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.

Formato	Tapa suave
Número de Páginas	360
Lenguaje	Inglés
Editorial	Duke University Press
Fecha de Publicación	2019-04-26
Dimensiones	9.1" x 6.1" x 0.8" pulgadas
Serie	Radical Perspectives
Letra Grande	No
Con Ilustraciones	Si
Temas	América Latina, Urbano

A. Ricardo López-Pedreros is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University and coeditor of The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History, also published by Duke University Press.