The Developmental Turn (1960s–1980s)
Developmentalist historical interpretations, needless to say, leaned heavily on implicit recipes (or prescriptive teleologies) as to what the new national states and elites of Peru or Latin America should have done in the decades following independence. These ideas, such as building more diverse national economies or even joining the industrial revolution, reflected the robust sense of what ‘had to be done’ inherited from 1960s-style economic developmentalism, before the doubts sown by radical critiques of it in the 1970s and the rapid rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. But these formulas also departed from quite disparate sociological idealisations or ‘counterfactuals’ of modernising states, or from vastly different notions about the working relationships of states to liberal markets. However mired in economic determinism these models were, the questions they posed often sparked wonderful historical research.
To simplify these developmental interpretations, I group them here into three main ways in which historians depicted Peru's stunted Leviathan in the century after independence.
First, some historians argued that republican elites were incapable of mounting real or thoroughgoing liberal-capitalist national projects. A true national ‘bourgeoisie’ was puny and weak and, lacking a base in internal markets or in alliances with other internal social groups, devolved into appendages of foreign merchants and powers (‘compradors’) with no stake in internal transformation. Lacking the capacity for civil politics in the state, urban elites also became political lackeys of militaristic caudillos or rustic gamonales, the antitheses of modern liberalising agents. As the Peruvian state became bloated with export bounties after 1850, few resources went into the transformation of capitalist markets or the legal system; instead, much was wasted on Pharaonic export-promotion projects like Andean railways or giveaways to rentier ‘crony capitalist’ cliques, both national and foreign.Footnote 2 Eighteenth-century (Smithean) economic and constitutional liberalism was never tried, nor ever had a chance, in remote outposts of the post-colonial ‘West’ like Peru.
The second opposite interpretation was that post-independence elites and states proved incapable of leading an anti-liberal, statist or national transformation of their countries along the lines of Bismarckian Germany or Meiji Japan. States like Peru's would not have embarked on socialism or autarchy, but historians have suggested some kind of nationalist, locally defined, strong state or industrial nineteenth-century ‘Gerschenkronian’ reaction to the region's lag behind the post-eighteenth-century liberal transformations of northern European and North American states.Footnote 3 Peru's state would have had to have been coherent and integrative, which it was not, and its elites, beguiled by alien forms of liberalism (possessive individualism, private property rights or consumption of imported fashions), would have had to embrace a starker and more assertive vision of their historic leading role.
Third, rather than finding fault with either liberal or illiberal nationalism, there was a more hybrid stream of analysis. Post-colonial elites and nascent European-style states in places like the Andes were embedded in societies that were simply too fragmented, regionally and ethnically divided or socially heterogeneous to produce anything as clear as the two historical options sketched above. In mixed fashion, much of the country was mired in its ‘pre-capitalist’ relationships and mentalities. Its elites were neither proto-capitalist liberals like early Argentine patriots nor conservatively ‘feudal’ like Brazil's slavocracy, having inherited social elements haphazardly from Hapsburg and Bourbon colonial institutions and political cultures. A transformative strong state of any kind was extremely unlikely in the Andes.Footnote 4 Here, the angle was more analytical than prescriptive, but still obsessed with a state that failed to appear.
Clearly, the main tension in these past state-seeking interpretations was between historical social scientists who deemed that countries like Peru had never experienced a true, deep, unfettered ‘liberalism’, and those who deemed that liberalism in a ‘post-colonial’ setting (to tap the later terminology) had penetrated Peru but was simply a wrong, misguided or inauthentic path to sustained national development. These sociological lenses became complemented, complicated and sometimes contested by an emerging ethnographic, engaged, ‘bottom-up’ national school of social history, which came to be known as la nueva historia (the New History), pioneered by scholars like Alberto Flores Galindo, Manuel Burga and Nelson Manrique, who began publishing later in the 1970s.Footnote 5 For developmentalists, politics or active political transformation were not at issue: no truly ‘serious’ civil parties or visions, it was thought, existed among elites; majoritarian but disarticulated peasants in the faraway sierra remained mostly out of the picture (or else the backward, utopian or patriotic rebels were betrayed by self-serving coastal ruling cliques); and the small urban labouring masses on the coast remained in ‘pre-political’ or racially oppressed dependence.Footnote 6 Needless to say, neither of these historical visions of liberalism was closely based on empirical research. Provoked by these dubious grand conceptions, however, the work that followed would make the real historical choices faced by Peru more nuanced, and perhaps less historically demanding.
The Political Turn (1990s Onward)
Since the 1980s, younger historians have generally turned away from the grand ‘teleologies’ and the confident ‘economic determinism’ dissected above. This is not a turn from history: more and better historical research is being done today in Peru and about nineteenth-century Latin America than ever before. The best recent analyst of the larger trends, Paulo Drinot, sees a discernible shift in the political ‘locus’ of Peru's historical production, battered by the crises of academic institutions and employment that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 7 The results do not necessarily reflect the ‘cultural’ or ‘subaltern’ turn promoted by many North American specialists, though more cultural, social and ethnic influences have filtered into political historical analysis. What we see is thus largely a turn to ‘politics’ or ‘political culture’, to use Nils Jacobsen's revived term, in understandings of the Peruvian and Latin American state. Going beyond the exhausted developmental policy paradigm of the 1960s and 1970s, this turn reflected the positive search for the historical roots of ‘civil society’ or ‘citizenship’, broadly defined, during the sometimes literally tortured late twentieth-century process of national re-democratisation. It also emerged during a period when a strong universal prescription for liberalism of all kinds (economic ‘neoliberalism’, post-1989 global democratic triumphalism) made historians reassess the first long regional encounters with the comparable modernity and modernisation projects of the nineteenth century. In Peru, perhaps more than in other authoritarian contexts, this quest for a different (kinder? gentler?) Leviathan intensified during the distressing struggle between the terrorism of Sendero Luminoso and the corresponding state terrorism, and the resulting degradation of human rights generally, which occurred in the 1980s. The country seemed to lack any effective buffer or alternative in elite civic or inclusionary popular politics. The core question for intellectuals became: why was liberal democracy so historically incapable, weak or ‘underdeveloped’ in places like Peru?
It is best to arrange the contributions of the political turn by trends and themes rather than implicit models, because of its continuing timidity with regard to modelling or even broader historical synthesis. The reading that follows is by no means an exhaustive or formal historiographical analysis of these trends, or one that is attentive to all the new and key research. Often, the biggest historical questions have been posed in negative terms, relative to older Marxist-inflected structural and social history: as history beyond ‘domination’ and ‘resistance’ or as a tension between ‘Gramscian’ and ‘Tocquevillian’ political optics (interpreted as top-down hegemonic versus bottom-up agency perspectives).Footnote 8 These research interests remain diverse, even disparate, although in generational and intellectual terms this group has succeeded the socially inflected New History of the 1970s, which itself had just superseded Peru's long hegemonic oligarchic and liberal historiography.
One stream of work debates the possibilities, organisation and political meaning of the nascent political press, clubs and parties, especially Manuel Pardo's anti-militarist Partido Civil of the 1870s, or the reconstructive elite political movement of Nicolás de Piérola and recuperating civil elites following the War of the Pacific (1879–83). There are a number of valuable new works on the performance, rituals, ideologies and reality of ‘elections’ across early national Peru. Military politics is also a newly central topic.Footnote 9 The social, political and regional bases of caudillo mobilisation – in early republican Cusco, for example – have gained far more study, as have extra-regional political projects such as the striking Peru–Bolivia Confederation of the 1830s, and the unstable constitutionalism and legalism of Peru's tempestuous early regimes.
