ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the origins of the Latin American state and presents its historical determinants as well as its contemporary directions. It begins with an exploration of the beginnings of state-society relations in the Iberian Peninsula. The corporative ordering of society was closely bound up with the formative period as well as the successes of the early Spanish state. The chapter looks at how the "Hapsburg model" of sociopolitical organization was carried to the New World. It includes that economic, sociological, institutional, military, and cultural factors were all involved in complex and overlapping ways. The chapter examines the collapse of the model in the Wars of Independence and the efforts to rebuild a new, "republican" state system in the nineteenth century. It looks at the efforts to create corporatist and semicorporatist systems in Latin America beginning in the 1930s. The chapter concludes with an assessment of both neoliberalism and neocorporatism in Latin America.
