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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.3 (2003) 509-510



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Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class. By Patrick Barr-Melej (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 288 pp. $49.95 cloth $19.95 paper

Despite modernization theory's obsession with the presence or absence of middle classes as vital to explaining Latin America's postwar crises of development and democracy, only recently have historians turned from the social-historical focus on peasants, workers, and other "subalterns," which has dominated much of the historiography since the 1960s, to the much-neglected history of the Latin American urban middle classes during the twentieth century. In step with this new trend, Barr-Melej in Reforming Chile seeks to redress the lack of historical work on Chile's middle sectors by documenting the role of Chile's emergent middle class in early twentieth-century debates about social reform, national culture, and nationalism.

Barr-Melej discards a structuralist-Marxist definition of class to focus on the cultural realm of middle-class representation in literary texts and debates about public education, unlike recent studies more influenced by social history that have located the middle class in terms of profession and occupation or private life and everyday forms of sociability. Whereas these latter studies analyze the middle class in the everyday material, as well as cultural, conditions of modernizing and urbanizing Latin America, Barr-Melej focuses on "influential people of the middle class" and middle-class people "with the greatest cultural and political power" (2, 4). Reforming Chile charts the "political-cultural project" of intellectuals and social reformers during the first decades of the twentieth century. In examining the literary works of well-known writers and reformers' campaigns for public education, Barr-Melej argues that middle-class intellectuals forged a new national-cultural sphere shaped by nationalism, mesocratic values, and a romantic celebration of the popular classes that was distinct from the cultural worlds of Chile's oligarchic elites and rural and urban working classes.

Barr-Melej's focus on well-known intellectuals and political figures lends itself to a particular vision of the public sphere drawn not so much from Habermas or the new cultural history, as from more traditional intellectual and political history, like the work of Collier on ideas and politics in nineteenth-century Chile. 1

The first four chapters of Reforming Chile trace the formation of the Radical party and examine the works of notable "middle class" intellectuals from the nineteenth century—from liberals Francisco Bilbao, José Victorino Lastarria, and Andrés Bello to famous early twentieth-century nationalists like Nicolás Palacios, Francisco Encina, and Tancredo Pinochet Le-Brun. In addition, this section of the book looks at the literary [End Page 509] movement called criollismo and analyzes its major works, emphasizing the authors' efforts to establish a national culture that differed from aristocratic culture through a romantic and populist embrace of the countryside (and, in some cases, mining regions).

The last three chapters focus on the campaigns of middle-class reformers for public education as central to national development and the formation of a national (and nationalist) identity. In this section, Reforming Chile shows how reformers within the Radical party saw public education as a means to "uplifting" the working classes, resolving the "social question," and building a homogeneous national identity rooted in a mestizo racial identity.

 



Thomas Klubock
State University of New York, Stony Brook

Notes

1. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence: 1808-1837 (Cambridge, 1967).

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