Democracy in Latin America 1760–1900: Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru

Extract

Democracy in Latin America 1760–1900: Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru. By Carlos A. Forment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003. 488p. $35.00.

Carlos Forment has produced a highly original, intriguing, and thoroughly researched exploration of civic behavior in Latin America from the mid-1700s through 1900. He presents the provocative argument, contrary to much past research, that citizen democracy, “understood in Tocquevillian terms as a daily practice and form of life rooted in social equality, mutual recognition, and political liberty, was by the mid-nineteenth century rooted in the region” (p. xi). This book cites numerous examples and scholarship from many parts of Latin America, but Forment provides detailed evidence from Mexico and Peru. As he argues in his introduction, Latin American forms of democracy are characterized by four qualities. First, democracy is disjointed because those forms that do exist are found among individual citizens, and not between citizens and governmental institutions, which essentially imposed an authoritarian structure on society. Second, he believes that the practice of democracy is one-sided, given his evidence that it is practiced in civil society rather than in political or public life. Third, it is highly fragmented, given the failures in Latin America to meld social equality and cultural/ethnic differences. Fourth, he claims that Catholicism provided the language of public life, and that Latin Americans used it to create new democratic meanings from traditional religious terms, which he labels “Civic Catholicism.”