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Power and Identity: Politics and Ideology in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. G. Merquior
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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

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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.