This study contains useful material on the early efforts of the Chilean Right and Christian Democrats to contain peasant unrest within the framework of a parliamentary capitalist system. The study is divided into three parts which include chapters on the Alessandri reform, the Christian Democrats, the strategy of opposition to reform and what are described as the “urban-rural cleavages” of the latter years of the Frei government. Lacking a perspective that identifies the key interests of social forces in Chilean policies, the author is at a loss to explain class cleavages and conflicts as well as class alliances. Hence the author underestimates the potentialities of the working-class parties to carry out a massive reform; at the same time he overstates the possibilities for change inherent in the Frei presidency and in its principal social base, the urban middle class. The urban/rural cleavages which the author makes a great deal of unfortunately did not materialize: the urban and rural middle class and Right has been and is opposed to massive rural change while the urban workers have been and are the principal supporters of peasant supported agrarian reform. None of this is particularly novel. The usefulness of this study is largely confined to the chapters on the Alessandri period and the first two years of the Frei government. The rest is based on very thin research. The discussion of working class politics would have benefitted from a reading of Angell, Peppe and Goodman; the assertions concerning landlord consumptionist behavior would have benefited from a reading of Sternberg; changes on the composition of the rural labor force would have been more accurately discussed by reading Zemelman; and the pre-1950 social history of rural discontent would have been better documented by a discussion of Almino Affonso, et al., Movimiento Campesino Chileno; linkage between bureaucrats and rural elites is discussed in Petras and LaPorte. Massive U.S. involvement in Chilean politics ($20 million dollars for Frei in 1964) and agrarian reform are not adequately discussed despite useful accounts by Wolpin and Mutchler. It is hoped that U.S. scholars who make attempts to discuss social and political development in Latin America will pay more attention to the Washington Post and less to formal models which fail to deal with external penetration. Kaufmans argument against the existence of a ruling class is inadequate since he fails to examine the interconnections and overlap between economic elites, the degree of economic concentration and their impact on overall societal development. Kaufman should consult Ewan’s doctoral thesis. Kaufman’s inadequate discussion of the social organization of power prevented him from recognizing the limits of the “reform-mongering” framework. According to this approach reforms deemed acceptable are those attributed to a nominal “center” and strategies are elaborated in which the center is supposed to form coalitions with tire “moderate left” or “moderate right.” This approach overlooks the actual historical process in which social demands occurred in Chile and the way in which politics polarized. Unfortunately the normative bias in the Hirschman and Anderson approaches so influenced Kaufman as to prevent him, in part, from realizing that the movement for agrarian reform would not be contained within this stratagem; and that the center would not “float” but move to the right. Models derived from western liberal ideology are not useful in understanding countries going through periods of rapid social change. It is to Kaufman’s credit that he recognized this in his introduction.
It is hoped that liberal social scientists will recognize the utility of class analysis in understanding large-scale agrarian reform. The failure of the “Center” should not now be construed as an argument against agrarian reform but as a point of departure for a new critical re-examination of old models and thoughts.
