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On Paradigms and the Pursuit of the Practical

A book of this kind is eloquent testimony to the continuing power of the self-serving dogma on development constructed in the North Atlantic over the course of the last three centuries. Whether under the rubric of the Black Legend, the White Man's Burden, Manifest Destiny, or the pseudoscientific abstractions of post-World War II “modernization theory,” the assumptions of that dogma have been the same. Development in what is today called the Third World has been thwarted by a premodern cultural and institutional legacy that impedes receptiveness to, acquisition of, and propagation of the modern values that would foster a process of change recapitulating the developmental success story of the capitalist nations of the North Atlantic Basin. Safford confronts this dogma on what would seem to be its strongest ground. His case study focuses on Colombia—that most traditional and Catholic of the major Latin American nations—during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period of economic malaise and political chaos. The result is an important and richly detailed study that largely succeeds in demonstrating, in Safford's cautious words, that “value attachments in Latin American society have been more ambiguous than they are generally represented to be” (p. 11). Put more forcefully and positively, Safford makes a strong case for the proposition that economic, geographic, and social structures themselves help to mold the values often attributed solely to institutional and cultural legacies in Latin America, and that it is these structural conditions that exercise the strongest influence on the success or failure of elite efforts to foster technological progress.