ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews and summarizes a bit in order to pull together Costa Rica's blurred portrait into a more coherent picture. Costa Rica clearly shared much of the origin, history, social culture, and political and economic traits of Central America. Contrary to the foundation myth's contention of the virtual classlessness and egalitarianism of Costa Rica, world economic and political forces stimulated further class differentiation, mobilization, and conflict in the early twentieth century. The solution to the economic difficulties brought about a remarkable revolution in Costa Rica's political economy—the abandonment of the social democratic development model for a neoliberal one. Costa Rica's insurgent political elites of the 1940s pressed for and eventually settled upon democratic rules of the game in the era during and after World War II when inclusion of the labor and political left and liberal democratic political arrangements were in vogue in the West.