A more nuanced and rounded vision of peasant participation in politics, beyond the simpler ‘nationalist/not-nationalist’ or ‘resistance/accommodation’ binaries of the 1980s, is also emerging, ranging in type from the deceivingly ‘royalist’ or liberal campesinos of Ayacucho to the rural social bandits of Cajamarca to the loyal and tax-paying republicano peasants of Ancash and Cusco. Regional political culture, in reaction to former ‘Lima-centric’ habits and assumptions, has received greater due, whether the ‘whiter’ honour-based citizenry ideals in early republican Arequipa or the indigenous-inflected and charismatically led regional politics of Cusco.Footnote 10 The ‘liberalism of the bedroom’ and women's claims on the family and political spheres are now out in the open, as is the social impact of turn-of-the-century civilising hygiene campaigns against women (and ‘diseased’ populations generally), breaking down the traditional barriers between private behaviour and public spheres. There is work on nineteenth-century campesina women and their conflictual encounters with both men and republican law. The gendered politics of Lima's notorious maricones (gays) is studied in shaping manly new republican citizenship ideals.Footnote 11 The racial and abolitionist politics of coastal blacks during and after independence is finally recognised, together with early aspects of the black contribution to popular and creole culture, such as Lima's watery Carnival. The search for popular politics and political identities deepens in many guises. The century-long process of defining and redefining republican Peru's ‘Indian problem’ (and creole mestizaje) is now read as a complex political and representational problematic. There was a longer ‘visual politics’ of race, shaped by shifting transnational ‘contact zones’, which helped to congeal republicanised racial and political hierarchies. Racism has become a usable category of historical analysis.Footnote 12
A major new political theme with regard to Peru is civic ‘associationism’: that is, the question of whether the surprising array of new voluntary, neighbourhood and regional organisations established after independence added to the democratic ‘public sphere’ of Peru, were politically hollow or left a reasserted ‘civilising’ order in their wake. Specific urban social groups such as immigrants and artisans, mobilised in electoral campaigns and political struggles over trade, are now fully visible as potential citizens, as are specialised circles of white elites such as physicians and health officials.Footnote 13 Some progress has been made in identifying actual patterns of Lima elite formation and its relationships to state formation.Footnote 14Involuntary organisations – social control exercised through new-style prisons and punishments – and the coercive definition of law generally are striking novel political chords, as are the unruly criminals, bandits and vagabonds who made them seem so necessary.Footnote 15 Lima's changing political space has also won perceptive analysis in terms of how residential patterns, urban renewal campaigns and nationalist monument-building modernised and structured the capital's domination and social integration. Recently, ‘corruption’ has become an overt historical topic for what it reveals about Peru's shifting business of politics, competitive ruling cliques and their relation to the state, and the legitimacy and strength of legal and market institutions.Footnote 16 Previously ignored political ideas are now very respectable: ‘developmental’ ideas, legal and constitutional debates, medical and technological ideas, political projects, political thinkers (Peru's many forgotten Juan Espinozas) and indigenista visionaries, sometimes critically read as elitist managerial or reactive ‘discourses’. In the intellectual history field, there is a growing and informed debate about early Peruvian historians, anthropologists and ‘historiographies’: how did they rewrite or erase whole peoples and fractured pasts from the republican political imaginary and Peruvian past, or alternatively, give way to non-official memories of the Peruvian ‘nation-state’?Footnote 17
One virtue of this sharp political turn, besides its broad and deep stream of excellent new historical work, is that rather than a ‘should have done or been’ mentality, historians are more attuned to finding out what a real Latin American state was made of politically, or what it ‘could’ have done. They no longer assume Peruvian history to be one big, continual, jodido (screwed-up) ‘failure’, or to use Mark Thurner's temporal post-colonial studies terms, as a ‘not yet’ nation or form of modernity. Rather, they look at politics as they really were, instead of searching for a mythical counterfactual Leviathan. Historians are busily discovering the social bases of politics and thus of more tangible ‘possibilisms’, to tap Albert O. Hirschman's concept, an idea that had an early national formulation in the 1930s with Jorge Basadre's classic ambivalent, alliterative puzzle in the title of his influential book, Perú: problema y posibilidad. To be sure, this sense of open political or cultural possibility is often undercut by 1990s-style Foucauldian fatalism about the inevitability of social ordering and control, though this is more drastically embraced outside Peru's national historiography.Footnote 18 This latter trend is being tempered by historians’ rediscovery of Norbert Elias’ sociological notion of internalised and assimilated ‘civilising habits’ (‘habitus’ in the customary terminology) in the long-term consolidation of political cultures and regimes. And since nearly all of this work is divorced from questions of economic, fiscal, state or capitalist development, a lonely exception being the dedicated and wide-ranging economic historian Carlos Contreras, or the impact of larger material constraints and structured inequalities on citizenship and politics, it also suffers a utopian streak.Footnote 19 This untethered ‘agency’ erupts strikingly in exaggerated portrayals of the impact of sundry political actors, from remote peasant rebels to outcast thinkers to corrupted-to-the-core urban politicians and elites. Unlike the grand interpreters of the 1970s, who interpreted first and investigated later, these smaller-scale political findings have yet to congeal into any larger new visions or syntheses about an Andean Leviathan – that is, whether any large or strong or predatory state has ever surfaced in the Andes.
As a non-member of this historical cohort, it is hardly my place (nor really in my capacity) to make this synthesis.Footnote 20 However, a number of generalities (and perhaps generalities to other Latin American contexts) can be made about these writings, about the tensions within them and with the developmentalist turn of the past. One comparison is obvious: while previously the success of the state and state-building was on trial, by the 1990s it was the existence of a viable ‘nation’ (as an Andersonian political and cultural community) and popular and cultural citizenship that counted. The relationship of the state or republicanism to these nationality and identity concerns is just beginning to be untangled. Another keynote in Latin American historiography (or universally since around 1989) is the widespread, often culturalist ‘postmodern’ scepticism of ‘modernisation’ or ‘modernity’ projects writ large, rather than any specific kind of imported, liberal or non-liberal path of modernisation. Through the now hoary filter of Foucault, modernity and ‘the’ state were read primarily as limiting rather than liberationist in terms of human possibilities, and in the extreme, all modernist concerns with material ‘development’ or conditions of ‘poverty’ as strictly oppressive.Footnote 21 This broad critique of Western modernity – that none of it really works or fits – can lead historians and others into some pretty obscure, micro or particular corners, or into a desperate search for an authentic indigenous ‘alternative’ modernity, one that rivals or mimics the pyrrhic New Left search for alternative states, development or class consciousness of the 1970s and 1980s. This is practically a universal trend of scepticism in ‘southern’ historiographies since 1989. In this turn, there is a good deal of slippage between liberalism and ‘modernity’ – liberalism is at once illiberal and a stand-in for authoritarian rationalism – and a deep ambivalence about the necessity of state hegemony, cohesion or control. This is not to mention related questions of historical scale: macro versus micro politics, public versus private spheres, subjectivised agency versus the externalised identity cage of social class. In the main, the fragmentation of historiography (whether from a weak synthetic will or the theoretical allure of discursive, non-state or intimate capillary power) has not led to a holistic re-evaluation of the role of larger national ideologies and ‘projects’ such as nineteenth-century liberalism.Footnote 22
Rethinking the Unintegrated Nation and Unequal Development?
One set of integrative issues, which might be addressed more rigorously in long-run research, concerns the connection and overlaps between political legitimacy and the ‘social disciplining’ power of nascent nineteenth-century states like Peru's. During the recent Foucauldian wave it was assumed (quite wrongly, I think) that ‘the state’ actually enjoyed the institutional coherence to deploy disciplinary power, even in the discursive and internalising sense of subject- and/or citizen-making. These forms of ‘governmentality’, as Drinot adroitly shows for even twentieth-century Peru, remained limited to strategic urban and formal sectors of the state.Footnote 23 This organising or ordering power, or lack thereof, is analogous to earlier general debates around Peru's lack of ‘national integration’. For the older developmentalists, of course, there was the equally utopian assumption that the state, had it not been undermined by global imperialists and their local class lackeys, would have had the coherence and strength to mount a Gerschenkronian ‘national’ project along the lines of nineteenth-century Germany or Japan, which assumes the political focus, capacity or appeal to mobilise en masse the state's claimed citizens and subjects. Many historians, taking a lead from Barrington Moore Jr., might wonder if such historical formulas for accelerated development led to reactionary politics or fascism rather than to a democratised citizenry. Indeed, this is what Latin American sociologists such as Guillermo O'Donnell suggested with the original ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ thesis about the industrial politics of the harshly disciplinary dictatorships of the 1970s, a century later.Footnote 24 This state mobilisation or organisational incapacity was a special challenge in places like nineteenth-century Peru, whereas ‘forced savings’-type investment, central to Gerschenkron's classic analysis of catch-up European states, was not the key developmental issue, given the massive public bounties available from Peru's nationally controlled exports like guano and nitrates, and later, the opportunity for overseas finance of public projects. It can be argued that Peru's state lacked national mobilisation powers until its concrete institutional central expansion in the 1920s under an increasingly authoritarian president, Augusto B. Leguía, and arguably Peru's most potent effort ever at reshaping its own citizenry and development, during the illiberal military regime of President Velasco between 1968 and 1975 – a full century after the state's formative era – still lacked the governmental power to succeed.
If ‘social discipline’, for better or worse, is taken as a key ingredient of state formation and liberalism, these can be researchable questions, lit by comparative perspectives. There are now wider literatures from which to bounce off: for example, Diane Davis has recently focused on social discipline (and its relative deficits and defects) in Latin America's twentieth-century development endeavours, in comparison with the social disciplinary forces undergirding the gamut of Asian economic ‘miracles’ between the 1970s and the 1990s, most of which, likely not by coincidence, occurred in far more socially egalitarian and middle-class-enlarging societies than Latin America's.Footnote 25 A number of European historians and historical sociologists are also critically re-examining the classic Weberian thesis linking discipline to religion, individualism, the growing powers of the early modern state, and the early modern birth of capitalism itself. In contrast to the modernist idea of the external autonomous or Weberian coercive power of the state, which surely became a feature of most of the modern polities of twentieth-century Latin America, enduring power, mobilisation capacities and economic dynamism swell from the culturally inflected, ‘internalised’ self-disciplining of emergent labouring classes, entrepreneurial groups, the army, civic sphere or citizenry.
Yet in places like the Andes, the initial post-colonial and post-independence era, considered here as the period from 1815 to 1895, is best seen as an era of loss of the powers, discipline and legitimacy of the state. Indeed, according to the larger recent socio-historical scheme of James Mahoney, this peripheralised branch of the Spanish colonial state in Lima had long been suffering structural decay, both during and after the Bourbon reforms. Late colonial Lima, as illuminated by Flores Galindo, was also a seething site of social and racialised defiance of customary authority, not necessarily in the recognisable style of subaltern ‘resistance’. This was interpreted by Lima elites as a loss of moral bearings and power, and those elites thus resisted independence in conservative rearguard fashion.Footnote 26 After 1821 Peru also constituted a paradigmatic case where the state, however feeble, came first, and ‘the nation’ and associated citizenry projects were long in following. This is one reason why Benedict Anderson's striking mid-1980s assertion of ‘creole patriots’ as the inventors of modern Western nationalism (even the specific ones who named this republic ‘Peru’) seems so awkward to most Latin Americanists, even as we continue to borrow from his pat phrases and culturalist baggage. Claudio Lomnitz's thoughtful retort to Anderson makes better sense: that places like Mexico (and Peru, to return to its frequent direct comparison) were poor in nation-style horizontal and ideational solidarities, but abounded in vertical, top-down, centrifugal, corporate and coerced loyalties.Footnote 27
But Peru, especially during the first three decades after colonialism, and again in the two decades of national-state collapse that followed the War of the Pacific, was basically, I would think, an ungoverned or ungovernable country, where even most vertical ties came undone. It was a ‘minnow’ of a state rather than a Leviathan. This weakness was both a cause and an effect of its feeble citizenry and nationalist allegiances. Regionalist and caudillo warfare, public penury and debt, deep geographic fragmentation (as roads and commercial routes decayed), social difference, distances and ethnic inequalities, and the breakdown of formal colonial caste hierarchies and institutions meant that the majority of Peru's people were basically on their own. Most Peruvians were not yet articulated to a central or local government through the emotive or identity ties of citizen-making (loyalty, patriotism, nationalism) that culturalists like to talk about, nor subject to institutionalised deference or legal controls through policing, law, prisons, or customary or forced work duties for which retrospective ‘state-builders’ might have pined. Rather, the strongest loyalties or ties in politics were to ephemeral caudillo figures or factions, which in turn (a few localised exceptions aside) were themselves feebly connected (though they were connected) to national projects such as liberalism or Church-style conservatism. Most Peruvians were likely unnerved by the instability, shifts and unpredictable rounds of violence of the times. They lacked, save for a well-organised corporatist consulado merchant class around Lima, even a rudimentary working Tillyan ‘protection racket’ war-state.Footnote 28 In the meantime, slavery and other forced labour regimes disintegrated along the coast, a zone hit by fearsome banditry, as did old-style colonial urban disciplining institutions such as guilds, militias and cofradías, only faintly and slowly replaced during the nineteenth century by elite or worker voluntary associations.
In the vaster sierra, ‘Indians’ seem to have gained a fair measure of autonomy, whether they wanted it or not, and with or without the ties of colonial-style kuraka state intermediaries. In an essay published two decades ago, I speculated that this disintegration of the colonial order, paradoxically, had a lot to do with the resurgence of majoritarian Indian caste lifestyles and identities among Peru's peasant communities, which showed up numerically as Indianisation in the century's rudimentary census documents. Much of the new historical literature surveyed before, as well as a closer recent study by Adrian Pearce, supports this picture.Footnote 29 Peru's rural world was thus unlike Mexico's, where inter-elite struggles and the new and unstable republican state (probably due to its geographic predominance) intruded more on the daily lives of peasants, who were becoming visibly more mestizo in the post-colonial era. Mexican peasants countered, according to John Tutino's systematic historical interpretation, with an ever-growing state of insurrection, whereas in Peru there were only sporadic and scattered peasant uprisings in the nineteenth century and no campesino revolution in the twentieth.Footnote 30 One might continue this comparison by noting the dramatic and timely appearance in Mexico of a durable developmental elite dictatorship, the Porfiriato, which in whatever complicated fashion, and whatever complex relation to rural folk, ended in a social revolution joined by many aroused mestizo-ised peasants.
In the selva, Peru's third and most disarticulated imagined national space, the European presence and state visibly retreated through much of the nineteenth century, its borders eroded by indigenous Amazonian attacks (by so-called barbarous Chunchos) and their geographic frontier advances. Only in recent decades, first after the militarisation of the explosive illicit cocaine trade of the Huallaga region and most recently with state–indigenous resource conflicts which have mobilised communities, has this huge ecological swathe of eastern Peru truly come under tangible governmental purvey.Footnote 31
So most Peruvians, subalterns likely more than would-be elites, probably ignored or evaded the existence of a national state and authority – falling into, or building, for better or worse, a James Scott-like state of benign ‘anarchy’ instead.Footnote 32 By no means was it an egalitarian anarchy: the uneven resources and influence of Peruvians contributed to the lack of effective state ties or to associative or organisational discipline. The disarticulation of Peruvian people(s) from the state likely lurched along in phases, correlating with the state's visible shrinkage and expansion generated around Lima, and around export revenue cycles and meandering caudillo campaigns. Many literate town and city notables probably wanted a stronger, wider, more mobilising national state – a few, with regional affiliations, perhaps through imagined liberal institutions and values – but the other two million or so other Peruvians likely did not worry or think about it much. From a sociological perspective, Peru's nineteenth-century state had little working ‘symbolic capital’ (Pierre Bourdieu's term) or working bundles of ‘social power’ (Michael Mann's). None of this is to say that the peasants and other peoples of Peru were ignorant or Hobsbawmian ‘pre-politicals’; rather, it contests a statist teleological lens – a statolotry – that reads backwards their questionable state capture or allegiances.
