Book Reviews : Latin American Politics. By WILLIAM S. STOKES. (New York: Thomas Y. Cro well Company, 1959. Pp. xv, 538.)

• Published date: 01 September 1960
• Date: 01 September 1960
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296001300348
• Author: K.H. Silvert
• Subject Matter: Articles

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Latin American Politics. By WILLIAM S. STOKES. (New York: Thomas Y. Cro-
well Company, 1959. Pp. xv, 538.)
In these days of the soft opinion, the soft sell, and the soft review, Professor
Stokes’s book sounds a dissonant chord, coming up with the hard opinion ex-
pressed in hard language with evident hardheadedness. Opinions among most
of his area colleagues certainly will not be favorable to this treatise, designed as
&dquo;an introduction to the nature of power in Latin American politics.&dquo; Stokes is
a Manchesterian Liberal in his economics, doggedly Protestant in his wariness
and suspicion of the Catholic Church, and classically libertarian in his politics.
These views are entirely self-consistent and serve to provide a tightly woven
threat of internal logic for those able to resist bucking against the pull of the
thesis at every turn of the page. The author is the only wholly unreconstructed
Conservative of note writing in the Latin American field; as such, his focus
serves to freshen material which has been growing stale with the many recent
attempts to write heavy textbooks and thin symposia on the basis of insufficient
primary materials. The only seemingly incongruent attitudes are those which
lead the author into neo-Freudian analysis, especially discernible when he con-
siders the position of the family in Latin America. But then, Freudianism and
laissez-faire-ism are both orthodoxies not necessarily in clash, since the two are
at least in part theories of natural states and the social process.
The book’s organization is the most valuable contribution of the author,
in this reviewer’s opinion. Stokes starts right in with social class, which he views
as the basic social fact against which all other analysis must be projected. Having
thus given himself an excellent independent variable which he can carry from
country to country, he discusses the family, education, the Church, and the
military in setting the general social stage. The center third of...