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5-52
Santiago de Chile. Centro de Estudios Bicentenario
Alan Knight*
St. Antony's College, University of Oxford
Resumen
Abstract
This article seeks to identify and explain the historical links between
democracy and revolution in Latin America. It first defines and analyses
'democratic’ and 'revolutionary' traditions in the continent. It notes the
precocity of nineteenth-century Latin American liberalism which,
stimulated by the independence struggles, carried implications for the
subsequent onset of democracy in the twentieth-century political
permutations (social democracy, revolutionary populism, statist populism,
socialist revolution, and authoritarian reaction), seeking to tease out the
corresponding relationship between the two 'traditions'. It concludes
(inter alia) that the current triumph of liberal democracy in Latin
America, while in part attributable to historical precedent, is also
significantly contingent, and dependent on the apparent exhaustion of the
revolutionary tradition.