Winner of the Barrington Moore Jr. Prize for the Best Book in Comparative and Historical Sociology from the American Sociological AssociationWinner of the Best Book Award in the Comparative Democratization Section from the American Political Science Association Despite their many similarities, Central American countries during the twentieth century were characterized by remarkably different political regimes. In a comparative analysis of Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, James Mahoney argues that these political differences were legacies of the nineteenth-century liberal reform period. Presenting a theory of "path dependence," Mahoney shows how choices made at crucial turning points in Central American history established certain directions of change and foreclosed others to shape long-term development. By the middle of the twentieth century, three types of political regimes characterized the five nations considered in this study: military-authoritarian (Guatemala, El Salvador), liberal democratic (Costa Rica), and traditional dictatorial (Honduras, Nicaragua). As Mahoney shows, each type is the end point of choices regarding state and agrarian development made by these countries early in the nineteenth century. Applying his conclusions to present-day attempts at market creation in a neoliberal era, Mahoney warns that overzealous pursuit of market creation can have severely negative long-term political consequences. The Legacies of Liberalism presents new insight into the role of leadership in political development, the place of domestic politics in the analysis of foreign intervention, and the role of the state in the creation of early capitalism. The book offers a general theoretical framework that will be of broad interest to scholars of comparative politics and political development, and its overall argument will stir debate among historians of particular Central American countries.

Looking at the Latin American liberal project during the century of postindependence, this collection of original essays draws attention to an underappreciated dilemma confronting liberals: idealistic visions and fiscal restraints. Liberals, Politics, and Power focuses on the inventiveness of nineteenth-century Latin Americans who applied liberal ideology to the founding and maintenance of new states. The impact of liberalism in Latin America, the contributors show, is best understood against the larger backdrop of struggles that pitted regional demands against the pressures of foreign finance, a powerful church against a decentralized state, and aristocratic desire to retain privilege against rising demands for social mobility. Moving beyond the traditional historiographical division between Eurocentric and dependency theories, the essays attempt to account for a uniquely Latin American liberal ideology and politics by exploring the political dynamics of such countries as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru. Contributors discuss liberal efforts to build a viable legal order through elections and to implement a means of public finance that could fund the states' operations. Essays that span the entire century address issues such as the emergence of caudillos, the role of artisans, and popular participation in elections in light of fiscal, and other, impediments to progress. In their introduction, Vincent C. Peloso and Barbara A. Tenenbaum provide a hemispheric overview of liberalism that illustrates its similarities across Latin America. By exploring the liberal constitutional and economic order lying beneath apparently dictatorial states, this pathbreaking volume underlines the importance of fiscal policy in the fashioning of state power. Liberals, Politics, and Power serves not only as a guide to the liberal principles and practices that governed state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America but also as a means to evaluate the complex relationship between ideas and practical politics.

Two interrelated essays dealing with the economic, social, and political changes that took place in Central America Central America and its ill-fated federation (1824-1839) are often viewed as the archetype of the “anarchy” of early independent Spanish America. This book consists of two interralted essays dealing with the economic, social, and political changes that took place in Central America, changes that let to both Liberal regime consolidation and export agricultural development after the middle of the last century. The authors provide a challenging reinterpretation of Central American history and the most detailed analysis available in English of this most heterogeneous and obscure of societies. It avoids the dichotomous (Costa Rica versus the rest of Central America) and the centralist (Guatemala as the standard or model) treatments dominant in the existing literature and is required reading for anyone with an interest in 19th century Latin America.

Why do some countries progress while others stagnate? Why does adversity strengthen some countries and weaken others? Indeed, in this era of unprecedented movement of people, goods, and ideas, just what constitutes a nation-state? Forrest Colburn and Arturo Cruz suggest how fundamental these questions are through an exploration of the evolution of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica over the last quarter of a century, a period of intriguing, often confounding, paradoxes in Central America's development. Offering an elegant defense of empiricism, Colburn and Cruz explore the roles of geography and political choice in constructing nations and states. Countries are shown to be unique: there are a daunting number of variables. There is causality, but not the kind that can be revealed in the laboratory or on the blackboard. Liberalism—today defined as democracy and unfettered markets—may be in vogue, but it has no inherent determinants. Democracy and market economies, when welded to the messy realities of individual countries, are compatible with many different outcomes. The world is more pluralistic in both causes and effects than either academic theories or political rhetoric suggest.

Looks to the criminality and violence of Latin America to assess the discord between liberalism in theory and practice, and thus how liberalism might be exhausted in relation to local conditions not reconcilable to its core tenants.

Nállim chronicles the decline of liberalism in Argentina during the volatile period between two military coups—the 1930 overthrow of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the deposing of Juan Perón in 1955. While historians have primarily focused on liberalism in economic or political contexts, Nállim instead documents a wide range of locations where liberalism was claimed and ultimately marginalized in the pursuit of individual agendas. Nállim shows how concepts of liberalism were espoused by various groups who “invented traditions” to legitimatize their methods of political, religious, class, intellectual, or cultural hegemony. In these deeply fractured and corrupt processes, liberalism lost political favor and alienated the public. These events also set the table for Peronism and stifled the future of progressive liberalism in Argentina. Nállim describes the main political parties of the period and deconstructs their liberal discourses. He also examines major cultural institutions and shows how each attached liberalism to their cause. Nállim compares and contrasts the events in Argentina to those in other Latin American nations and reveals their links to international developments. While critics have positioned the rhetoric of liberalism during this period as one of decadence or irrelevance, Nállim instead shows it to be a vital and complex factor in the metamorphosis of modern history in Argentina and Latin America as well.

A leading intellectual historian of Latin America here examines the changing political ideas of the Mexican intellectual and quasi-governmental elite during the period of ideological consensus from the victory of Benito Juárez of 1867 into the 1890s. Looking at Mexican political thought in a comparative Western context, Charles Hale fully describes how triumphant liberalism was transformed by its encounter with the philosophy of positivism. In so doing, he challenges the prevailing tendency to divide Mexican thought into liberal and positivist stages. The political impact of positivism in Mexico began in 1878, when the "new" or "conservative" liberals enunciated the doctrine of "scientific politics" in the newspaper La Libertad. Hale probes the intellectual origins of scientific politics in the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, and he discusses the contemporary models of the movement the conservative republics of France and Spain. Drawing on the debates between advocates of scientific politics and defenders of the Constitution of 1857 in its pure form, he argues that the La Libertad group of 1878 and their heirs, the Cientificos of 1893, were constitutionalists in the liberal tradition and not merely apologists for the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Díaz. Hale concludes by outlining the legacy of scientific politics for post-revolutionary Mexico, particularly in the present-day efforts to inject "democracy" into the political system. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.