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Abstract

Throughout the 1980s, the `lost decade' for Latin America, the tide of democratisation and of tentative economic liberalisation seems to have coincided with the discredit of neo-Marxist theories, most notably the so-called dependency school. In their stead, cultural interpretations have been rekindled and renewed, in the very throes of the region's economic predicament. Richard Morse's Prospero's Mirror is a brilliant instance of this, with its influential stress on an organicist-patrimonialist substratum allegedly intrinsic to the Iberian collective consciousness besides representing, to a certain extent, a positive challenge to the values of late industrial modernity. Conceived as a short exercise in historical sociology, this paper takes issue with both the descriptive and the normative levels of the Morse thesis. While trying to qualify the `identity' issue in the subcontinent, the author claims that the best way to deeper development and social redemption in Latin America does not lie in any principled resistance to capitalism and modernity; rather, it promises to require integration policies inside as well as outside the area - able to produce actual breakthroughs towards a fuller market economy and a badly needed reform of the state.

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THE OTHER WEST: ON THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF LATIN AMERICA

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