This book makes one think the adage “military history is to history what military music is to music” still has substance after all. Over the years too much military history in monographic form has failed to encourage sophisticated linkages with political and social history. Impressive in style and substance, The Grand Illusion stops short of pursuing significant opportunities to place an important subject within the historical and cultural perspectives that would enlighten us further about the essence of modern Chilean civil-military relations.
Throughout the book, opportunities to link prussianization’s failure to civilian as well as military causes are noted, but go unseized. For example, the civil war of 1891, curiously referred to as a “revolution,” certainly the result of something more historic than a “squabble” (p. 45); the parliamentary republic of 1891–1925 (pp. 178–80) and its violent episodes; and the “mobilization of 1920” (pp. 101–2)—all well documented in secondary literature—are...
