The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton Legacy Library, 1832) - Hardcover

Stepan, Alfred C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691075913 ISBN 13: 9780691075914

Verlag: PRINCETON UNIV PR, 1978

Inhaltsangabe

Although the state's role in society has clearly expanded since the 1930s, its independent effect on social structure and change has been given little weight in modern political theories. To bring theory more into line with reality, Stepan proposes a new model of state autonomy which he shows to be particularly well suited for understanding political developments in the Iberian countries and their former Latin-American colonies.

Originally published in 1978.

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"This is a highly significant and innovative attempt to apply arguments derived from theories of the state and theories of corporatism to the comparative analysis of authoritarian rule in Latin America. It is the first major book-length statement I know that presents a theoretically oriented, genuinely comparative analysis of the performance of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and it is excellent."--David Collier, Indiana University

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The State and Society

Peru in Comparative Perspective

By Alfred C. Stepan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-07591-4

Contents

List of Tables and Figures, viii, 
Preface, xi, 
PART ONE · The Role of the State: Concepts and Comparisons, 
1. Liberal-Pluralist, Classic Marxist, and "Organic-Statist" Approaches to the State, 3, 
2. "Corporatism" and the State, 46, 
3. The Installation of Corporatist Regimes: Analytic Framework and Comparative Analysis, 73, 
PART TWO Peru: An Organic-Statist Experiment, 
4. Evolution of the Peruvian Army as the Strategic State Elite: Context and Content, 117, 
5. Organizing the Weakly Organized: The State and Urban Squatters, 158, 
6. Reorganizing the Organized: Statism versus "Participatory" Self-Management in the Sugar Cooperatives, 190, 
7. The State and Foreign Capital, 230, 
8. The Institutionalization of Organic-Statist Regimes, 290, 
Selected Bibliography, 317, 
Index, 339, 

CHAPTER 1

Liberal-Pluralist, Classic Marxist, and "Organic-Statist" Approaches to the State

A major, nearly worldwide trend since the 1930s has been the steady growth of the role of the state in political life. In the industrialized world, the emergence of the managerial state to combat the crisis of capitalism during the depression, the widened scope of executive power in World War II, and growing state regulative and welfare functions since the war, have all contributed to the expansion of the state. In the Third World it is even clearer that most development plans call for the state to play a major role in structuring economic and social systems.

Despite this expansion of the declared and undeclared functions of the state, there had been a significant decline in theoretical analyses of the impact of state policies on society. Starting in the mid-195os, when the field of comparative politics underwent a major period of innovation, it was widely believed by members of the profession that this subfield of political science contained the most important new contributions. When we examine this period of innovation, however, there is a striking preoccupation with the search for the underlying economic, social, and even psychological causes of political behavior. The new approaches in comparative politics in most cases assigned little independent weight to the impact of state policies and political structures on the social system. Without denying the gains to comparative politics made by the move away from a sterile emphasis on descriptive studies of a formal-legal nature, it is clear that a price has been paid, namely a retreat from what should be one of the central concerns of the discipline. While almost everywhere the role of the state grew, one of the few places it withered away was in political science.

The first task of this chapter, therefore, is conceptual, namely to examine what role the state plays in some of the major models used in contemporary political analysis. Is the state analyzed as an independent variable that has an impact on society, or is it treated as a dependent variable? If the latter, what problems for empirical research are presented by such conceptual approaches and what reformulations are indicated?

My second task in this chapter is analytical and empirical. Are there models that emphasize the role of the state that have been neglected by contemporary political science? Can an awareness of these alternative models help overcome some of the major conceptual and empirical lacunae that characterize much work in contemporary political science? And, less generally, are there political systems that have been influenced by these alternative institutional, administrative, and normative models? If so, it might greatly aid the analysis of politics in such societies to incorporate explicitly elements of these models into our research strategies.

I argue that there exists a recognizable strand of political thought, which I call "organic-statist," that runs from Aristotle, through Roman law, natural law, absolutist and modern Catholic social thought. I suggest that organic statism represents powerful philosophical and structural tendencies found throughout Western Europe, and especially in the Iberian countries and their former colonies, where organic statism was never as fully challenged by alternative political models as in the rest of the European cultural area. In addition, I argue that a modern variant of the organic-statist model of society provides a useful analytic framework with which to begin investigating the interrelationship of state and society in one of the more important and original political experiments in modern Latin American history — Peru. But first it is necessary to review the basic assumptions about the role of the state in some of the major models of political life.

I begin with an examination of liberal pluralism and the classical Marxist model of the role of the state in capitalist societies, because in their various guises these two models are the most influential competing methodological paradigms used in contemporary political analysis. As such, I think it is useful to indicate to what extent some of the major lines of development of both of these theories treat the political sphere as a dependent variable, and to indicate some of the empirical and conceptual problems created by an excessive reliance on either approach. A brief discussion of these two approaches is an indispensable prelude to a more extensive analysis of the organic-statist approach for two reasons. First, as a body of literature, from the mid-nineteenth century on, much of the corpus of organic-statist writing has been developed and modified in explicit normative opposition to both liberal pluralism and Marxism. It is therefore important to clarify how these three approaches differ on most of the central questions of political philosophy — on the role of the individual, the nature of the political community, the common good, and most importantly, the state. Second, at the empirical level of twentieth-century Latin American politics, the major political leaders who have attempted to impose corporatist variants of the organic-statist vision of politics on their countries have invariably acted as though liberal and Marxist ideologies and structures were the major obstacles in their path. It is therefore imperative from the point of view of the present analysis to consider the interaction of liberalism, Marxism, and organic statism.

A final preliminary note. By no means do I intend to advocate the normative or analytic superiority of the organic-statist model over that of either liberal pluralism or Marxism. I do, however, want to make explicit the analytic implications of the different models. Most models usually fuse normative, descriptive, and methodological components. However, for analytic purposes these components can be separated. That is, in part, models are normative statements about what societies should be like. In part they are empiricald escriptions of how societies are. In part they are methodological approaches suggesting what aspects of political life are important to study.

Classical Marxism and liberalism pluralism, in very different ways, contain vivid descriptions of what societies are like empirically that tend to portray the state as a dependent variable. Analysts working with either a classical Marxist or liberal-pluralist vision of the real world tend to use methodological...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRINCETON UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1978
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691075913
• ISBN 13: 9780691075914
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar