Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900 (Morality and Society Series): Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru by Carlos A. Forment

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Synopsis

Carlos Forment's aim in this highly ambitious work is to write the book that Tocqueville would have written had he traveled to Latin America instead of the United States. Drawing on an astonishing level of research, Forment pored over countless newspapers, partisan pamphlets, tabloids, journals, private letters, and travelogues to show in this study how citizens of Latin America established strong democratic traditions in their countries through the practice of democracy in their everyday lives.

This first volume of Democracy in Latin America considers the development of democratic life in Mexico and Peru from independence to the late 1890s. Forment traces the emergence of hundreds of political, economic, and civic associations run by citizens in both nations and shows how these organizations became models of and for democracy in the face of dictatorship and immense economic hardship. His is the first book to show the presence in Latin America of civic democracy, something that gave men and women in that region an alternative to market- and state-centered forms of life.

In looking beneath institutions of government to uncover local and civil organizations in public life, Forment ultimately uncovers a tradition of edification and inculcation that shaped democratic practices in Latin America profoundly. This tradition, he reveals, was stronger in Mexico than in Peru, but its basic outlines were similar in both nations and included a unique form of what Forment calls Civic Catholicism in order to distinguish itself from civic republicanism, the dominant political model throughout the rest of the Western world.

Foreign Affairs

This is the first volume of what promises to be a major reinterpretation of Latin American political history. In this immensely learned and thoughtful study, the distinguished Argentine scholar Forment turns much conventional wisdom on its head. His starting point is the realization that the most recent "return" to democracy in Latin America was radically different from all previous such movements in one respect: it was not accompanied by a renaissance in democratic practice or thought. He thus sets out to examine how democratic life can be rebuilt from the rubble of authoritarianism, shaking himself free from overly deterministic theoretical frameworks to ask why evidently vibrant civil societies have not produced stable democratic states.

Forment's first volume focuses on the development of democratic life in Mexico and Peru from independence to the late 1890s, tracing the emergence of hundreds of political, economic, and civic associations that together formed a culture of "civic Catholicism." By carefully weaving a rich texture of detail and vignette, he shows the disjunction between daily life and institutional structure. Contrary to what Tocqueville teaches, Forment concludes that democratic life in Latin America in fact arose from this fissure — so that Latin American democracy, although weakly institutionalized, remains surprisingly robust in daily life.

Biography

Carlos A. Forment is the director of the Centro de Investigación y Documentación de la Vida Pública in Buenos Aires, Argentina.