This book covers the years from the breakdown of the Spanish Empire in America to the stabilisation of the new republic of Chile. It is a survey of the political ideas and the interplay of ideas and political action during the independence period. Whilst examining the influences making for change in late colonial Chile and the implications of political experiment and instability, much of the text is devoted to a description of the common ideology of the revolution. The author considers that the political theory was based on the notions of the social contract, the sovereignty of the people, representative government, the division of powers and a system of natural rights. It was derived from the liberal thought of the enlightenment and from the doctrines of the North American and French revolutions. But it was a complex of vaguer emotions and attitudes such as utopianism, anti-Spanish feeling, the 'black legend', an incipient nationalism and the idealisation of the Araucanian Indian which gave the revolution its mystique.

"Examines the role in Chilean politics during the 1970s and 1980s of cultural beliefs and values surrounding the family. Draws on election propaganda, political speeches, press releases, public service campaigns, magazines, newspaper articles, and televised political advertisements"--Provided by publisher.

This Oxford Handbook comprehensively examines the field of Latin American history.

Contains primary source material.

Few dispute that a major turning point in the history of present-day Chile commenced with the election in 1970 of a Marxist physician, Salvador Allende. What followed were three years that shook South America, if not the world. Land reform, factory expropriation, the politicization of a sector of the armed forces, curriculum reform in education, each in their turn led to a hardening of political fault lines, and created the basis for the overthrow of the Allende regime. This work, by one of the foremost analysts of modern Chile, features an interview with an earlier president of that beleaguered country, Eduardo Frei. In what is likely to be viewed as the most authoritative statement to date on U.S.Chile relationships during this stormy period, Falcoff debunks the myth of a CIA-inspired overthrow of the democratic forces, placing responsibility on Allende's failure to obtain or even seek a decisive electoral mandate, on a governing coalition internally inconsistent and frequently at war with its constituent elements, on an economic policy that polarized supporters and enemies, and ultimately on the need to turn to the military for the stability that its policy failures could not achieve. The final chapter, on the assumption to power and political changes rendered by the present ruler, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, indicates that the problems of Chile are not attributable to any single ruler or party. Falcoff indicates that core problems in Chile, from capital formation to the search for diversification, were exemplified in cultural, moral, and spiritual values between the Frei and Allende epochs. The prolonged Pinochet regime, for Falcoff, has postponed settlement of the major issues raised by the democratic era: equality and growth, legality and legitimacy. The costs of democratic order remain for Chileans to confront and resolve.