186
PAR..TISAN R.EVIEW
Veliz's effort to explain the contrast goes beyond both the political
and the economic dimensions, into the cultural dimension, which corre–
sponds to a theoretical as well as to a practical development. Over the
past decades there has been an evolution in understanding, and respond–
ing to, the contrast between Latin America and the United States. In
political terms, the basic response was formulated in relation to the func–
tion of democracy. With the all too evident precariousness and serious
limitations of Latin American democracy, the challenge was then under–
stood as economic and the response was formulated in terms of the func–
tion of a market economy within a democratic polity. But with the
mercantilist restraints on market economy and the increased social polar–
ization accompanying it, the challenge has come to be understood in
cultural terms, and the responses are formulated in relation
to
the func–
tion of a liberal culture, encompassing a market economy within a
democratic polity.
This rediscovery of the cultural dimension of the challenge of mod–
ernization, of which Veliz is a firm exponent, coincides, paradoxically
enough, with a convergent concern on the part of Catholic social
thought, which he so decries. In Pope John Paul II's latest social encycli–
C;ll,
Centesimus Annus,
the breakdown of Communism is explained
;J.S
the
result of a fundamental anthropological error, as the denial of the sub–
jectivity of the individual as a person endowed with moral autonomy
and responsiblity, as well as the denial of the so-called "subjectivity of
society," formed by a plurality of intermediary, autonomous groups con–
sidered to be structures of participation and co-responsibility. The basic
decisions undertaken in a free and social economy, which for the first
time is fully recognized by Catholic social thought in this encyclical, be
they of work, consumption, savings or investment, imply ethical-cultural
options and a style of life. The critique of market economy, according
to John Paul
II,
is directed not so much at an economic system, as at an
ethical-cultural system which renders the economic dimension of human
life absolute, consequently underrating the ethical and religious dimen–
sion, and thereby weakening the whole socio-cultural system.
Veliz's thesis is at cross-purposes, at least at the explicit level, with
Centesimus Annus .
It seeks to prove "that Catholicism is a principal and
most visible circumstance affecting the life of the heirs of the imperial
Indies and that for a number of complex reasons, some unnecessary, oth–
ers possibly unjust, the Catholic Church has become symbolically associ–
ated with social and political arrangements that, regardless of other con–
siderations , have sustained repeated and catastrophic economic failures
and are now widely regarded as inimical to the advancement of industrial
