ABSTRACT
Transformations were not about transforming existing (state) institutions, but inventing and building completely new types of social institutions, which unfolded in everyday practices and subjectivities. The state in Latin America can be organized around three analytical axes. First, any discussion of state transformation must consider the transformation of social relations and how they condense and crystalize in the institutionalized forms of the state apparatus and state discourses. Second, a basic element of any theorizing of the state in Latin America is its different roles in society. Third, concentrated in the field of political thinking, especially within state theory, the Eurocentric legacy with is universalizing claims has had a strong historical and modern pertinence, which includes little recognition of Latin American intellectual production in the Global North. The US ambition to establish itself as the sovereign of the Americas was expressed explicitly later in the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary.
