This is a short book of readings, loosely grouped around the subject indicated by the book’s title, which constitutes another of the useful Borzoi paperbacks on Latin America under the general editorship of Lewis Hanke. Each of the readings is short, but long enough to make its point.
While most of the selections are well-known, and their inclusion predictable—Sarmiento on Facundo Quiroga, Jesús de Galíndez on Trujillo, Bunge on “racial psychology”—they are nonetheless well-chosen, and the collection as a whole is worth having. I found Lyle McAlister’s piece on civil-military relations, excerpted from the Journal of Inter-American Studies, the most helpful item in the collection, although there are worthwhile insights in the selections from Richard Morse, John J. Johnson, and François Chevalier. It is, as always, a pleasure to encounter again Arciniegas and Madariaga. In addition the selections from nineteenth-century writers are themselves of historical interest. Professor Hamill is apparently an admirer of Johnson and pays compliments to his work where appropriate.
If a central tendency emerges from the various writings included, it is to stress the contradiction between the premises of the formal constitutional procedures and the social and cultural realities of the area, and to regard caudillismo as a reflection of a primitive stage of cultural development, which arises to fill the gap left by the failure of constitutional norms to establish their relevance.
The editor contributes a good bibliographic survey to end the volume. The rather over-written introduction demonstrates a knowledge of the history of the area and the literature on the subject but rambles. Its crucial weakness lies in not providing some sort of theoretical structure that would tie the readings together, and in not delimiting the concept of the caudillo, which is central to the whole enterprise.
