A View from Latin America

A View from Latin America One might expect this essay to be very brief. Political history, as everyone knows, has come to be old-fashioned and outmoded. Especially in the United States, and to a substantial extent in Europe as well, attention has turned from authority figures and policy-makers to common people and popular masses. Explorations in economic history have continued to shed light on the origins and transformations of feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. Investigations of social history have opened up entirely new vistas of awareness and inquiry-with conspicuous emphasis on sex differences, sexuality, the family, and other areas of intimate, day-to-day existence. Interest in the mighty and powerful appears to be declining fast. The new concern is with the daily lives of ordinary people, a trend that offers a clear prognostication for political history in the I980s: there will not be much of it. This tendency comes from diverse origins. One is the identification of new issues and problem-areas, as in the case of women's history. Another is the discovery of hitherto unused records and sources. Still another factor is technology: computerization has made it possible to handle masses of data-and hence to ask questions-that seemed unthinkable only two decades ago. The development of econometrics has produced powerful tools for analyzing crucial aspects of economic change, and the application of demographic techniques to historical materials has offered novel insights into the dynamics of social transition. For all of these reasons, substantive and methodological, historians in Europe and America are concentrating energies on social and economic (rather than political) dimensions of the past. But the turn away from politics is more than a sign of disinterest. It is also an act of rejection-a stance that derives from