In 1930 Paraguay, despite the appearance of calm, was on the verge of a major upheaval. In 1928 the governing Liberal Party had won the right to rule in the first freely contested election in the country's history, and after years of sullen abstentionism the opposition Colorado Party had been induced to accept minority status in Congress. Moreover, political progress was matched by relative economic stability. Outside Asunción, the nation's capital and only real city, the effects of the world depression were little felt by the predominantly self-sufficient agrarian population of some 750,000. Beneath the surface, however, lay explosive tensions.

Popular discontent with President José P. Guggiari stemmed from a growing impatience with his failure to take a firm stand against Bolivia over conflicting claims to the Chaco, a large wasteland of desert and jungle lying between the Andes Mountains and the Paraguay River. Despite his efforts to lead an honest and progressive administration, Guggiari was to leave office in 1932 a very unpopular man. His government was most severely damaged by a notorious incident on 23 October 1931, in which his guards attacked a student rally protesting his apparent weakness in the face of Bolivian aggression. Eleven people were killed and many more wounded. Although Guggiari was later exonerated by a congressional investigation, the Colorados resigned their legislative seats and Paraguay's young intellectuals turned away from Liberalism to embrace new movements such as the Liga Nacional Independiente, which called for massive war preparations. The election in 1932 of a new Liberal president, Eusebio Ayala, in a one-man race, did little to reverse the party's growing political isolation.

The consolidation of Colombia as a nation-state has faced a major obstacle in the country's geography, the main topographical feature of which is the Andean mountain range. The central Cordillera of the Andes is separated from the western Cordillera by the Río Magdalena and the Río Cauca. The Pacific coastal plain that extends from Panama to the Ecuadorian frontier is covered by dense jungle, which has prevented the completion of the Pan-American Highway connection between Panama and Colombia. (In contrast, the Caribbean littoral to the north is more open and climatically better favoured.) The eastern plains - the Llanos Orientales - stretch from the foot of the eastern Cordillera south and east to the frontiers with Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. This fragmented landscape contains a wide diversity of altitude and relief, and since temperature depends on altitude rather than season, Colombia is, by convention, divided into ‘hot country’ (below 3,500 feet above sea-level), ‘temperate country’ (between 3,500 and 6,500 feet) and ‘cold country’ (above 6,500 feet).

The obstacles to economic development caused by poor communications can hardly be overestimated. Engineering difficulties and the high cost of construction and maintenance caused by the mountainous terrain impeded the establishment of more than a limited railway network before 1930. Indeed, Bogotá and Medellín had no direct rail connection with the Caribbean coast till the late 1950s. Thus, navigation along the Magdalena remained vital to the country's prosperity. (President Mariano Ospina Pérez in the late 1940s included the level of the Magdalena waters among the daily information that he required.)

‘In no other country do people live as we do … no other people on earth currently enjoy achievements such as ours’. Thus, in the course of a speech in 1949, did President Luis Batlle Berres express euphoric sentiments of satisfaction with the state of the Uruguayan nation. They were not necessarily shared by all his listeners, but during the following decade the notion that ‘como el Uruguay no hay’ (there's nowhere like Uruguay) was quickly absorbed into national mythology. As late as the mid-1960s Uruguayans might still cling to the belief that they were citizens of an exceptional country, blessed (unlike their neighbours) with the capacity to achieve political stability, as well as prosperity and social justice. Such an optimistic and complacent view was generally shared by external observers. But in reality Batlle Berres' statement had lost all meaning, except perhaps in an ironic sense. At mid-century Uruguay had fully recovered from the authoritarianism of Gabriel Terra in the 1930s and was now engaged, in the new age of import-substitution industrialization, in an attempt to re-establish and extend the political and social institutions of the batllista system of the pre-1930 period. The nation turned inwards, as if it preferred to live on the strength of a legend, choosing to enjoy a comfortable present rather than to contemplate an uncertain future. The consolidation of the new ideology, neo- batllismo, was facilitated by international changes of which Uruguay was a passive and, in the short term, favoured beneficiary.

The primary tradition in European philosophy since antiquity has been Aristotelianism. Most philosophers have worked within some version of it, and it would be no more exaggerated than most slogans to say that philosophy has been a series of footnotes to Aristotle and in particular to his metaphysical doctrine of substance. The tradition is not an unchanging monolith, of course, but a diversity with a unity and continuity given by shared metaphysical principles. It runs from Aristotle and the Peripatetics through the Arabs, Al Farabi, and Averroes, to St. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval philosophers, and on to Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, G. W. F. Hegel, and Marx.

Marx was an Aristotelian in metaphysics, and unless we keep this in mind we cannot appreciate his work. This has been lost sight of since Marx's time because scholarship and thought in this century, especially in English-speaking countries, have been deeply affected by the legacy of the empiricist philosophers, especially David Hume. For several decades it was de rigeur to reinterpret writers of the older tradition according to the principles of empiricist metaphysics. Aristotle and Marx are only two of the more prominent authors to have received such treatment, and to understand them it is necessary to stand back from much of the recent writing.

