Critical Passions: Selected Essays (review)
obvious explanation for the difference relates to the contrasting social orders in the two countries. In conclusion, Adelman has shown us how much we may profit from in-depth empirical research into the institutional structure by which Latin America continued its participation in world markets in the nineteenth century. Yet if we feel compelled to answer North’s interrogatory, how did Latin America fall behind, historians need to look beyond the NIE. How else can the reader make sense of Adelman’s postscript on Argentina’s twentieth century? He makes mention there of many workers and migrants being left “outside the realm of formal representation” and of “emerging ideas of social entitlements” among the popular classes (p. 291). Political economic analysis gives us no inkling as to the historical antecedents to the populist and statist polices of the mid-twentieth century. Neither do we acquire any understanding as to why the popular classes today continue to resist market reforms. Therefore, we scholars might profit in pursuing research agendas guided just as much by social history as by the New Institutional Economics.