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Book Review
Constitucionalismo y Orden Liberal: América Latina, 1850–1920. Coordinated by MARCELLO CARMAGNANI. Turin, Italy: Otto Editore, 2000. 380 pp. €7.20 (paper).
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This book consists of eleven essays addressing various facets of liberalism as it manifested itself in Latin American culture, institutions, and society. Four consider Mexico; four, Argentina; two, Chile; and one, Peru. Carmagnani asserts that in collecting these works together a new interpretation of constitutionalism and liberalism during the period may emerge. The goals are to free the historical investigation of liberalism from the vilification the term has received through overly politicized historical writings, to provide needed sophistication in defining the term, and to revise critically the liberal past of Latin America, thereby freeing history from ideology. The lens through which to view these goals is "the constitutional recognition of the liberty of social actors" and the themes that follow from this aspect of liberalism (p. 2). No more perceptive and interesting organization for discussing these essays could be constructed than the structure of analysis found in Carmagnani's very brief—perhaps too brief—introduction. |
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The first two essays, Gabriella Chiaramonti's "Buscando el Ciudadano 'Virtuoso': El Censo Peruano de 1876 en el Proyecto Político de Manuel Pardo" and Leticia Mayer's "La Ley de los Grand Números y la Cultura Liberal en México, 1856–1885," examine concrete ways that liberalism recognized the individual. Chiaramonti skillfully analyzes the politics and legislation of the first national-scale Peruvian census, an undertaking that raised contested issues of suffrage, indirect representation at the national level, and the nature and function of both civil and voting registers. While literally taking note of the individual, the census served to self-legitimize the central government, to adopt local power structures for national purposes, and to construct a Peruvian nation. Mayer's contribution stresses the importance of statistics and statistical methods as related to individuals and individual actions. The liberal Mexican state applied these methods in areas as diverse as medical injuries, civil registers, and codification. |
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