| Review of: | Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1810, Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru by Carlos A. Forment |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Victoria Crespo |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 28/03/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 13, Issue 4, Pages 583-592 |
Book Reviews
What would Alexis de Tocqueville have written if he had traveled to Latin America? This is the question behind Carlos Forment's ambitious work. The first volume of a two-volume enterprise, this book surveys the public landscape and associational practices in nineteenth-century Mexico and Peru. The second will consider Argentina and Cuba. Based on an outstanding amount of research, Forment argues that by the mid-nineteenth century, a robust civic democracy was already rooted in Latin America. Such a bold proposition is welcome in a field dominated by historiography that frequently depicts nineteenth-century Latin America as a barren political desert, populated only by authoritarian
Bringing order to a complex and vast historical subject matter, Forment organizes his book in four parts. The first is dedicated to the development of his theoretical model and engages at length with contemporary theoretical debates. Neo-Tocquevillian approaches, postcolonialism, the origins of dictatorship in Latin America, and the literature on transitions to democracy in the region are extensively discussed. In the remaining three parts Forment enters public and associational life from the perspective of political sociology, constructing a Tocquevillian model of public life divided into four terrains: civil society, economic society, political society, and the public sphere, which correspond to his chapters. Forment follows a conventional historical periodization and considers the cases of Mexico and Peru separately. By collecting information from hundreds of newspapers, pamphlets, journals, and private letters, he digs down to the micro level of everyday life. He discovers that throughout the nineteenth century, more in Mexico and less in Peru, there was a vibrant associational life and public sphere(s) where citizens deliberated and practiced self-rule. Influenced by Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of
However, Forment notes that democratic life in nineteenth-century Latin America was different from its European and North American counterparts. He identifies four central characteristics of Latin America's divergent democracy. The resulting ideal type is neither very Tocquevillian nor very democratic. First, Latin American democracy was characterized by a
Forment traces the origins of this democratic tradition in colonial religious confraternities. Organized by parishioners devoted to the same saint, confraternities were the most important type of association in which elite and plebeian groups participated. He also refers to the Jesuit doctrine of probabilism, which encouraged believers to follow the most probable path towards good whenever the existing religious dogma could not account for a novel situation. During the independence movements - Forment prefers to call them anti-colonial - probabilism provided Mexicans and Peruvians the narrative resources they needed to assert themselves as "rational adults capable of practicing self-rule, [and] exercising sovereignty" (79). Forment calls this language Civic Catholicism, which in his view constituted the main discursive horizon of Latin American public life in the nineteenth century. There is a whole school of historiography that identifies Jesuit doctrine as the main ideological foundation of Spanish American independence movements. [2] But by linking probabilism to the formation of associational life and of a democratic postcolonial
This work breaks with the conventional interpretation of Catholicism as one of the heaviest burdens of the Hispanic colonial legacy. Forment argues that the dichotomy between passion and reason, the emphasis on the common good, the notion of associative life, and references to personal liberty were central to the language of Civic Catholicism. At this point, however, some difficulties come to the surface. One unresolved problem for Forment is that nineteenth-century Catholicism was not very civic. Ideologically, it was characterized by a systematic rejection of liberalism, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. It is hard to reconcile Catholicism's moral cohesion and hierarchical structure of authority, which was not challenged until the mid-twentieth century, with the civic-democratic
Forment establishes an analogy between the role Tocqueville attributes to Puritanism in the United States and Catholicism in Latin America. However, the Toquevillian framework here seems to inhibit the analysis. A less predetermined interpretative path might have allowed for the identification of other sources of Latin American democracy, which are less puzzling than Civic Catholicism. For example, Forment does not account for the contention of recent scholarship that the nineteenth-century Latin American discourse of political participation, virtue, and the common good should be understood within the civic republican tradition, a political culture that Forment circumscribes to the French experience of modernity. [3] The early influence of Jacobinism in Latin America is understated and the democratic impetus of the French revolution of 1848 is an important omission. Liberalism is missing as well. Even though Forment, and the new Latin American political history in general, seeks to break with the "old" historiography's emphasis on liberal ideology, the fact is that the assertion of citizenship and the struggles for individual rights were central in providing an institutional and discursive framework for associational and communicative practices in civil society. [4]
During the independence movements, Forment argues, Latin Americans experienced sovereignty for the first time. He maintains that citizens practiced sovereignty of the people in a horizontal manner, meaning that they deposited their sovereignty in each other rather than in government institutions. In Forment's view, associational practices contributed to the development of this notion of popular sovereignty, however citizens were discouraged from exercising it in the political domain. Forment claims to draw this peculiar concept of sovereignty from Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt. However, it is hard to understand why Forment came up with such an apolitical formulation considering that the constituent power, law-making, and the political are at the heart of both Tocqueville's and Arendt's concepts of popular sovereignty. [5]Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile Forment's conception of horizontal sovereignty with his own historical analysis. For example, he shows that in Mexico this initial experience of sovereignty resulted in the provisional government of Chilpancingo (1813-14), which introduced popular elections and constitutional government.
The least convincing aspect of Forment's study is what he calls the "disjointed character" of Latin American democracy. Forment inverts the ordinary dichotomy of Latin American politics between meaningless constitutional law coexisting with an authoritarian and clientelistic political culture. In his view, daily practices in civil society were democratic while governments and political institutions remained authoritarian for most of the nineteenth century. Even though his study suggests the contrary, Forment insists on establishing an artificial gap between governments and civic associations. For example, Forment demonstrates that by the second half of the nineteenth century there was an effervescent public sphere in Mexico and an incipient one in Peru. As Hilda Sabato and other scholars have argued, the public sphere in Spanish America was precisely "a space of mediation between certain sectors of civil society and the state or the government." [6] Forment's work also shows that political associations such as voting clubs, political parties, and militias were instances in which citizens participated, expressed their opinions, and influenced governments. Conversely, his research indicates that the creation of civic and political associations was in the core of several republican governments, illustrating that the boundaries between the civic and the political were actually more fluid than Forment depicts.
Forment's empirical analysis also illustrates that political developments at the level of the state were not detached at all from associative life in civil society. Let me give a few examples. Considering the Mexican case, Forment shows that during the first federal republic, from 1826 to 1835, the number of newspapers and tabloids rose from 20 to 53, and then declined in 1836-40 with the authoritarian regime (193). Later, the Reform war (1857-60) and the French occupation (1862-67) hindered associative practices. After the Franco-Mexican War, with the postwar republican governments, associative life grew "broader and deeper" (240). The development of the public sphere accompanied this process until the late 1880s, when Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship silenced civil society and the public sphere. In the Peruvian case, the 1854 popular rebellion, which contributed to the decentralization of the state and the creation of townships, stimulated the creation of civic and economic associations. Associational life developed steadily until the Chilean invasion and occupation of Peru in 1879 (286). Forment's findings show that whether the state is at peace or war, whether the state is occupied by a foreign nation, or whether the government is constitutional or dictatorial explains the variations in the number and density of associations and in the dynamism of the public sphere.
Considering political society, against the reader's expectations Forment mimics the traditional interpretation that political life was authoritarian and corrupt. He analyzes the existence of voting clubs, municipal townships, and civic militias for both cases. While Forment is skeptical of national politics mobilized by voting clubs and proto-political parties, he is more enthusiastic about municipal politics, where, particularly in Peru after the 1854 decentralization, citizens broke with their colonial "anti-civic habits" and acquired "democratic inclinations" (367). Certainly, democracy was not the norm in nineteenth-century Latin America. However, Forment's account also shows that there were extraordinary moments of democratic politics such as the Mexican electoral process of 1828, in which almost 70 percent of Mexicans, including the poor and the illiterate, were eligible to vote. In Peru in 1872, the opposition candidate Manuel Pardo won the presidential election. This victory, Forment tells us, was generated from below, by the hundreds of political clubs that had been organized across the country.
Forment concludes that democratic groups across the region practiced the "politics of anti-politics" and lived with their "backs toward the state" in order to prevent government officials from destroying their civic and economic associations. In doing so, however, these groups failed to eliminate authoritarianism from politics. According to Forment, anti-politics was at once the greatest strength and weakness of democratic life in Latin America. This argument also encapsulates the strength and weakness of Forment's book. The weakest point of
The book's strength, however, is also on this apolitical terrain. Forment vividly describes a dense network of salons, community development groups, mutual-aid and professional associations, artisan guilds, ethnic associations, educational groups and scientific societies, credit associations, regional fairs, and charity groups. This study also offers a penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century spaces of sociability, tastes, habits, and daily practices. Forment takes the reader to the nineteenth-century cafes, taverns, and street-corners of Lima and Mexico City. He documents varied daily activities, from collective worship to journalistic practices, reading and writing habits, and sports. This book is also a journey to patriotic rituals and parades; to the bullring, the philharmonic, the theater, and other public spaces where the people entertain themselves. Forment successfully shows that a sense of equality, liberty, and self-determination gradually crystallized in a civic life that had democratic characteristics. This extraordinary research is Forment's main contribution. This is the most comprehensive existing study of civic life, communicative practices and forms of sociability in nineteenth-century Latin America.
[1]For example, François-Xavier Guerra,
[2]See Manuel Giménez Fernández,
[3]José Antonio Aguilar Rivera and Rafael Rojas, eds.,
[4]For this discussion, see Hilda Sabato, "On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Latin America,"
[5]Alexis de Tocqueville,
[6]Hilda Sabato, ed.,