This speculative digression, about whether legitimating or socialising-disciplining ties might be a missing link in thinking about liberalism, the state or developmental possibilisms, is not meant to deny other, longer developments. Clearly – and this also needs to be researched explicitly over the long term – even weak states like Peru's were slowly setting territorial, discursive, administrative and infrastructural roots in the Andes, attracting a limited (often squabbling) citizenry base. After all, even a relatively poor and unstable state like Peru was a legacy of the Iberian ‘West’, with its governing plazas de armas of town architecture and institutions, religious disciplining, elaborate legal codes, and a socialised peasantry long formed under Spanish colonialism. These foundations were buttressed during the later nineteenth century with French-style administrative and knowledge models and during the twentieth by templates, advice and finance filtering mainly from the United States. During and after Leguía's oncenio regime of the 1920s, the state expanded more intensively and rapidly through national road-building, labour drafts, public health projects, higher literacy and education rates, new mass media, factories, mines, food commissaries and a growing state bureaucracy, creating more modern subjects and inclusive hierarchies.Footnote 33 Over the long term a ‘nation’ and national culture congealed, with effective symbols, sovereignties and subjectivities, as well as many Peruvian citizens, though riven by steep inequalities and contesting interpretations of those symbols and powers. By the early twentieth century most of Peru's social movements were recognisably ‘modern’, if not necessarily liberal, though the shocking anti-state terror and official violence associated with the difficult repression of the Sendero Luminoso insurrection during the 1980s later put many of these assertions into doubt. What is harder to buy is that this long-term emergence of the Peruvian (or, for that matter, Latin American) nation-state came to or from a one-way threshold where liberalism, the state and development reached some stable ‘take-off’ point or stage – a precursor prerequisite mythology of 1960s ‘modernisation’ theory and its recent echo, liberal neo-institutionalism.Footnote 34
Wherever this vibrant, growing and still disparate Peruvian historiography takes us, I hope it can link again to big and complicating questions about liberalism and the state. As noted by Alan Knight, the generational split between the historians of the 1970s (with their focus on development) and those of the 1990s (who focused on politics), besides reflecting their different training, mindsets or political contexts, also embodies a historical dichotomy that has typified Latin America since the nineteenth century: the divorce of nineteenth-century ‘economic liberalism’ (free trade, commodification, property rights, market individualism) from classical eighteenth-century political liberty, equality and constitutional liberalism.Footnote 35 This kind of split – intellectual yearnings and ideologies of liberalism's natural convergence aside – is actually not anomalous in a global historical sense, for there is little intrinsic to markets or commerce that dictates stronger democracy, political or human rights, and equality. Indeed, if Latin America is known for anything on the global stage of liberalism, it is for the ‘authoritarian liberalism’ expertly practiced by the export-oriented developmental regimes of ‘order and progress’ of the late nineteenth century, from Porfirio Díaz in Mexico to the Brazilian Republic and the sundry aristocratic and oligarchic republics of South America.Footnote 36 Export liberalism has been linked to the top-down expansion of state power and a hardening of long-term social inequalities, exclusion and dualism.
Nor is this equation dead. At least two recent Peruvian regimes, Alberto Fujimori's in the 1990s and Alan García's domesticated and assimilated twenty-first-century Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA) – born of course as an anti-oligarchic ‘revolutionary’ party – embraced the national tradition that divorces growth-inducing liberalisation from political democratisation and equalising social policies.Footnote 37 Decades ago, during the heyday of Latin American structuralism, Rosemary Thorp characterised the recurrent modern policy motif of Peru as an ‘open economy’ orthodoxy, and that diagnosis still seems to fit, making liberal Peru once again an outlier in a more left-leaning heterodox Latin America, now led by burgeoning developmental social democracies like Brazil's. The unusual appeal, staying power and exclusionary terms of Peru's neoliberalism demand more scrutiny. For a remarkable example, the current Peruvian government of Ollanta Humala (at the time of writing in mid-2012), which initially frightened many observers at home and abroad with its incoming Velasquista-style campaign rhetoric in 2011, has already effectively returned to the pragmatic Fujimori–García political and policy style, albeit with more lip service paid to equality issues. Since 1990 every Peruvian regime seems to ride in on the ‘Left’ only to rule on the side of the Right and in tandem with the global market. The decades-long political vigour of Peru's exclusionary liberalism comes, I venture, from the memory-politicking of a national security state that evokes the ghosts of a failed leftist insurgency (Sendero Luminoso) and that still pins virtually all of Peru's problems on the fleeting statist reforms (nationalisations, agrarian reform, lofty oversized development projects, and bureaucratic state expansion) of the Velasco era in the late 1960s. It is also powerfully fuelled by incredible enclave and extractive exports, such as high-technology gold and copper mining. Peru is now growing impressively, but the intellectual class still worries aloud whether this twenty-first-century boom is a rerun of the nineteenth-century prosperidad falaz (‘false prosperity’, Basadre's evocative term for the catastrophic illusions of the guano and nitrate export age).
Across Latin America, one of the core insights of the structuralist and dependency schools is currently enjoying an intellectual rehabilitation of sorts: the idea that global capitalist integration and liberal institutional reforms in the nineteenth century (and during other processes and epochs of Latin American history) actually exacerbated political inequalities and social exclusions across the region, even when open markets brought about needed productivity gains, state stabilisation and significant infrastructural investment.Footnote 38 There has been dependency and development and inequality, in a new variation on Fernando Henrique Cardoso's sophisticated structuralist dependency thought. Indeed, Cardoso, during his influential presidency of Brazil (1995–2003), refocused his own vision: Brazil was no longer, he announced, an ‘underdeveloped’ nation but an ‘unjust’ nation, suffering from staggering class, regional and racial inequalities – a suggestive categorisation for a number of growing Latin American countries, though one that also inadvertently lets development off the hook for its production and reproduction of social inequalities. Over the long haul Latin America has seen citizen-, civil society- and nation-building, along with often long bouts of repression and seemingly ancient and intractable social exclusions.Footnote 39 No doubt the issue of social inequality within the liberal-capitalist growth style was handled too deterministically by its critics in the past, but historians or social scientists who insist on thinking narrowly about the ‘economic’ or ‘political’ (much less cultural) side of liberalism will continue to reproduce this dichotomy – economics/politics – rather than engaging their multiple divergences, linkages or historical contingencies. These political economy lenses are essential for grasping the region's durable or indelible inequalities, which lie at the heart of continuing widespread scepticism about the fit of liberalism to Latin American societies.
This essay, part think-piece, part historiography, is an attempt to untangle changing perspectives on the tensions between liberalism and economic development in nineteenth-century Latin America. I use the nation I know best, Peru, as an empirical life jacket to stop myself from drowning in too many distinctions and details. Since the 1960s, larger social science, political and policy controversies about liberalism, the state and possibilities for economic growth have shifted ground repeatedly, as have their related historical debates. In the 1970s, structuralist and dependency perspectives deeply informed the questions posed by historians and social scientists about markets, state-building and Latin American development.Footnote 1 In the decades that followed, disenchanted by the twin crises of developmentalism and kindred paradigms of history during the 1980s, many historians turned away from ‘big questions’ of economic history and towards more political and micro facets of liberalism and the state. Historians must still reconcile these successive ‘developmental’ and ‘political’ turns in studies of the Latin American state, and this commentary is meant to foster positively such cross-disciplinary discussion.
To provide some context, historians had become fascinated with Peru by the 1970s because it seemed to present one of the region's most flagrant cases of ‘failed’ national development, unlike the case of Mexico, which at the time still appeared more successful over the long term. This comparison seems ironic now as Peru has registered a straight decade of solid economic growth, with credible political stability, while Mexico has fallen behind economically since the early 1980s and, with its drug-related violence and graft, is often labelled by pundits as a looming ‘failed state’. Nineteenth-century Peru was the scene both of spectacular economic opportunities – the guano and nitrate export bonanzas – and of a frenetic spurt of state-building under the rubric of modernising free-trade liberalism. Yet neither phenomenon led to appreciable or sustained development or even, it seems, a genuine and integrated new nation. Indeed, at the end of the century, in the 1890s, the country was just as lagging and ‘colonial’, with its stark ethnic divides and oppressions, as it had been in the waning viceregal era. One could say that Peru ‘declined’ under nineteenth-century liberalism. This unfortunate post-colonial saga made Peru one of the darlings of 1970s dependency historians (and then scholars making more nuanced critiques of liberal modernisation recipes), in ways that echoed, if more loudly, the discontent of similar revisionists throughout the Americas. I leave it to readers to decide whether its extremity makes Peru an apt empirical case for generating larger insights about the broader historiography of economic liberalism in Latin America. I think it may, insofar as Peru's historical reality gaps (cultural and material divides between rural Indian peasants and dominating westernised urban elites; between differently constructed regionalisms like coast, sierra and selva; between universal liberal doctrines and the restricted practice of Peruvian citizenship and the state; and between articulated aspirations to modern economic progress and failures to achieve them) put into relief many of the issues and intellectual trends found almost everywhere about the newly founded nation-states of Latin America.
