governing Chile

[from Paul E. Sigmund's The Overthrow of Allende, University of Pittsburgh, 1978]

Chile has lessons not only for less developed countries. It has been experiencing in accelerated fashion the transition from traditionalism to modernity, from hierarchy to equality, and from elite rule to democracy that began in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages and has now spread throughout the globe. It has tried the formulas of right, center and left which have been developed since the French Revolution as secular religions, ideological responses to the new awareness of the capacity of man to use the state to transform society and achieve justice. Yet those responses differ in their choice of values to emphasize, and they can either organize society for change or immobilize it by creating deep divisions in the body politic. In the Chilean case, ideology divided the country into three groupings, and when any one comes to power the other two would combine to prevent it from governing.