Book Review Essay: Understanding Latin America in the Era of Globalization

Despite the importance of globalization for understanding contemporary Latin America, we lack a comprehensive and theoretically substantive analysis of the phenomena.Duncan Green's early offering, The Silent Revolution (2003), was the lone monograph in the field, but even its second edition has become significantly dated.William I. Robinson's Latin America and Global Capitalism offers us a valuable contribution by filling the void.Robinson deploys a rigorous theoretical analysis in consideration of deep empirical data in offering explanations for why the region's free market transformation was a fiasco.The book clearly merits inclusion in the Johns Hopkins Studies in Globalization Studies series, and will stand as a benchmark for all future scholarship.When considered with Robinson's Promoting Polyarchy (1996), Transnational Conflicts (2003), and A Theory of Global Capitalism (2004), the author is now the top scholar in the field of critical globalization studies.The first of Robinson's six chapters frames the book by placing Latin America within the context of what he describes as the "epochal shift in world capitalism."He understands contemporary globalization as constituting a new historical period, because the process of neoliberal market transformation generated the transnationalization of the elite class, corporations, and institutions of economic governance.This triad of transnationalization differs from earlier manifestations because of the scope, scale, and intensity of the process.Robinson maintains that it has generated "new forms of poverty and wealth, and new configurations of wealth and power" that carries with it a "new cartography" within the geographical divisions of the once modern world-system (p.43).Globalization's new mapping blurs the distinctions between core, periphery, and semiperiphery through the transnational networks of capital, labor, and production.The glue holding the new globalized system together is a new a form of imperialism, itself a transnational form of hegemony.On these accounts, Robinson appears to be in camp with the post-modern wanderings of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire (2001).Yet, Robinson's take on the transnational order, through his theory ofpolyarchy (defined below), keeps him firmly grounded in a radical critique of capitalism.Those familiar with Robinson's work, will see the maturation of his theoretical positions, which he now uses to set the stage for a rigorous and ambitious analysis of Latin America's experience with neoliberalism.The book's core argument is established in the opening section of chapter two.He maintains that the political economy of globalized neoliberalism is profoundly unstable due to the deep contradictions of late capitalism.This argument, of course, has been articulated by many theorists, such as David Harvey in his classic The Condition of Postinodernity.Robinson's

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