Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Patrick Barr-Melej provides a cultural history of the Chilean middle class and its reformist brand of nationalism in the crucial first half of the twentieth century. His book is a welcome addition to the spate of recent works on Latin American middle classes and to the even more voluminous literature on nationalism in the region. It will interest scholars of Chile, of twentieth-century nationalisms in Latin America, and of middle-class politics worldwide.

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Barr-Melej examines the views of leading reformers who were members of, or identified with, the centrist Radical Party. Barr-Melej sees the Radical Party—which grew significantly during the 1920s, became the most influential force in Chilean politics in the 1930s, and headed governing coalitions in the 1930s and 1940s—as the principal political expression of the middle class and as formative of middle-class views. In many respects, this conceptualization of the relation between the party and the middle class is sound. The Radical Party was indeed closely identified with the middle class, especially with those middle-class sectors that swelled with the expansion of state employment, including educators, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. Moreover, as Barr-Melej points out, the Radical Party's insistence on reformist rather than revolutionary solutions to the excesses of capitalism and the party's belief in the efficacy of state intervention dovetailed with the middle class's aversion to radical change and its embrace of modernization and social engineering. In attending to the convergences between the Radical Party and the broader middle class, however, Barr-Melej pays relatively little attention to the disjunctures among technical/professional discourses, party politics, anti-oligarchic reform currents, and middle-class popular and literary cultures. As a result, the complexities of middle-class nationalism tend to recede in his account. Comprehensive discussions of colonial and nineteenth-century developments in politics, literature, and education also detract somewhat from the book's focus on middle-class nationalism.

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