There are several good reasons to pause before wading into Karl Marx's philosophy of art, but surely the most worrisome is that there is nothing there to wade into, at least not in the deep and systematic sense that the word philosophy usually and properly entails. Marx was a remarkably well educated and broadly read man, and one can find in his works an impressive range of scattered references to a variety of aesthetic phenomena, from specific works of art to the most general aspects of artistic production. But there is nothing even approaching a systematic aesthetic theory in all of this. Judging strictly from the written record, it appears that Marx was after bigger, or at least very different, fish.

Such a conclusion has political as well as textual punch. Marx was, after all, a revolutionary: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.” As the last and most famous of the Theses on Feuerbach has it, “the point is to change it” (Marx, 1975: 423; italics in original).

With a growth in population from 17.5 million in 1964 to 22.3 million in 1973 and 28.6 million in 1985, Colombia was expected to overtake Argentina in the 1990s and resume its nineteenth-century position as the most populous Latin American country after Brazil and Mexico. Between 1951 and 1964 the country had one of the world's highest rates of demographic increase — 3.5 per cent per annum. From 1965 the rate of growth decelerated — in substantial part as a result of a sharp decline in birth-rates (from 40 per thousand in 1960 to 20 per thousand in 1974). By the early 1980s the annual rate had fallen to less than 2 per cent.

This reduced rate of population growth can be associated with urbanization and improved literacy. By the 1980s urban fecundity had fallen to only 55 per cent of the level in the countryside and was in part attributable to explicit policies of birth control, which, despite the power of the Church, had been adopted since the late 1960s. Between 1973 and 1985 the proportion of Colombians under fifteen years of age fell from 43 to 33 per cent. Nevertheless, growth in the under-five age group of 4 per cent per annum, combined with a 4.4 per cent annual increase among five- to fourteen-year-olds, imposed heavy pressures on health, education and housing services during the 1960s and 1970s.

Peru after 1960 experienced significant changes in its social structure, a notable expansion and intensification of political participation and important advances in the national integration of the peasants, as well as the urban middle and working classes, which were traditionally characterized by fragmentation and a marginal political status. At the same time, Peru underwent a series of changes in its political regime, shifting from an oligarchic system to a relatively broad-based democratic polity. Yet the relations between state and society acquired a conflictive character in so far as political ‘inclusion’ was accompanied by ‘exclusionary’ policies in the socio-economic arena which impeded the democratization and nationalization of Peruvian society and politics. The resulting tension produced a high level of political conflict and violence, contributing to the disintegration of the state.

After the Second World War, Peru had experienced a short period of democratic transition that ended in 1948 with a military coup headed by General Manuel A. Odría. The Odría dictatorship (1948–56) paved the way for increased participation by U.S. capital in the economy as a result of which traditional exports expanded and high rates of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) were achieved. (During the period from 1950 to 1967, exports grew 7 per cent annually — as against 4 per cent in Latin America as a whole — and GDP rose 6 per cent annually. In 1965, 47 per cent of the country's exports were produced by U.S. corporations, and 62 per cent of the financial capital was controlled by U.S. banks.)

The year 1930 opens the gateway into modern Argentina. The military coup of September 1930 brought the collapse of constitutional government and initiated the long sequence of weak democracies, punctuated by coups d'état and military dictatorships, that remained the cardinal feature of Argentine politics into the 1980s. The plunge into depression in 1930 permanently shifted the path of economic development. Hitherto Argentina had subsisted as an informal dependency of Great Britain, supplying Britain with meats and grains and serving as a leading British market for coal, manufactured goods and, at least till 1914, capital exports. Beginning in 1930 the Victorian structure, already under growing pressure since the outbreak of the First World War, began to totter. From the depression came a decline of agrarian exports and an expansion of manufacturing – conditions that impaired the stability of the Anglo-Argentine relationship as they transformed the components of the Argentine economy. Social change of equal magnitude, and with the same enduring consequences, paralleled the economic shifts. The population of Argentina grew from 11.8 million in 1930 to 15.3 million in 1946, but the rate of growth declined. Falling rates of growth were a consequence of a substantial decline in the birth-rate, from 31.5 per thousand in 1920 to 24.7 per thousand in 1935, which contemporaries conventionally blamed on the depression. (In contrast death-rates fell only slightly, from 14.7 per thousand in 1920 to 12.5 per thousand in 1935.) Declining population growth was also a result of the end of mass European immigration.

At first glance Karl Marx's reception seems to pose few real problems. Marxism, the doctrine he inspired, has, on any reckoning, been enormously influential. If today, in E. J. Hobsbawm's words, “the shadow of Karl Marx presides over a third of the human race” this is surely no mean accomplishment for a theorist who died in relative obscurity in 1883 (Hobsbawm, 1987: 336). Marx's legacy is, in any case, intellectual as well as political, rather as he himself might have expected. “Over the whole range of the social sciences” says David McLellan in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, “Marx has proved probably the most influential figure of the twentieth century”(Miller et al., 1987: 322). There is no reason to regard this claim as exaggerated. Ever since its inception, Marxism has stimulated debate across the social sciences. But it did so in an unprecedented way, which was both advantageous and disadvantageous to its reception. We have only to contrast the scholars who have tackled Marxism but have not lent their names to political movements at the same time.