The Developmental Turn (1960s–1980s)
Developmentalist historical interpretations, needless to say, leaned heavily on implicit recipes (or prescriptive teleologies) as to what the new national states and elites of Peru or Latin America should have done in the decades following independence. These ideas, such as building more diverse national economies or even joining the industrial revolution, reflected the robust sense of what ‘had to be done’ inherited from 1960s-style economic developmentalism, before the doubts sown by radical critiques of it in the 1970s and the rapid rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. But these formulas also departed from quite disparate sociological idealisations or ‘counterfactuals’ of modernising states, or from vastly different notions about the working relationships of states to liberal markets. However mired in economic determinism these models were, the questions they posed often sparked wonderful historical research.
To simplify these developmental interpretations, I group them here into three main ways in which historians depicted Peru's stunted Leviathan in the century after independence.
First, some historians argued that republican elites were incapable of mounting real or thoroughgoing liberal-capitalist national projects. A true national ‘bourgeoisie’ was puny and weak and, lacking a base in internal markets or in alliances with other internal social groups, devolved into appendages of foreign merchants and powers (‘compradors’) with no stake in internal transformation. Lacking the capacity for civil politics in the state, urban elites also became political lackeys of militaristic caudillos or rustic gamonales, the antitheses of modern liberalising agents. As the Peruvian state became bloated with export bounties after 1850, few resources went into the transformation of capitalist markets or the legal system; instead, much was wasted on Pharaonic export-promotion projects like Andean railways or giveaways to rentier ‘crony capitalist’ cliques, both national and foreign.Footnote 2 Eighteenth-century (Smithean) economic and constitutional liberalism was never tried, nor ever had a chance, in remote outposts of the post-colonial ‘West’ like Peru.
The second opposite interpretation was that post-independence elites and states proved incapable of leading an anti-liberal, statist or national transformation of their countries along the lines of Bismarckian Germany or Meiji Japan. States like Peru's would not have embarked on socialism or autarchy, but historians have suggested some kind of nationalist, locally defined, strong state or industrial nineteenth-century ‘Gerschenkronian’ reaction to the region's lag behind the post-eighteenth-century liberal transformations of northern European and North American states.Footnote 3 Peru's state would have had to have been coherent and integrative, which it was not, and its elites, beguiled by alien forms of liberalism (possessive individualism, private property rights or consumption of imported fashions), would have had to embrace a starker and more assertive vision of their historic leading role.
Third, rather than finding fault with either liberal or illiberal nationalism, there was a more hybrid stream of analysis. Post-colonial elites and nascent European-style states in places like the Andes were embedded in societies that were simply too fragmented, regionally and ethnically divided or socially heterogeneous to produce anything as clear as the two historical options sketched above. In mixed fashion, much of the country was mired in its ‘pre-capitalist’ relationships and mentalities. Its elites were neither proto-capitalist liberals like early Argentine patriots nor conservatively ‘feudal’ like Brazil's slavocracy, having inherited social elements haphazardly from Hapsburg and Bourbon colonial institutions and political cultures. A transformative strong state of any kind was extremely unlikely in the Andes.Footnote 4 Here, the angle was more analytical than prescriptive, but still obsessed with a state that failed to appear.
Clearly, the main tension in these past state-seeking interpretations was between historical social scientists who deemed that countries like Peru had never experienced a true, deep, unfettered ‘liberalism’, and those who deemed that liberalism in a ‘post-colonial’ setting (to tap the later terminology) had penetrated Peru but was simply a wrong, misguided or inauthentic path to sustained national development. These sociological lenses became complemented, complicated and sometimes contested by an emerging ethnographic, engaged, ‘bottom-up’ national school of social history, which came to be known as la nueva historia (the New History), pioneered by scholars like Alberto Flores Galindo, Manuel Burga and Nelson Manrique, who began publishing later in the 1970s.Footnote 5 For developmentalists, politics or active political transformation were not at issue: no truly ‘serious’ civil parties or visions, it was thought, existed among elites; majoritarian but disarticulated peasants in the faraway sierra remained mostly out of the picture (or else the backward, utopian or patriotic rebels were betrayed by self-serving coastal ruling cliques); and the small urban labouring masses on the coast remained in ‘pre-political’ or racially oppressed dependence.Footnote 6 Needless to say, neither of these historical visions of liberalism was closely based on empirical research. Provoked by these dubious grand conceptions, however, the work that followed would make the real historical choices faced by Peru more nuanced, and perhaps less historically demanding.
The Political Turn (1990s Onward)
Since the 1980s, younger historians have generally turned away from the grand ‘teleologies’ and the confident ‘economic determinism’ dissected above. This is not a turn from history: more and better historical research is being done today in Peru and about nineteenth-century Latin America than ever before. The best recent analyst of the larger trends, Paulo Drinot, sees a discernible shift in the political ‘locus’ of Peru's historical production, battered by the crises of academic institutions and employment that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 7 The results do not necessarily reflect the ‘cultural’ or ‘subaltern’ turn promoted by many North American specialists, though more cultural, social and ethnic influences have filtered into political historical analysis. What we see is thus largely a turn to ‘politics’ or ‘political culture’, to use Nils Jacobsen's revived term, in understandings of the Peruvian and Latin American state. Going beyond the exhausted developmental policy paradigm of the 1960s and 1970s, this turn reflected the positive search for the historical roots of ‘civil society’ or ‘citizenship’, broadly defined, during the sometimes literally tortured late twentieth-century process of national re-democratisation. It also emerged during a period when a strong universal prescription for liberalism of all kinds (economic ‘neoliberalism’, post-1989 global democratic triumphalism) made historians reassess the first long regional encounters with the comparable modernity and modernisation projects of the nineteenth century. In Peru, perhaps more than in other authoritarian contexts, this quest for a different (kinder? gentler?) Leviathan intensified during the distressing struggle between the terrorism of Sendero Luminoso and the corresponding state terrorism, and the resulting degradation of human rights generally, which occurred in the 1980s. The country seemed to lack any effective buffer or alternative in elite civic or inclusionary popular politics. The core question for intellectuals became: why was liberal democracy so historically incapable, weak or ‘underdeveloped’ in places like Peru?
It is best to arrange the contributions of the political turn by trends and themes rather than implicit models, because of its continuing timidity with regard to modelling or even broader historical synthesis. The reading that follows is by no means an exhaustive or formal historiographical analysis of these trends, or one that is attentive to all the new and key research. Often, the biggest historical questions have been posed in negative terms, relative to older Marxist-inflected structural and social history: as history beyond ‘domination’ and ‘resistance’ or as a tension between ‘Gramscian’ and ‘Tocquevillian’ political optics (interpreted as top-down hegemonic versus bottom-up agency perspectives).Footnote 8 These research interests remain diverse, even disparate, although in generational and intellectual terms this group has succeeded the socially inflected New History of the 1970s, which itself had just superseded Peru's long hegemonic oligarchic and liberal historiography.
One stream of work debates the possibilities, organisation and political meaning of the nascent political press, clubs and parties, especially Manuel Pardo's anti-militarist Partido Civil of the 1870s, or the reconstructive elite political movement of Nicolás de Piérola and recuperating civil elites following the War of the Pacific (1879–83). There are a number of valuable new works on the performance, rituals, ideologies and reality of ‘elections’ across early national Peru. Military politics is also a newly central topic.Footnote 9 The social, political and regional bases of caudillo mobilisation – in early republican Cusco, for example – have gained far more study, as have extra-regional political projects such as the striking Peru–Bolivia Confederation of the 1830s, and the unstable constitutionalism and legalism of Peru's tempestuous early regimes.
