In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published Crozier, Huntington, and Wantanuki's Crisis of Democracy, which questioned the compatibility of stable capitalist development and traditional democratic freedoms in the advanced capitalist nations, a theme echoed in Lindblom (1977), Lindberg et al. (1975), Nisbet (1975), and Huntington (1981). Living in capitalist societies whose recent experience is strikingly nondemocratic, Latin American scholars have felt most urgently the need to assess critically this contradiction and its implications for general political tendencies within the process of capitalist development. In the 1970s, directly in response to events in the major industrialized Latin American nations (especially Brazil, Argentina, and Chile), theoretical and empirical research has reformulated the terrain of debate regarding the relationship of political, economic, and social relations in peripheral capitalist nations. This new vocabulary and new set of hypotheses about state structure and state intervention suggest explanations for the nondemocratic political structure and the increasingly expansive and intensive role of the state in the process of capital accumulation in Latin America.

Charles II named the Duque de la Palata as viceroy of Perú in 1680 with the hope that he would be able to revitalize the production of royal revenue in the realm. The key to accomplishing that goal, the king believed, was to assign more Indians to the mines and silver mills of Potosí because the crown ostensibly received 20 percent of the silver marked in the Villa Imperial. One-seventh of the adult population of male originarios (Indians living in their assigned pueblos) in the obligated provinces could be assigned to Potosí in any one year under Francisco de Toledo's ordinances, and the Duque was authorized to extend this mita obligation to any or all of the fourteen previously exempted altiplano (highland) corregimientos, that is, to increase the base from which the one-seventh ratio was taken. The number of new corregimientos to be added would depend upon the results of a prerequisite census in the thirty corregimientos of Alto Perú (sixteen mita and fourteen exempted).

During the 1960s, several academics from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chile became involved in a dispute concerning the aims of both the philosophical discipline and the university as a whole. Because this dispute turned into a conflict of national proportions and brought about the collapse of the administrative structure of the university in May of 1968, it raises a number of questions abut the motivations of these academics and the extent to which the philosophical discipline, as cultivated in Chile, inspired their words and deeds in relation to university affairs.

This essay will focus on Brazil as a Portuguese possession between 1500 and 1800, with all of the problems that Brazil posed for Portugal and Portugal for Brazil within the framework of that larger unity known as the Portuguese Empire. In order to understand historiographical developments during the last ten years, they must be viewed in light of the general development of the science of history. Since 1960 the number of university students has increased considerably, particularly in Latin America and in Europe, and more specifically in Brazil and France. The number of history students has also increased, although the demand for historians has diminished considerably in the last four or five years. Moreover, students in Europe and Brazil tend to continue into doctoral or pos-graduação programs while in the United States, the number of Ph.D. recipients has also increased for reasons that are not strictly demographic. An expected consequence would be an impressive number of dissertations and theses being defended in universities and, perhaps to a lesser degree, actually published. Such a result has been prevented in the field of the history of colonial Brazil, however, by the fact that the current generation is much more interested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in earlier periods. The advantage of this situation is that as long as the production on the colonial age neither decreases nor increases excessively, it remains quality work and, barring exceptions, is not too affected by the pseudo-marxist language that is extremely popular among certain Brazilian intellectuals. It remains a harmonious blend of genuine scholarship in what might be called the traditional style, and of more innovating accounts inspired by the Annales school that draw on the conceptual approaches and the quantitative concerns of other social sciences. The economic and political concerns are equally represented therein, leaving aside cultural history, which falls outside the field under discussion here.

Despite certain early efforts to interpret Mexico as a pluralist constitutional democracy, or democracy-in-the-making (Scott 1959; Tucker 1957), scholars today almost universally agree that the political system of Mexico is authoritarian. The trappings of Mexico's liberal constitution and elections notwithstanding, Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) serves to integrate the polity under the highly centralized control of a single institution that dominates access to all public office. At the apex of the PRI is the Mexican president, who not only chooses his own successor but controls access to the PRI's candidate lists for all other public offices and therefore dominates both the party and the congress. In sum, as Coleman and Davis argue, Mexico fits the ideal type of authoritarian political organization because “decisions are made almost exclusively by the ruling elite rather than by democratic, pluralist processes” and because “there are severe restrictions placed upon political mobilization” (1976, 195).

Carlos Fuentes's preoccupation with history is best expressed in Terra nostra (1975). This novel constitutes a rewriting of Western history from the Roman Empire to the end of the twentieth century for the purpose of tracing the historical and ideological bases of contemporary Latin America. In this work, Fuentes proposes to identify the origin of Latin American structures within the historical and ideological configuration of Hapsburg Spain. To this end, his novel portrays an all-encompassing vision of the conquest and the founding of the New World that situates the reader at the crossroads of Hispanic history. Such a goal simultaneously requires an interpretation of the sociopolitical and conceptual history of the West and an evaluation of the premises that gave rise to the Modern Age.

In April 1970, the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress and Yale University, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation, sponsored in Washington an international symposium on Cuban research materials. The Cuban Revolution had attracted the attention of an international scholarly community and, quite suddenly, a new and vast corpus of literature had come into existence. By 1970 this prodigious enterprise showed no sign of coming to an end; on the contrary, it gave every indication of expanding. In 1970 the Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh launched Cuban Studies Newsletter, a publication that the editors described as “designed to provide comprehensive and timely communication among those interested in Cuban studies.” The development of Cuban study centers in Europe and the United States further served to stimulate interest in Cuba. The moment was propitious, then, for an international symposium to review the state of research collections and library holdings on Cuba. Some fifteen participants, mainly scholars with research interests in Cuba and librarians and bibliographers with specializations in the Caribbean and Latin America, presented a variety of papers dealing with various aspects of library and archival collections possessing materials on Cuba.