Venezuela's political, economic and social development in the twentieth century has been unique in Latin America. In 1900, Venezuela was a poor and caudillo-dominated Caribbean country. Export agriculture based on coffee and cacao produced some modest wealth for the planter class, but neither the Andean nor the coastal hacendados could be said to constitute a national modernizing elite. Poor communications and regionally based rural economies meant that national loyalties remained weak. Moreover, the nineteenth-century civil wars had played havoc with hopes for economic prosperity, national integration and even political stability as successive regional politico-military cliques came to power in Caracas.

Economic growth accelerated around the turn of the century. Under the dictatorship of the Táchira caudillo Cipriano Castro (1899–1908) foreign companies intensified asphalt exploitation; and from 1914, under the dictatorship of another Tachira caudillo, Juan Vicente Gomez (1908–1935), Venezuela's economy began to undergo a singular transformation with the discovery of rich oil fields in the western province of Zulia and in the eastern coastal region. However, the impact of the oil industry upon Venezuela would not be fully evident until after Gómez's death. Moreover, political life changed little before 1936, except for an expansion of government jobs and a very modest strengthening of central government. Economic patterns and class structure also registered only slight shifts. Many of Gómez's cronies entered the elite by selling concessions to foreign oil companies, and a larger and more affluent middle class arose as Venezuelans found professional employment with the oil companies and in the growing public sector.

THE PERONISTA DECADE, 1946–55

On 24 February 1946 General Juan Domingo Perón was elected president of Argentina in an open poll. This victory was the culmination of his dizzying political rise, which had begun a few years earlier when the military revolution of June 1943 put an end to a decade of conservative governments and brought to power a clique of army colonels with fascist sympathies. The emerging military regime had been groping its way between the hostility that its authoritarian and clerical tendencies had awakened in the middle and upper classes and the diplomatic quarantine organized by the United States in reprisal for Argentina's neutral position in the Second World War. Through clever palace manoeuvring Perón became the regime's dominant figure and ended the political isolation of the military elite by launching a set of labour reforms that had a powerful impact on the working class, whose numbers had swelled with industrialization and urbanization since the mid-1930s. In Perón's vision, the function of these reforms was to prevent the radicalization of conflicts and the spread of Communism. But the Argentine bourgeoisie did not fear an imminent social revolution, a fear which, at other times and in other places, had facilitated the acceptance of similar reforms. As a result, they joined the anti-fascist front organized by the middle class, imbuing political cleavages with a visible class bias.

The history of Bolivia could be viewed as the history of a rather small elite (or cluster of political, economic and bureaucratic elites) whose members were frequently on first-name terms with one another and whose alliances and divisions often had as much to do with private as with public life. Membership might be achieved through family background, education or success in one of a limited range of (essentially urban) careers, but the qualifications did not have to be particularly high to exclude the great majority of the population. Fluency in spoken and written Spanish, access to a town and a means of livelihood sufficiently secure to leave a margin above individual subsistence disqualified the great majority of adult males, at least until well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, the internal affairs of these elites could be highly complex and arouse great passion, and their divisions could have important consequences for the population as a whole (as in the Federal Revolution of 1898, when an armed conflict between Conservatives and Liberals – or perhaps between the elites of La Paz and Sucre – raised the peasant masses of the altiplano into collective action on a massive scale). The Bolivian elites were by no means homogeneous, or even coherent. The country's geography, the centripetal tendencies of its pattern of economic development (aptly symbolized by the external orientation of its railway system) and the colonial character of its social structure conspired against the emergence of a socially unified elite and contributed to the complexity and instability of its ‘traditional’ history.

“Religion . . . is the opium of the people ” (Marx, 1975: 244). That is probably Marx's best-known remark about religion; indeed, perhaps it is the best-known statement of all. In the popular reception of Marx this observation is supposed to embody all that is known of his unremitting hostility to religion, especially to Christianity. Yet even taken on its own and out of context, it is a decidedly ambiguous remark, full of hidden complexities. I doubt if anything much is known about Marx's attitude toward the widespread habit of opium taking in his day, but if the practice of religion is meant to be analogous to drug taking, it is likely that he at least thought that both practices needed to be explained and not merely explained away.

Presumably Marx thought that drugs were taken as a source of illusions and hallucinations and also as a palliative, a form of consolatory flight from the harshness of the real world. Religion, he points out in the same passage, is the “illusory happiness of the people.” So if we are to explain the practice, we need to know not just why partakers personally like drug-induced illusions but also, and more fundamentally, why in the first place, users perceive the need to fly from the real world into illusions. For “religious suffering,” Marx continues, “is the expression of real suffering.“ That being the case, we should explain what it is about the real world itself that provokes the need to flee from it into religious illusions.