The chapter on the development of state organization in Latin America, published in The Cambridge History of Latin America Volume VI, Part 2 and (in an abridged form) in Latin America: Economy and Society Since 1930, focussed on the phase of national integration that followed the collapse of liberal internationalism in the 1930s. It therefore downplayed the questions of individual rights that are often thought to constitute the core of liberal republicanism. However justified this simplification may be for most Latin American countries during most of the period from the 1930s, it proves to be a considerable handicap when attempting to explain the evolution of state organization during the 1980s. From a broader perspective we need a complementary study of the intermittent, fragmentary and unequal appearance – and disappearance – of citizenship rights in the interstices between state organization and the realm of private life. But so far we lack a history of the faltering emergence of an increasingly well-defined ‘public sphere’ in Latin American society, even though this almost certainly constitutes a critical factor differentiating the ‘populism’ of the 1940s and 1950s from the fragile ‘democratizations’ of the 1980s.

Put simply, there are two possible relationships between the state and the people. Viewing them as subjects, the state's main concern is with securing their compliance (and perhaps therefore providing for their security); as citizens, they acquire rights which the state is supposed to uphold. At the beginning of the period under study most of the population of Latin America were little more than subjects; at the end they were rather less than full citizens.