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Latin American Research Review 39.3 (2004) 294-304



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The State, Civil Society, and Revolutions:

Building Political Legitimacy in Twentieth-Century Latin America

University of Texas at San Antonio
The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala's October Revolution. By Cindy Forster. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Pp. v+287. $34.95 cloth.)
Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform iin Postrevo-Lutionary Yucatán. By Ben Fallaw. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. vii+222. $64.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)
The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940. By Michael J. Gonzales. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Pp. vii+307. $21.95 paper.)
In The Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America. By Nicola Miller. (London: Verso, 1999. Pp. vii+342. $20.00 paper.)
Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics and Corruption. By Stephen R. Niblo. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Pp. vii+408. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.)
Revolution In the Street: Women, Workers, and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870-1927. By Andrew Grant Wood. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001. Pp. ix+239. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

For the past few years, Latin American historiography has seen an explosion of interesting work focusing on state-formation and the relationship of civil society to the state. In an attempt to provide a more complete historical understanding of political authority, scholars have reevaluated the role of governments, ruling elites, and the lower classes. Many of the new monographs draw on Antonio Gramsci's ideas of hegemony and the constructing of consent to be ruled by all social classes. The six books in this review question the relationship between civil society and the state by looking at Latin American revolutions during the early to mid-twentieth [End Page 294] century. This collection of books draws most heavily on case studies from the Mexican Revolution, but also includes the Guatemalan Revolution and most broadly, revolutionary and reform movements in Peru, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba. The authors collectively offer a complex vision of political legitimacy that is constructed among the lower classes, the ruling elites, and the national bourgeoisie. This essay focuses on two main themes prevalent in each of the works: 1) the power of the national state to dominate political and social ideology, and 2) the power of the lower classes to challenge state control. For purposes of clarity, the books will be discussed based on the chronological order of their topics. By offering careful investigations of the relationship between a variety of social classes and the state, these books show the process of state formation and offer new insights into the development and limitations of state power.

The State and Intellectuals: Creating Consent to Rule

One of the fundamental questions addressed by state-formation scholars concerns how governments construct consent to rule. Nicola Miller investigates the connections between intellectuals and national governments, drawing primarily from case studies of Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba. She divides intellectuals into two categories. Local intellectuals (similar to Gramsci's organic intellectuals) often developed radical programs that interpreted the needs of the lower classes. However, local intellectuals lacked power to implement these radical visions at the national level. More powerful intellectuals tended to be tightly entwined with the machinery of government power and rarely developed independent critiques of the ruling apparatus (32). Miller argues that the powerful intellectuals interpreted and enforced the ruling elites' vision of the nation for the masses, especially when Latin American countries implemented national educational systems in the twentieth century. From the pre-revolutionary to post- revolutionary era in Mexico (the 1870s through the 1940s), the Secretary of Public Education implemented a policy of national education that included "modernizing" the indigenous peoples and developing the image of racial unity. In Argentina during the Peronist era of the 1940s, national education emphasized a romanticized view of the Argentine "folk" that was designed to highlight nationalism. The state disciplined intellectuals who strayed from the official messages. In...

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