A more nuanced and rounded vision of peasant participation in politics, beyond the simpler ‘nationalist/not-nationalist’ or ‘resistance/accommodation’ binaries of the 1980s, is also emerging, ranging in type from the deceivingly ‘royalist’ or liberal campesinos of Ayacucho to the rural social bandits of Cajamarca to the loyal and tax-paying republicano peasants of Ancash and Cusco. Regional political culture, in reaction to former ‘Lima-centric’ habits and assumptions, has received greater due, whether the ‘whiter’ honour-based citizenry ideals in early republican Arequipa or the indigenous-inflected and charismatically led regional politics of Cusco.Footnote 10 The ‘liberalism of the bedroom’ and women's claims on the family and political spheres are now out in the open, as is the social impact of turn-of-the-century civilising hygiene campaigns against women (and ‘diseased’ populations generally), breaking down the traditional barriers between private behaviour and public spheres. There is work on nineteenth-century campesina women and their conflictual encounters with both men and republican law. The gendered politics of Lima's notorious maricones (gays) is studied in shaping manly new republican citizenship ideals.Footnote 11 The racial and abolitionist politics of coastal blacks during and after independence is finally recognised, together with early aspects of the black contribution to popular and creole culture, such as Lima's watery Carnival. The search for popular politics and political identities deepens in many guises. The century-long process of defining and redefining republican Peru's ‘Indian problem’ (and creole mestizaje) is now read as a complex political and representational problematic. There was a longer ‘visual politics’ of race, shaped by shifting transnational ‘contact zones’, which helped to congeal republicanised racial and political hierarchies. Racism has become a usable category of historical analysis.Footnote 12
A major new political theme with regard to Peru is civic ‘associationism’: that is, the question of whether the surprising array of new voluntary, neighbourhood and regional organisations established after independence added to the democratic ‘public sphere’ of Peru, were politically hollow or left a reasserted ‘civilising’ order in their wake. Specific urban social groups such as immigrants and artisans, mobilised in electoral campaigns and political struggles over trade, are now fully visible as potential citizens, as are specialised circles of white elites such as physicians and health officials.Footnote 13 Some progress has been made in identifying actual patterns of Lima elite formation and its relationships to state formation.Footnote 14Involuntary organisations – social control exercised through new-style prisons and punishments – and the coercive definition of law generally are striking novel political chords, as are the unruly criminals, bandits and vagabonds who made them seem so necessary.Footnote 15 Lima's changing political space has also won perceptive analysis in terms of how residential patterns, urban renewal campaigns and nationalist monument-building modernised and structured the capital's domination and social integration. Recently, ‘corruption’ has become an overt historical topic for what it reveals about Peru's shifting business of politics, competitive ruling cliques and their relation to the state, and the legitimacy and strength of legal and market institutions.Footnote 16 Previously ignored political ideas are now very respectable: ‘developmental’ ideas, legal and constitutional debates, medical and technological ideas, political projects, political thinkers (Peru's many forgotten Juan Espinozas) and indigenista visionaries, sometimes critically read as elitist managerial or reactive ‘discourses’. In the intellectual history field, there is a growing and informed debate about early Peruvian historians, anthropologists and ‘historiographies’: how did they rewrite or erase whole peoples and fractured pasts from the republican political imaginary and Peruvian past, or alternatively, give way to non-official memories of the Peruvian ‘nation-state’?Footnote 17
One virtue of this sharp political turn, besides its broad and deep stream of excellent new historical work, is that rather than a ‘should have done or been’ mentality, historians are more attuned to finding out what a real Latin American state was made of politically, or what it ‘could’ have done. They no longer assume Peruvian history to be one big, continual, jodido (screwed-up) ‘failure’, or to use Mark Thurner's temporal post-colonial studies terms, as a ‘not yet’ nation or form of modernity. Rather, they look at politics as they really were, instead of searching for a mythical counterfactual Leviathan. Historians are busily discovering the social bases of politics and thus of more tangible ‘possibilisms’, to tap Albert O. Hirschman's concept, an idea that had an early national formulation in the 1930s with Jorge Basadre's classic ambivalent, alliterative puzzle in the title of his influential book, Perú: problema y posibilidad. To be sure, this sense of open political or cultural possibility is often undercut by 1990s-style Foucauldian fatalism about the inevitability of social ordering and control, though this is more drastically embraced outside Peru's national historiography.Footnote 18 This latter trend is being tempered by historians’ rediscovery of Norbert Elias’ sociological notion of internalised and assimilated ‘civilising habits’ (‘habitus’ in the customary terminology) in the long-term consolidation of political cultures and regimes. And since nearly all of this work is divorced from questions of economic, fiscal, state or capitalist development, a lonely exception being the dedicated and wide-ranging economic historian Carlos Contreras, or the impact of larger material constraints and structured inequalities on citizenship and politics, it also suffers a utopian streak.Footnote 19 This untethered ‘agency’ erupts strikingly in exaggerated portrayals of the impact of sundry political actors, from remote peasant rebels to outcast thinkers to corrupted-to-the-core urban politicians and elites. Unlike the grand interpreters of the 1970s, who interpreted first and investigated later, these smaller-scale political findings have yet to congeal into any larger new visions or syntheses about an Andean Leviathan – that is, whether any large or strong or predatory state has ever surfaced in the Andes.
As a non-member of this historical cohort, it is hardly my place (nor really in my capacity) to make this synthesis.Footnote 20 However, a number of generalities (and perhaps generalities to other Latin American contexts) can be made about these writings, about the tensions within them and with the developmentalist turn of the past. One comparison is obvious: while previously the success of the state and state-building was on trial, by the 1990s it was the existence of a viable ‘nation’ (as an Andersonian political and cultural community) and popular and cultural citizenship that counted. The relationship of the state or republicanism to these nationality and identity concerns is just beginning to be untangled. Another keynote in Latin American historiography (or universally since around 1989) is the widespread, often culturalist ‘postmodern’ scepticism of ‘modernisation’ or ‘modernity’ projects writ large, rather than any specific kind of imported, liberal or non-liberal path of modernisation. Through the now hoary filter of Foucault, modernity and ‘the’ state were read primarily as limiting rather than liberationist in terms of human possibilities, and in the extreme, all modernist concerns with material ‘development’ or conditions of ‘poverty’ as strictly oppressive.Footnote 21 This broad critique of Western modernity – that none of it really works or fits – can lead historians and others into some pretty obscure, micro or particular corners, or into a desperate search for an authentic indigenous ‘alternative’ modernity, one that rivals or mimics the pyrrhic New Left search for alternative states, development or class consciousness of the 1970s and 1980s. This is practically a universal trend of scepticism in ‘southern’ historiographies since 1989. In this turn, there is a good deal of slippage between liberalism and ‘modernity’ – liberalism is at once illiberal and a stand-in for authoritarian rationalism – and a deep ambivalence about the necessity of state hegemony, cohesion or control. This is not to mention related questions of historical scale: macro versus micro politics, public versus private spheres, subjectivised agency versus the externalised identity cage of social class. In the main, the fragmentation of historiography (whether from a weak synthetic will or the theoretical allure of discursive, non-state or intimate capillary power) has not led to a holistic re-evaluation of the role of larger national ideologies and ‘projects’ such as nineteenth-century liberalism.Footnote 22
Rethinking the Unintegrated Nation and Unequal Development?
One set of integrative issues, which might be addressed more rigorously in long-run research, concerns the connection and overlaps between political legitimacy and the ‘social disciplining’ power of nascent nineteenth-century states like Peru's. During the recent Foucauldian wave it was assumed (quite wrongly, I think) that ‘the state’ actually enjoyed the institutional coherence to deploy disciplinary power, even in the discursive and internalising sense of subject- and/or citizen-making. These forms of ‘governmentality’, as Drinot adroitly shows for even twentieth-century Peru, remained limited to strategic urban and formal sectors of the state.Footnote 23 This organising or ordering power, or lack thereof, is analogous to earlier general debates around Peru's lack of ‘national integration’. For the older developmentalists, of course, there was the equally utopian assumption that the state, had it not been undermined by global imperialists and their local class lackeys, would have had the coherence and strength to mount a Gerschenkronian ‘national’ project along the lines of nineteenth-century Germany or Japan, which assumes the political focus, capacity or appeal to mobilise en masse the state's claimed citizens and subjects. Many historians, taking a lead from Barrington Moore Jr., might wonder if such historical formulas for accelerated development led to reactionary politics or fascism rather than to a democratised citizenry. Indeed, this is what Latin American sociologists such as Guillermo O'Donnell suggested with the original ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ thesis about the industrial politics of the harshly disciplinary dictatorships of the 1970s, a century later.Footnote 24 This state mobilisation or organisational incapacity was a special challenge in places like nineteenth-century Peru, whereas ‘forced savings’-type investment, central to Gerschenkron's classic analysis of catch-up European states, was not the key developmental issue, given the massive public bounties available from Peru's nationally controlled exports like guano and nitrates, and later, the opportunity for overseas finance of public projects. It can be argued that Peru's state lacked national mobilisation powers until its concrete institutional central expansion in the 1920s under an increasingly authoritarian president, Augusto B. Leguía, and arguably Peru's most potent effort ever at reshaping its own citizenry and development, during the illiberal military regime of President Velasco between 1968 and 1975 – a full century after the state's formative era – still lacked the governmental power to succeed.
