Catholic and technocratic approaches

The extensive power of the Catholic Church declined with secularizing crusades in the post­independence period but the influence of the church on economic thought remained sturdy.

A technocratic bent in policymaking was manifest when several countries in the region became early adopters of social insurance programs promoted by the International Labor Organization and other agencies of the incipient international policy system. Reformist elites of the early twentieth century were still influenced by the weighty presence of positivism, which in Latin America constituted a sui generis school of thought with important national variations (Guadarrama, 2004). Faith in science and in state action, typical of positivism, led to new understandings of the realities of Latin America and facilitated participation in cross-national expert networks concerned with the spread of revolutionary ideologies.

Compared with the stature of the anti-clerical left, increasingly shaped by Marxism, and religious conservatism sustaining the old oligarchic order, the political significance of progressive Catholicism was limited when a new encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, was issued in 1931. The papal document resonated with Catholic intellectuals and politicians because it condemned individualism and collectivism, taking a moralist middle path for improvement in working conditions. The Cold War propelled Christian Democratic parties to successfully occupy the political center, especially in Chile and Venezuela. While in office, these party platforms referenced Catholic economic doctrine and development economics in redistributive programs to lessen the concentration of income and land.

Dissatisfaction with the pace of change, however, moved Catholic groups further left to liberation theology, an internationally influential movement most famously associated with the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez. For a while, the region's ecclesiastical hierarchy endorsed this “Preferential Option for the Poor,” an approach that in part claimed the heritage of Bartolome de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican friar who advocated indigenous rights. Marxist ideas merged with progressive Catholicism in the ideological effervescence of the 1960s, with reformist and revolutionary paths fracturing multiple arenas. Liberation theology, after years of Vatican hostile scrutiny for its excessive politicization and anti-capitalist overtones, is being revalued under the recently elected Argentinean Jesuit pope, the first non-European in 1,300 years, who defines himself as a champion of the poor.

Nowhere has the cosmopolitan outlook of Latin American economic thinkers been stronger than among economists after the discipline became institutionalized in the region's universities in the 1940s. The promise of locally developed economic expertise, allegedly more appropriate to the particularities of local circumstances and constituencies, has repeatedly clashed with the propensity of external advisers to generalize prescriptions in unfamiliar contexts. Latin America's lengthy experience with visiting economists (Bianchi, 2011) and foreign “money doctors” (Drake, 1993) suggests that outside experts play an eminently political role, despite claims of unbiased technical advice.

Courcelle-Seneuil, a French finance specialist appointed counselor to the Chilean government in the 1850s, is still signaled as a precursor of economic orthodoxy and a prototypical crusader for economic liberalism. The externally validated professional credentials of foreign advisers typically constitute a power device in doctrinal disputes and in negotiations over the terms of foreign investments and loans. Sometimes, money doctoring varied in style and content, as shown in comparisons of the standard recommendations offered by the orthodox Edwin Kemmerer in his missions to several Latin American countries in the 1920s, and the more varied and heterodox proposals made by the Keynesian Robert Triffin in the 1940s, most famously in Paraguay (Helleiner, 2010).