ABSTRACT
Although some modernizationists touted the development potential of the new middle classes, others, such as French social scientist Jacques Lambert, were more structurally oriented in their analysis. In our final selection on modernization, Lambert pins responsibility for lags in Latin American social development squarely on the latifundia (great landed estates) that dominated the rural hinterland. On the one hand, the latifundia monopolized the land tenure system in such a way as to relegate the rural population, both on and off the great estates, to small, inadequate parcels (minifundios) that produced only a bare, subsistence standard of living. On the other hand, the isolation of the latifundia as well as the system of paternalistic social relations sapped the peasantry’s incentive for self-improvement because it guaranteed, in all but the most abusive cases, a minimal, however substandard, level of welfare.
Furthermore, the pervasive and insidious economic and social influence of the latifundia contributed to the formation of what Lambert and others perceived as a dual society, polarized between an unproductive, feudalized backland and a modernizing, urban sector. The solution was to promote agrarian reform and the “defeudalization” of the countryside through the encouragement of modern, capitalist techniques. Other adherents to the modernizationists’ diffusion thesis argued that encouraging foreign investment from the West would also serve to promote the process of development.
