ABSTRACT
The "pathology of democracy" school was prominent in Latin American studies in the early years, the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Although often viewed as dated and old-fashioned, the vestiges of this approach remain strong in some quarters. The "pathology of democracy" school measured Latin America almost exclusively from the point of view of the United States. The "developmentalist" school emerged in the early 1960s among a new generation of scholars and was closely related to the assumptions of the Kennedy years and the Alliance for Progress. The influential formulations of Charles W. Anderson are the most interesting of the three "schools" represented. For Anderson began by explicitly rejecting the North American biases of the earlier writers and taking Latin America on its own terms. He denied the popular view of Latin American politics as "unsystematic," arguing instead that it was its interpreters, who failed to understand what the "system" was.
