Content area
Full Text
This essay reviews the following works:
Neoliberalismo corregido y progresismo limitado: Los gobiernos de la Concertación en Chile, 1990-2010. By Manuel Antonio Garretón. Santiago: Editorial ARCIS, CLACSO, 2013. ISBN: 9789568114961.
Radiografía crítica al "modelo chileno": Balance y propuestas. Edited by Gonzalo Martner and Eugenio Rivera. Santiago: Lom, USACH, 2013. ISBN: 9789560004420.
Economía política del fracaso: La falsa modernización del modelo neoliberal. By Alberto Mayol and José Miguel Ahumada. Santiago: El Desconcierto, 2015. ISBN: 9789569370151.
Los chilenos bajo el neoliberalismo: Clases y conflicto social. By Carlos Ruiz and Giorgio Boccardo. Santiago: El Desconcierto, 2015. ISBN: 9789569370106.
Chile and the Neoliberal Trap: The Post-Pinochet Era. By Andrés Solimano. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781107003545. (Reprinted in Spanish as Capitalismo a la chilena. Y la prosperidad de las élites. Santiago: Catalonia, 2012. ISBN: 9789563241426.)
The major topics of interest for those studying Chile in the 1990s and 2000s-democratization and consolidation, growth, equity, regulation, governance-have lost their centrality among Chilean social scientists, who are now calling for a critical reexamination of the political and economic arrangements that have prevailed in the country since the end of its military dictatorship in 1989. Old topics such as class, power, and conflict have made a comeback. The five books discussed in this review essay are good examples of this renewed interest in a critical reexamination of the origins and trajectory of contemporary Chile. A close reading of these works reveals similar starting points, a number of analogies and broad complementarities among them, but also important limitations.1
These books are not merely a response to developments in Chile; they are the local expression of a broader global phenomenon in which scholars are paying greater attention to the consequences of economic restructuring, neoliberalism, and inequality in the aftermath of the subprime and Euro crises (2008). That is, the works analyzed here are the product of historical events, not merely an intellectual fashion trend. Economic adversities, political crises, and large protest movements are often drivers of adjustment and even transformation in scholarly thinking, especially in the social sciences, and this is what we are witnessing among scholars in Chile today.
In Alberto Mayol and José Miguel Ahumada's Economía política del fracaso: La falsa modernización del modelo neoliberal (2015), the authors claim that three...