through most of the classic and contemporary literature on theories of revolution—this being the simple proposition that the majority of the participants engaging in such activity are dissatisfied, discontented, and often disaffected individuals. If we can think of “revolution” for the moment in its most general terms—to subsume under such a conceptual label both the simplest manifestation of civil disorder to the most grandiose occurrence of what might be called basic social change—then, it seems, we are in a position to illustrate the emergence of this basic proposition throughout the literature.

Con mucho retraso he leído en mi exilio en Alemania la nota publicada en Latin American Research Review (11, núm. 3 [1976]) titulada “Estudio crítico sobre el libro de Osvaldo Bayer.” No es mi costumbre responder a críticas o comentarios donde se traten mis obras. Creo que no le corresponde al autor salir en defensa de su producción. Salvo el caso en que se tergiversen citas, se escondan datos, se ignoren documentos y se ataque directamente a la persona del escritor lanzando veladas acusaciones de tipo político como ocurre en el artículo publicado en esta revista.

As recently as 1960, edwin lieuwen observed that “on the general subject of militarism in Latin America no important books have yet appeared,” (Arms and Politics in Latin America, N.Y., 1960:279) a judgment that has never been seriously disputed. This is not to say that before that year the political role of the Latin American armed forces went unnoticed by historians and social scientists. On the contrary both the scholarly and popular literature dealing with the area abounds with references to militarism. From a scholarly point of view, however, the bulk of this production is unsatisfying.

In his inclusive and detailed classification of rural settlement types in Latin America, Marshall Wolfe admirably succeeds in his intention “to describe patterns and relationships that are widely important in the region.” His discussion touches upon important realities of rural social life and its place in the national society which too often are ignored. Despite the modesty of his claims, the author's synthesis of data from many sources provides the basis of a conceptualization which should prove extremely useful as a frame of reference for many practical and scholarly interests. The generalizations he offers about the characteristics of the distinct settlement types, and the nature of their relations to each other and to national institutions, constitute a series of hypotheses worthy of being investigated by research projects designed primarily for that purpose.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Chile prided herself on a century-old tradition of social studies. Beginning with the so-called generation of 1842 and with the support of the University of Chile (established in 1843), some of the most distinguished Chilean minds devoted themselves to the study of Chilean society and its evolution. Hernán Godoy Urzua (1967) classifies this intellectual production in six groups: social thinking of the nineteenth century, studies belonging to traditional social disciplines, writings on the “social question,” novels with social content, modern social essays, and writings with sociological intent.

The arena of Brazilian literary criticism during the 1950s was one of heated polemics and angry debates between the “old” and the “new” critics. In many ways, this protracted encounter involved a clash of world views as much as of concepts of literature and criticism. For one thing, the opponents of the nova crítica had a wholly different cast of mind from the new critics. Whether they utilized the reigning impressionistic or sociological approaches to literature and criticism, or whether they were merely dilettantes who dabbled in letters at their leisure, they all tended to view literature in other than a literary framework. To the new critics, this orientation was the same thing as saying that literature was only a satellite responding to the gravitational pull of other forms of knowledge—history, sociology, or psychology, for example. Its main function, therefore, was to illuminate the style of an epoch or the personality of the author, even that of the critic himself. Such a concept of literature was totally unacceptable to the new critics, who insisted on regarding literature in its own right, as a separate but equal planet in the universe of the intellect. Further, the new and the old critics locked horns over the measure of importance that subjective considerations should be allotted in literary criticism. The former wished to minimize them dramatically, maintaining that criticism was a rational, objective discipline; while the latter objected strenuously to such minimization, holding that criticism was primarily an exercise of the critic's creative imagination. The debate over subjective and objective attitudes in literary study is part of the broader issue of the relative merits of the modern, scientific mode of thought and the traditional, personalist mode that had characterized Brazilian literary criticism.

The Instituto de Estudios Peruanos is an independent, nonprofit organization devoted to social science research. It was founded in 1964 by a group of Peruvian scholars interested in the interdisciplinary study of Peru and its developmental problems. The Institute was officially recognized by the government, through the Ministry of Education, in Ministerial Resolution 2041 of May 1964. The staff consists of five senior researchers and nine associate researchers who share similar institutional goals and a common ideological perspective aimed at reformulating traditional ideas and interpretations of Peruvian reality in order to depict and analyze more accurately the country's economic, political, social, and cultural processes.

There has been much controversy over the nature of the institution of slavery, the relative humanity or lack of it in those slave holding nations which practiced it, and its benign or baleful effects upon the blacks on whom it was inflicted. Much has been said about the harshness of Anglo-American slavery and the relatively mild nature of Spanish American slavery, which respected a slave's basic humanity and rights of person, property, and family. Yet little has been done to quantify and document how those attitudes applied in practice. We have had little precise information about the slave family as it existed in the Spanish American colonies and the extent or use of slave property, or about the slaves' access to the legal system that might protect and defend his person, his property, or his family. New sources and methodology have begun to challenge long-held assumptions about both Anglo-American as well as Spanish American slavery. If any conclusion is warranted, it may be that slavery varied widely from place to place and was influenced perhaps as much by differing economic circumstances as by differences in cultural attitudes.

In 1877 Miguel Luis Amunátegui, noted historian and Chile's Minister of Education, observed aptly that while the Chinese bound their daughters' feet, his countrymen bound their daughters' minds. Amunátegui's dictum reveals an official concern for women's education that was unique in nineteenth-century Latin America. Chile's efforts to remove the “bindings” from the minds of its young women are important in several respects. Education was in fact the linchpin of an ambitious strategy to revamp and modernize every aspect of Chilean society. Because of the centrality of formal education in this experiment and the intensity of thinking on the subject, when women's education was addressed in official circles, female roles were being defined as part of a coherent national ideology. The Chilean experiments in education thus provide a rare opportunity to observe explicit, detailed reflection on women's roles. Unequivocal official commitment to public education in Chile also resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that in turn collected immense quantities of data on household size, family income, occupation, and related subjects. Much of this data concerns women and insofar as it documents the “social bedrock” so often obscured to scholars, it is immensely useful for women's history.