ABSTRACT
Profound social and economic transformations are shaking and undermining the traditional structure of society. In the political sphere the rising tide of revolutionary pressures threatens to sweep away or inundate the efforts of various kinds of regimes—military or civilian, conservative or reformist—to cope with and manage the changes and to promote national development. A good starting point for the study of Latin American society and politics— not just of its traditional order but of much of its style and structure as well— is to think in terms of a fairly well-defined, rigid adaptable, hierarchically and vertically segmented system of class and caste stratifications, groupings, corporate bodies, elites, and intereses, revolving around, tied to, and deriving legitimacy from the authority of the central state or its leader. On the eve of the conquest the constituent elements of Spanish society fell into two general categories, the vestiges of the medieval estates and the functional corporations.
