Chapter 4 looks specifically at the reorganisation of military power in this period, which is closely related to the declining power of aristocracies. The rise of the modern state and its monopoly of legitimate force made militaries and law enforcement bureaucratic functions of the state, rather than localised privileges of divided nobilities. The pacification of the nobilities, the subduing of their traditions of martial competition to the modern state, opens up the scope for the more civil forms of competition. The ‘wild’ can now be replaced by the ‘domesticated’.

In August 1953, the United States and Great Britain overthrew the government of Mohammed Mosaddeq with assistance from Iranian elements and the shah. The coup was motivated by American concerns that an Iranian “collapse” was imminent, one that would pave the way for a takeover by Iranian communists and threaten Western control of Middle Eastern oil reserves. Mosaddeq’s attempts to construct an “oil-less” economy, with some assistance from American developmentalists working in the Point Four program, may have succeeded in disentangling Iran from dependence on oil revenues. The coup squashed this experiment, and in 1954 the United States engineered a new oil agreement between the shah’s government and a consortium of oil companies, reintegrating Iranian oil into the global market and tying Iran’s economic future to the production of petroleum.

During this period occurred the collapse, not only of the Fourth Republic but also of the republican institutionality that was forged in Chile from its independence. The catalyst of this collapse is the decision to transfer the constituent power from the people to the Military Junta, headed by Pinochet. This transfer has no previous precedent in the republican history of Chile, and therefore breaks with our political and constitutional tradition, begun at Independence. During the Chilean dictatorship, starting in 1973, a new constitutional ideal of anti-republican orientation is installed by force. This process was consolidated in 1980 when Pinochet "granted" a Constitution that, together with assigning the military a political function not subordinated to the civil power, sets out to institutionalize a conception neo-liberal in respect of the laws and authoritarian in respect of government, inspired in Freidrich von Hayek and Carl Schmitt and, in the Estatuto de Garantías Constitutionales, adopted as law in 1970.