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A worldwide trend toward democracy is surely one of the more remarkable phenomena of our times, even if the movement twoard that goal may often be haphazard and elusive. Past history will provide a healthy skepticism concerning the likelihood of democracy being reached in the near future in many parts of the world, as well as a preparedness for the possibility that many countries apparently close to the "institutional divide" are going to slip back rather than cross it soon. Nevertheless, the past 2600 years, or even 5000, yield the reassuring message that during that long period freedom has improved its extent significantly, with respect both to geographical breadth and institutional depth....
Before the Pinochet coup in 1973, Chile had a lengthy history of constitutionalism. Early in the republican era the aristocracy established order in the political system; a century later the emergent middle sectors infused politics with wider democratic practices and, relative to most of Latin America, a level of pluralism came to characterize group politics. Despite the distinctive advantages that embellished Chile’s political system, however, certain unfulfilled promises still marred the actual picture in the early 1960s. As the lower economic strata of society were continually passed over by most of the social reforms and economic advances that bettered the general outlook of the nation...
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
In all parts of the world and in every age, many of the greatest works of literature have been shaped or inspired by the swirl of historical events. The wars, holocausts, and mushroom clouds of our own era haunt the pages of many twentieth-century writers; events of the past, even the remote past, also inspire many authors, though their work is contemporary in every way. And if we agree with the poet Czeslaw Milosz that "historicity may reveal itself in a detail of architecture, in the shaping of a landscape," we come to recognize that our understanding of a given poem or novel can often be deepened by a reading from this point of view. The essayists in Literature and the Historical Process ...