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In Makers of Democracy A. Ricardo López-Pedreros traces the ways in which a thriving middle class was understood to be a foundational marker of democracy in Colombia during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide array of sources ranging from training manuals and oral histories to school and business archives, López-Pedreros shows how the Colombian middle class created a model of democracy based on free-market ideologies, private property rights, material inequality, and an emphasis on a masculine work culture. This model, which naturalized class and gender hierarchies, provided the groundwork for Colombia's later adoption of neoliberalism and inspired the emergence of alternate models of democracy and social hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s that helped foment political radicalization. By highlighting the contested relationships between class, gender, economics, and politics, López-Pedreros theorizes democracy as a historically unstable practice that exacerbated multiple forms of domination, thereby prompting a rethinking of the formation of democracies throughout the Americas.
List of contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. "There Is No Other Class in Democracy" 1
Part I. Conscripts of Democracy: The Alliance for Progress, Development, and the (Re)Formation of a Gendered Middle Class, 1958–1965
1. A Bastard Middle Class 21
2. An Irresistible Democracy 42
3. The Productive Wealth of This Country 62
4. Beyond Capital and Labor 86
Part II. Contested Democracies: Classed Subjectivities, Social Movements, and Gendered Petit Bourgeois Radicalization, 1960s–1970s
5. In the Middle of the Mess 109
6. A Revolution for a Democratic Middle-Class Society 139
7. A Real Revolution, a Real Democracy 172
8. Democracy: The Most Important Gift to the World 225
Epilogue. A Class that Does (Not) Matter: Democracy beyond Democracy 255
Appendix 263
Notes 271
Bibliography 303
Index 333
About the author
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
