Recensions I Reviews

861

ne figurent pas dans le texte francais (307). Si ce rapport devait convaincre les
hommes et les femmes du monde entier ne conviendrait-il pas de le traduire le
plus soigneusement possible?
Le rapport Brandt est plein de bonnes idees pour la continuation et
l'expansion du developpement international, parexemple, celle d'une taxe sur le
commerce international (430). Ce qu'il faudrait maintenant, ce n'est plus des
rapports, mais de la propagande et de l'action.
E. E. MAHANT Universite

Laurentienne

The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America

Alain de Janvry
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, pp. xvi, 311
The author, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University
of California (Berkeley), explains that he wrote this book "principally for
practitioners of economic and agricultural development [searching for] a
consistent theoretical framework in which to interpret the situation they observe
and want to transform." Lacking this "framework," he contends, political
activists, as well as academic scholars and "armchair revolutionaries," have
been operating in a vacuum.
To fill the void as it relates to the agrarian question in Latin America, de
Janvry accumulated an impressive amount of empirical data in a number of
countries. Viewing these in historical perspective and in the light of various
schools of thought, he applies what he terms "the dialectic of uneven
development on a world scale" to his material. In this manner, he argues, he has
been able to provide the necessary theoretical perspective for understanding the
"underlying causes of the agrarian crisis in Latin America," as well as the "logic
of public reforms in agriculture" and the "achievements and limits of state
management of this crisis."
The "dialectic" turns out to be Marxist, and a sizeable portion of his
discussion involves an examination of the classical Marxists and the views of
current neo-Marxists, among whom he establishes his own special niche. This
exercise will be of interest to readers familiar with Marxist concepts, and
particularly to specialists in Latin American and Third World problems
influenced by the more prominent neo-Marxist scholars, whom he subjects to
critical scrutiny.
For non-Marxists, the book is nonetheless valuable for its sophisticated
treatment of the contradictory objectives and the uneven and fluctuating results
of agrarian reform in a wide variety of contexts, and for what the writer
characterizes as the "inherent limits to the capacity of the state to manage crises
due to its limited fiscal means, administrative capacity, and its own legitimacy."
At the same time, something less than a brand new "theoretical framework" for
solving Latin America's agrarian crisis emerges. "At this stage," he writes, "the
agrarian question is fundamentally non-agrarian and its solution lies in social and
structural changes at the level of total social formation." His specific
prescription for land reform and rural development programmes is that they
should "foment collective action and class consciousness" as "effective
mechanisms in the creation of social articulation and mass-based democratic
regimes."
This is another way of saying what "armchair" and other revolutionaries
have advocated in more concise language over the years: the substitution of a
socialist for a capitalist order as the answer to the frustrations of reformism in

862

Recensions / Reviews

Latin America. As a practical matter, however, it should now be clear that

socialism in the short run, and probably the long run, is a Utopian remedy,
particularly in areas of great tension such as Nicaragua and El Salvador, where
the persistance of unreachable goals could have tragic consequences. Moreover,
a generation of Third World experience with socialism on three continentsin
China, Guinea and Cuba among other countriesthus far indicates that
socialism does not create economic rationality or "mass-based democratic
regimes."
MAURICE HALPER1N Simon Fraser University

The Dynamics of Chinese Politics

Lucian Pye
Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1981, pp. xxv, 307
Lucian Pye's most recent book, a revised version of a report prepared for the
Rand Corporation, is a major contribution to the literature on Communist China.
It refines and amplifies some of the seminal views which he outlined in earlier
writings, particularly The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: M I T
Press, 1968), and applies them to elite behaviour in the post-Mao period.
The heart of his analysis is the view that "the fundamental dynamic of
Chinese politics is a continuous tension between the imperative of consensus
and conformity, on the one hand, and the belief, on the other hand, that one can
find security only in special, particularistic relationships, which by their very
nature tend to threaten the principle of consensus" (4). He contends that the
behavioural consequence of this cultural paradox is a constant process of
officials jockeying into shifting factional groupings; a process, ironically, that
has actually been strengthened rather than diminished by Maoist and
post-Maoist attempts to contain factionalism.
Pye presents a "composite model" which combines elements of both the
conflict and consensus approaches now prominent in the field. He is, however,
characteristically iconoclastic in rejecting the patron-client and interest group
approaches to factional behaviour. Even more iconoclastic is his understanding
of, first, the relationship between factional competition and the policy process
and, second, the origins of factional identification. In a single sentence he
challenges almost all of the extant explanations of elite conflict, observing that
"Chinese factions are not formed primarily in response to policy issues,
bureaucratic interests, generational differences, geographical bases... or
ideological considerations" (7). Most of the first half of the book is a defence of
the position that while organizational affiliation, ideological dispositions, age,
and other elements of career background help explain the identification of
individuals with specific factional networks, these factors rarely influence the
positions adopted by competing factions. He suggests that it is guanxi (a sense of
mutual indebtedness) and calculations of career self-interest that are crucial to
factional identification. And he comes close to real politik in his contention that
it is power politics, not policy preferences, that determine factional interaction.
Pointing to the prevailing attitudes of political participants, he isolates power as
the key to their behaviour because to these participants it is "the least
ambiguous and most predictive of all factors in social life" (127).
The scope of Pye's discussion is as broad as it is provocative. Among the
topics discussed are the following: the influence of cultural attitudes about
authority and dependency on factional identification, the rules for factional
mobilization, communication, and competition (including the pattern of purges