ABSTRACT
The political power to make the necessary changes came from General Pinochet, who ruled Chile from the 1973 coup that overthrew the elected Marxist-dominated government of Salvador Allende until 1990. The headlong rush to privatization in Chile was all the more surprising because it is a country with a long statist tradition. Even in the nineteenth century the revenues from the extraction of nitrate and, later, copper made it possible to build a relatively large state bureaucracy and centralized state. While the "modernization" of primary education involved municipalization more than it did privatization in the traditional sense, on the university level the privatizing impulse was applied more thoroughly. The state university system formerly dominated by the University of Chile and its branches was broken up into regions. The most controversial, far-reaching, and, in this writer's view, successful of the modernizations was the privatization of social security.