If ‘social discipline’, for better or worse, is taken as a key ingredient of state formation and liberalism, these can be researchable questions, lit by comparative perspectives. There are now wider literatures from which to bounce off: for example, Diane Davis has recently focused on social discipline (and its relative deficits and defects) in Latin America's twentieth-century development endeavours, in comparison with the social disciplinary forces undergirding the gamut of Asian economic ‘miracles’ between the 1970s and the 1990s, most of which, likely not by coincidence, occurred in far more socially egalitarian and middle-class-enlarging societies than Latin America's.Footnote 25 A number of European historians and historical sociologists are also critically re-examining the classic Weberian thesis linking discipline to religion, individualism, the growing powers of the early modern state, and the early modern birth of capitalism itself. In contrast to the modernist idea of the external autonomous or Weberian coercive power of the state, which surely became a feature of most of the modern polities of twentieth-century Latin America, enduring power, mobilisation capacities and economic dynamism swell from the culturally inflected, ‘internalised’ self-disciplining of emergent labouring classes, entrepreneurial groups, the army, civic sphere or citizenry.
Yet in places like the Andes, the initial post-colonial and post-independence era, considered here as the period from 1815 to 1895, is best seen as an era of loss of the powers, discipline and legitimacy of the state. Indeed, according to the larger recent socio-historical scheme of James Mahoney, this peripheralised branch of the Spanish colonial state in Lima had long been suffering structural decay, both during and after the Bourbon reforms. Late colonial Lima, as illuminated by Flores Galindo, was also a seething site of social and racialised defiance of customary authority, not necessarily in the recognisable style of subaltern ‘resistance’. This was interpreted by Lima elites as a loss of moral bearings and power, and those elites thus resisted independence in conservative rearguard fashion.Footnote 26 After 1821 Peru also constituted a paradigmatic case where the state, however feeble, came first, and ‘the nation’ and associated citizenry projects were long in following. This is one reason why Benedict Anderson's striking mid-1980s assertion of ‘creole patriots’ as the inventors of modern Western nationalism (even the specific ones who named this republic ‘Peru’) seems so awkward to most Latin Americanists, even as we continue to borrow from his pat phrases and culturalist baggage. Claudio Lomnitz's thoughtful retort to Anderson makes better sense: that places like Mexico (and Peru, to return to its frequent direct comparison) were poor in nation-style horizontal and ideational solidarities, but abounded in vertical, top-down, centrifugal, corporate and coerced loyalties.Footnote 27
But Peru, especially during the first three decades after colonialism, and again in the two decades of national-state collapse that followed the War of the Pacific, was basically, I would think, an ungoverned or ungovernable country, where even most vertical ties came undone. It was a ‘minnow’ of a state rather than a Leviathan. This weakness was both a cause and an effect of its feeble citizenry and nationalist allegiances. Regionalist and caudillo warfare, public penury and debt, deep geographic fragmentation (as roads and commercial routes decayed), social difference, distances and ethnic inequalities, and the breakdown of formal colonial caste hierarchies and institutions meant that the majority of Peru's people were basically on their own. Most Peruvians were not yet articulated to a central or local government through the emotive or identity ties of citizen-making (loyalty, patriotism, nationalism) that culturalists like to talk about, nor subject to institutionalised deference or legal controls through policing, law, prisons, or customary or forced work duties for which retrospective ‘state-builders’ might have pined. Rather, the strongest loyalties or ties in politics were to ephemeral caudillo figures or factions, which in turn (a few localised exceptions aside) were themselves feebly connected (though they were connected) to national projects such as liberalism or Church-style conservatism. Most Peruvians were likely unnerved by the instability, shifts and unpredictable rounds of violence of the times. They lacked, save for a well-organised corporatist consulado merchant class around Lima, even a rudimentary working Tillyan ‘protection racket’ war-state.Footnote 28 In the meantime, slavery and other forced labour regimes disintegrated along the coast, a zone hit by fearsome banditry, as did old-style colonial urban disciplining institutions such as guilds, militias and cofradías, only faintly and slowly replaced during the nineteenth century by elite or worker voluntary associations.
In the vaster sierra, ‘Indians’ seem to have gained a fair measure of autonomy, whether they wanted it or not, and with or without the ties of colonial-style kuraka state intermediaries. In an essay published two decades ago, I speculated that this disintegration of the colonial order, paradoxically, had a lot to do with the resurgence of majoritarian Indian caste lifestyles and identities among Peru's peasant communities, which showed up numerically as Indianisation in the century's rudimentary census documents. Much of the new historical literature surveyed before, as well as a closer recent study by Adrian Pearce, supports this picture.Footnote 29 Peru's rural world was thus unlike Mexico's, where inter-elite struggles and the new and unstable republican state (probably due to its geographic predominance) intruded more on the daily lives of peasants, who were becoming visibly more mestizo in the post-colonial era. Mexican peasants countered, according to John Tutino's systematic historical interpretation, with an ever-growing state of insurrection, whereas in Peru there were only sporadic and scattered peasant uprisings in the nineteenth century and no campesino revolution in the twentieth.Footnote 30 One might continue this comparison by noting the dramatic and timely appearance in Mexico of a durable developmental elite dictatorship, the Porfiriato, which in whatever complicated fashion, and whatever complex relation to rural folk, ended in a social revolution joined by many aroused mestizo-ised peasants.
In the selva, Peru's third and most disarticulated imagined national space, the European presence and state visibly retreated through much of the nineteenth century, its borders eroded by indigenous Amazonian attacks (by so-called barbarous Chunchos) and their geographic frontier advances. Only in recent decades, first after the militarisation of the explosive illicit cocaine trade of the Huallaga region and most recently with state–indigenous resource conflicts which have mobilised communities, has this huge ecological swathe of eastern Peru truly come under tangible governmental purvey.Footnote 31
So most Peruvians, subalterns likely more than would-be elites, probably ignored or evaded the existence of a national state and authority – falling into, or building, for better or worse, a James Scott-like state of benign ‘anarchy’ instead.Footnote 32 By no means was it an egalitarian anarchy: the uneven resources and influence of Peruvians contributed to the lack of effective state ties or to associative or organisational discipline. The disarticulation of Peruvian people(s) from the state likely lurched along in phases, correlating with the state's visible shrinkage and expansion generated around Lima, and around export revenue cycles and meandering caudillo campaigns. Many literate town and city notables probably wanted a stronger, wider, more mobilising national state – a few, with regional affiliations, perhaps through imagined liberal institutions and values – but the other two million or so other Peruvians likely did not worry or think about it much. From a sociological perspective, Peru's nineteenth-century state had little working ‘symbolic capital’ (Pierre Bourdieu's term) or working bundles of ‘social power’ (Michael Mann's). None of this is to say that the peasants and other peoples of Peru were ignorant or Hobsbawmian ‘pre-politicals’; rather, it contests a statist teleological lens – a statolotry – that reads backwards their questionable state capture or allegiances.
