Daniel Pécaut, a French sociologist with a keen eye for the political history of Colombia, seeks to explain social and political change in that country from 1930 to 1953 by arguing against all other interpretations as holistic as his own. Why the coexistence in Colombia, as nowhere else in Latin America, of forms of democratic order and violence? Whereas most other scholars have sought to demonstrate that the breakdown of democracy led to la Violencia, or that la Violencia brought democracy down, the author argues that they are of one piece: consubstantielles. Indeed, Pécaut’s work is a critique of causal arguments, especially those of teleological Marxism. His own, complex and labyrinthine, comes in a discourse that is, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words for his own work on France, “very French.”
The merit of this work is that it redirects the attention of political scientists and sociologists, so long held captive by (a concern for) the state, to the relationship between the state, a political realm relatively separate from it, and society. According to Pécaut, the underlying problem of Colombian history, and of Latin America, resides principally in society. Heterogeneous and combative, it proves invariably unmanageable for the state and politics. This is the opposite of Europe, Pécaut argues, where social coherence, whether consensual or conflictual, renders political order.
The work emerges out of three perceptive ideas. The first is a partial relationship between “civilization” and “barbarism,” which Pécaut transforms from a cultural dichotomy into a structural, spacial one, where the hors-social (that which cannot be assimilated into the national whole) is “barbarism.” It appears in this book only at times as a real, experiential force, most especially during the bogotazo. We get little idea of the place or meaning of “civilization” in Colombia, for the author’s ideas of order differ from those of Sarmiento.
Second is an ideology shared by liberals, conservatives, populists, and even communists. In Colombia, the ideal of a democratic order is based on the “natural” inequality of human beings, rather than on the social equality that pervades modern European thought. Third is an idea of democracy derived from the writings of Claude Lefort. Democracy can exist through the rise above society of a public symbolism that no social group or class can appropriate as its own. This fails to emerge in Colombia. Pécaut is part of that significant historiography that sees Colombia (and Latin America) for what Europe is not.
A timorous state, paralyzing party politics, the undermining of the organized working class (the one class that can offer society coherence), the privatizing appropriation of the state by strong economic elites, the ideology of inequality, and a constant “barbarism” are all part of the rapport de forces, both material and ideological, which Pécaut handles with dexterity, that make for the interplay of order and violence. Ultimately, the political elites resort to the latter. Civilian President Laureano Gomez, “Incapable de fonder la ‘bonne société,’ … laisse la mort effectuer son travail de dissolution” (p. 360).
There is a haunting quality to this book that makes it, in my estimation, obligatory reading. As other Latin American nations find forms of democracy, once again Colombia lives through a heightening of democracy and violence. As the author states, Colombia may be the exemplary, rather than the exceptional, case of late twentieth-century Latin American history. Civil society offers no utopias.
