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eryday culture I mean marketplace, firm, and property transactions, bid–
ding practices, courtroom activities, bureaucratic activities of many kinds,
tax practices, parking tickets, permits, licenses, hiring and promotion
practices, family relations, and other patterns of daily professional, com–
mercial, and personal interactions. At these levels the traditions Veliz dis–
cusses in most of his book may well be continuing more strongly than he
allows in his last chapter.
In
other words, at this level of everyday culture
there still may be more validity to Veliz's thesis than he himself seems to
be acknowledging. He argues, "The ramparts ... have now been
breached, not by outsiders fighting to get in, but by very large numbers
of insiders trekking out in the direction of supermarkets and shopping
centers." That is largely true, but many economic, legal, political, ad–
ministrative, and social institutions, practices, and values in Latin America
have not necessarily made the transition to the market and the private
sector so fully as Veliz's image may suggest. Neither have Latin American
intellectuals nor North American ones interpreting Latin America made
such a transition. Indeed, while many more of them are now reconciled
to political liberalism, they are still largely hostile to economic and cul–
tural liberalism.
The final chapter raises another question that deserves more atten–
tion. Given Veliz's thesis about cultural continuities, why has change
suddenly occurred now? Why not earlier? Or later? I do not see in
Veliz's argument a way to recognize that change is in the offing until
after it has happened. He explains Latin American continuity but not
Latin American change. Similar questions also arise with respect
to
England. There Veliz posits the continuul1l of a propensity for many
small changes; a sharp divergence from that pattern would occur, then, if
such a propensity were sharply to diminish. Thus Veliz writes of "the
unleashing by the English Industrial Revolution of the greatest process of
transformation in human history." English society was, he writes, "the
result of endless alteration," and he quotes approvingly Ernest Gellner's
description of it as "the only society ever to live by and rely on sustained
and perpetual growth ... the first society to invent the concept and
idea of progress, of continuous improvement." But has the alteration
been endless in England? Has its growth been perpetual, its improvement
continuous? Clearly, they have not. The question is, therefore, why has
England become less an agent for change than it once was? Earlier Veliz
acknowledges, "The Industrial Revolution that was born in England
now resides in the United States ... " This is true, and it leads him
to
what I view as his most interesting and provocative points.
Chapter Seven, "A World Made in English," has the freshest and po–
tentially most important argument (and also one of the most debatable