This speculative digression, about whether legitimating or socialising-disciplining ties might be a missing link in thinking about liberalism, the state or developmental possibilisms, is not meant to deny other, longer developments. Clearly – and this also needs to be researched explicitly over the long term – even weak states like Peru's were slowly setting territorial, discursive, administrative and infrastructural roots in the Andes, attracting a limited (often squabbling) citizenry base. After all, even a relatively poor and unstable state like Peru was a legacy of the Iberian ‘West’, with its governing plazas de armas of town architecture and institutions, religious disciplining, elaborate legal codes, and a socialised peasantry long formed under Spanish colonialism. These foundations were buttressed during the later nineteenth century with French-style administrative and knowledge models and during the twentieth by templates, advice and finance filtering mainly from the United States. During and after Leguía's oncenio regime of the 1920s, the state expanded more intensively and rapidly through national road-building, labour drafts, public health projects, higher literacy and education rates, new mass media, factories, mines, food commissaries and a growing state bureaucracy, creating more modern subjects and inclusive hierarchies.Footnote 33 Over the long term a ‘nation’ and national culture congealed, with effective symbols, sovereignties and subjectivities, as well as many Peruvian citizens, though riven by steep inequalities and contesting interpretations of those symbols and powers. By the early twentieth century most of Peru's social movements were recognisably ‘modern’, if not necessarily liberal, though the shocking anti-state terror and official violence associated with the difficult repression of the Sendero Luminoso insurrection during the 1980s later put many of these assertions into doubt. What is harder to buy is that this long-term emergence of the Peruvian (or, for that matter, Latin American) nation-state came to or from a one-way threshold where liberalism, the state and development reached some stable ‘take-off’ point or stage – a precursor prerequisite mythology of 1960s ‘modernisation’ theory and its recent echo, liberal neo-institutionalism.Footnote 34
Wherever this vibrant, growing and still disparate Peruvian historiography takes us, I hope it can link again to big and complicating questions about liberalism and the state. As noted by Alan Knight, the generational split between the historians of the 1970s (with their focus on development) and those of the 1990s (who focused on politics), besides reflecting their different training, mindsets or political contexts, also embodies a historical dichotomy that has typified Latin America since the nineteenth century: the divorce of nineteenth-century ‘economic liberalism’ (free trade, commodification, property rights, market individualism) from classical eighteenth-century political liberty, equality and constitutional liberalism.Footnote 35 This kind of split – intellectual yearnings and ideologies of liberalism's natural convergence aside – is actually not anomalous in a global historical sense, for there is little intrinsic to markets or commerce that dictates stronger democracy, political or human rights, and equality. Indeed, if Latin America is known for anything on the global stage of liberalism, it is for the ‘authoritarian liberalism’ expertly practiced by the export-oriented developmental regimes of ‘order and progress’ of the late nineteenth century, from Porfirio Díaz in Mexico to the Brazilian Republic and the sundry aristocratic and oligarchic republics of South America.Footnote 36 Export liberalism has been linked to the top-down expansion of state power and a hardening of long-term social inequalities, exclusion and dualism.
Nor is this equation dead. At least two recent Peruvian regimes, Alberto Fujimori's in the 1990s and Alan García's domesticated and assimilated twenty-first-century Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA) – born of course as an anti-oligarchic ‘revolutionary’ party – embraced the national tradition that divorces growth-inducing liberalisation from political democratisation and equalising social policies.Footnote 37 Decades ago, during the heyday of Latin American structuralism, Rosemary Thorp characterised the recurrent modern policy motif of Peru as an ‘open economy’ orthodoxy, and that diagnosis still seems to fit, making liberal Peru once again an outlier in a more left-leaning heterodox Latin America, now led by burgeoning developmental social democracies like Brazil's. The unusual appeal, staying power and exclusionary terms of Peru's neoliberalism demand more scrutiny. For a remarkable example, the current Peruvian government of Ollanta Humala (at the time of writing in mid-2012), which initially frightened many observers at home and abroad with its incoming Velasquista-style campaign rhetoric in 2011, has already effectively returned to the pragmatic Fujimori–García political and policy style, albeit with more lip service paid to equality issues. Since 1990 every Peruvian regime seems to ride in on the ‘Left’ only to rule on the side of the Right and in tandem with the global market. The decades-long political vigour of Peru's exclusionary liberalism comes, I venture, from the memory-politicking of a national security state that evokes the ghosts of a failed leftist insurgency (Sendero Luminoso) and that still pins virtually all of Peru's problems on the fleeting statist reforms (nationalisations, agrarian reform, lofty oversized development projects, and bureaucratic state expansion) of the Velasco era in the late 1960s. It is also powerfully fuelled by incredible enclave and extractive exports, such as high-technology gold and copper mining. Peru is now growing impressively, but the intellectual class still worries aloud whether this twenty-first-century boom is a rerun of the nineteenth-century prosperidad falaz (‘false prosperity’, Basadre's evocative term for the catastrophic illusions of the guano and nitrate export age).
Across Latin America, one of the core insights of the structuralist and dependency schools is currently enjoying an intellectual rehabilitation of sorts: the idea that global capitalist integration and liberal institutional reforms in the nineteenth century (and during other processes and epochs of Latin American history) actually exacerbated political inequalities and social exclusions across the region, even when open markets brought about needed productivity gains, state stabilisation and significant infrastructural investment.Footnote 38 There has been dependency and development and inequality, in a new variation on Fernando Henrique Cardoso's sophisticated structuralist dependency thought. Indeed, Cardoso, during his influential presidency of Brazil (1995–2003), refocused his own vision: Brazil was no longer, he announced, an ‘underdeveloped’ nation but an ‘unjust’ nation, suffering from staggering class, regional and racial inequalities – a suggestive categorisation for a number of growing Latin American countries, though one that also inadvertently lets development off the hook for its production and reproduction of social inequalities. Over the long haul Latin America has seen citizen-, civil society- and nation-building, along with often long bouts of repression and seemingly ancient and intractable social exclusions.Footnote 39 No doubt the issue of social inequality within the liberal-capitalist growth style was handled too deterministically by its critics in the past, but historians or social scientists who insist on thinking narrowly about the ‘economic’ or ‘political’ (much less cultural) side of liberalism will continue to reproduce this dichotomy – economics/politics – rather than engaging their multiple divergences, linkages or historical contingencies. These political economy lenses are essential for grasping the region's durable or indelible inequalities, which lie at the heart of continuing widespread scepticism about the fit of liberalism to Latin American societies.
Back to the Present?
I have yet to reconcile these two historical waves about the Peruvian state: the first, concerned with analysis, however forced, of the state's role or lack thereof in structuring and fostering economic development, and the second, with the complex ingredients of post-colonial political life. This essay has at least shown some ways in which changing historical production has grappled with specific fields of contemporary Latin American political economy. I have suggested that the newer historical literature, even if eliding the powers of material and market forces, lends us better clues than past deductive or imaginary class or dependency analysis for grasping the workings of republican states like Peru's. The refurbished appeal of Weberian ideas about the embeddedness of economies in political institutions and culture (and the return to a critical sociology about divergent and multiple modernities), and of the institutional nexus between economics and power, would seem to open a working space for bringing such big concerns back together. Historical sociologists have begun dissecting the ‘disciplinary’ micro-foundations of diverse economic growth experiences, opening a neo-Weberian or Eliasian space even to historians infatuated with Foucauldian notions of the state.Footnote 40 The explicit and growing study of Latin American inequalities is another way to bring the developmental and the political back into an active and urgent dialogue.
Historical social scientists, if indirectly, are also beholden to the possibilities of the present, and the role of the state in economic development is suddenly timely again. The eclipse of late twentieth-century liberal market fundamentalism, by gradual political reconquest in Latin America and by the sudden 2008 market implosion in the ‘Washington Consensus’ metropole, is ushering in a significant period of political and economic experimentation throughout most (although not all) of the Americas. Yet today, in contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, even the most active unorthodox attempts at social reform, national development and neo-populism (from Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela to the campaign politics of Humala in Peru) tolerate or encourage both a range of liberal rights and market-generated employment. In this leftwards shift, as noted, Peru has remained one of the steadfast neoliberal outliers, but paradoxically this accentuates the Andean country's long role as a laboratory for ideas about liberalism and the state. The hybrid forms of the emerging Latin American Left, and the swelling demand for both development and equality, will no doubt inspire rethinking of comparable dilemmas in the past. Like the cultural recognition of multiple modernities, and the sociological grasp of many pathways to modernisation, there are again suddenly ‘many recipes’ for economic growth – a realisation that also helps us to reimagine a more diverse, possibility-laden past.Footnote 41