The contribution of Francisco José Moreno’s book is more his provocative concept of “authoritism” than his analysis of Chilean political culture. The latter is viewed historically, often intuitively. The impression is that any of several other Latin American nations might have served the author’s purposes as well as Chile or even better.
The book rests on several assumptions, the most vulnerable being the author’s assertion that a “single political culture” (p. xvi) exists for the entire Ibero-American world, despite what he acknowledges as important differences between countries. The book criticizes English literature on the region for ignoring the “most fundamental psychological [sic] mechanisms that operate in those societies” (p. xvii). Authoritism is the author’s concept to accommodate these distinctive “mechanisms,” and Chile the type case.
Authoritism is explained as an alternative concept to “authoritarianism,” which is dismissed because it implies illegitimate political control. Authoritism suggests legitimate power, “psychologically” accepted and legally sanctioned. Moreno conceives of authoritism as a “single center of legitimate political power, the legal supremacy of which is sanctioned in the name of justice and whose actions are, therefore, not to be bound by written regulations or existing customs” (p. 24). This becomes for the author a fundamental cultural reality of the Ibero-American world, including—logically—Chile.
Chile presents a difficult challenge to such a thesis, for its political culture seems to many observers more national, more idiosyncratic than others in Latin American. Moreno rejects the familiar interpretation of Chilean political stability—that the nation has evolved a reasonably representative institutional framework and a democratic political culture. He argues instead that Chilean stability is historically based on “its ability to accommodate structurally political forces common to the whole region” (p. 184)—that is, an authoritistic political culture. The viewpoint is expressed characteristically in a somewhat impressionistic analysis of Frei’s regime. Moreno “explains” Frei’s domestic political difficulties, apart from his “ability to assimilate his own propaganda,” as an “intellectual inclination for pluralism” in the face of his “nation’s proclivity toward absolutist monism . . .” (p. 172), and argues that only by suppressing his pluralistic inclinations could Frei have gained control over his nation. While dismissing “Anglo-Saxon pluralism” as politically unworkable in Latin America, Moreno unfortunately does not make clear his notion of pluralism.
The direction of Moreno’s analysis is provocative despite abundant problems. The interpretation of Chile, which occupies most of the book, is formalistic and almost tangential. The author criticizes available information about Chilean life as insufficient to analyze the sociopolitical variables related to his authoritistic concept. Yet Chile has been reasonably well researched by North Americans and Chileans, and relevant evidence is ignored. The author disturbingly refers to distinctive Latin American “psychological mechanisms” as though there must be a separate discipline for Latin Americans. His analogies, including one between Mexico and Chile in the concluding chapter, are sometimes annoyingly simplistic.
Yet despite these reservations, there is probably some truth in Moreno’s fundamental assertion, however unconvincingly set forth. He has isolated a profoundly pervasive cultural attitude in much if not all of Latin America, an attitude treating society organically rather than pluralistically. The perspective is reinforced and transmitted by socio-cultural institutions and traditions which define political competition hierarchically, in a manner very different from our own experience. This Moreno intuitively senses, and he correctly criticizes his North American colleagues for their ethnocentrism toward this reality and their failure to accommodate it. The result is an often challenging if diffuse perspective on contemporary Latin American politics, including—but not very well exemplifying—Chile.
