ABSTRACT
The concept of civil society, emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, could not initially make its way out of the West because the social processes it expressed belonged exclusively to the West. In Latin America, the early modern differentiation between the economy and the private sphere did not take place until the early twentieth century. In the context of nation-building, this resulted in a disproportionately large private sphere and the continual possibility that personal relations could be extended to the political realm. Franco (1974) shows how in postcolonial Brazil the public activities of free men took place in the private space of the big landowners. Guerra demonstrates a similar phenomenon in Mexico, where the large haciendas ‘constituted more important centres than the small villages. For those who inhabited their centres as well as those who inhabited their peripheries… they represented the centres for the exercise of worship, festivals, etc.’ (Guerra 1988:134). Thus, the kind of society built in Latin America during its three hundred years of colonization is a society with a strong private space that personalizes formal relations, establishing some sort of hierarchy between all free members of society. In this social structure there was no space for civil society for two reasons: first, because a holistic and hierarchical conception of society could not have led to a society of equals; second, because the fusion between the private and the state could not have led to any process of differentiation. Thus, the idea and concept of civil society remained alien to the Latin American political and social scenes.
