Recensions I Reviews 861

ne figurent pas dans le texte francais (307). Si ce rapport devait convaincre leshommes et les femmes du monde entier ne conviendrait-il pas de le traduire leplus soigneusement possible?

Le rapport Brandt est plein de bonnes idees pour la continuation etl'expansion du developpement international, parexemple, celle d'une taxe sur lecommerce international (430). Ce qu'il faudrait maintenant, ce n'est plus desrapports, mais de la propagande et de l'action.

E. E. MAHANT Universite Laurentienne

The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin AmericaAlain de JanvryBaltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, pp. xvi, 311

The author, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the Universityof California (Berkeley), explains that he wrote this book "principally forpractitioners of economic and agricultural development [searching for] aconsistent theoretical framework in which to interpret the situation they observeand want to transform." Lacking this "framework," he contends, politicalactivists, as well as academic scholars and "armchair revolutionaries," havebeen operating in a vacuum.

To fill the void as it relates to the agrarian question in Latin America, deJanvry accumulated an impressive amount of empirical data in a number ofcountries. Viewing these in historical perspective and in the light of variousschools of thought, he applies what he terms "the dialectic of unevendevelopment on a world scale" to his material. In this manner, he argues, he hasbeen able to provide the necessary theoretical perspective for understanding the"underlying causes of the agrarian crisis in Latin America," as well as the "logicof public reforms in agriculture" and the "achievements and limits of statemanagement of this crisis."

The "dialectic" turns out to be Marxist, and a sizeable portion of hisdiscussion involves an examination of the classical Marxists and the views ofcurrent neo-Marxists, among whom he establishes his own special niche. Thisexercise will be of interest to readers familiar with Marxist concepts, andparticularly to specialists in Latin American and Third World problemsinfluenced by the more prominent neo-Marxist scholars, whom he subjects tocritical scrutiny.

For non-Marxists, the book is nonetheless valuable for its sophisticatedtreatment of the contradictory objectives and the uneven and fluctuating resultsof agrarian reform in a wide variety of contexts, and for what the writercharacterizes as the "inherent limits to the capacity of the state to manage crisesdue to its limited fiscal means, administrative capacity, and its own legitimacy."At the same time, something less than a brand new "theoretical framework" forsolving Latin America's agrarian crisis emerges. "At this stage," he writes, "theagrarian question is fundamentally non-agrarian and its solution lies in social andstructural changes at the level of total social formation." His specificprescription for land reform and rural development programmes is that theyshould "foment collective action and class consciousness" as "effectivemechanisms in the creation of social articulation and mass-based democraticregimes."

This is another way of saying what "armchair" and other revolutionarieshave advocated in more concise language over the years: the substitution of asocialist for a capitalist order as the answer to the frustrations of reformism in

862 Recensions / Reviews

Latin America. As a practical matter, however, it should now be clear thatsocialism in the short run, and probably the long run, is a Utopian remedy,particularly in areas of great tension such as Nicaragua and El Salvador, wherethe persistance of unreachable goals could have tragic consequences. Moreover,a generation of Third World experience with socialism on three continentsinChina, Guinea and Cuba among other countriesthus far indicates thatsocialism does not create economic rationality or "mass-based democraticregimes."

MAURICE HALPER1N Simon Fraser University

The Dynamics of Chinese PoliticsLucian PyeCambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1981, pp. xxv, 307

Lucian Pye's most recent book, a revised version of a report prepared for theRand Corporation, is a major contribution to the literature on Communist China.It refines and amplifies some of the seminal views which he outlined in earlierwritings, particularly The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: M I TPress, 1968), and applies them to elite behaviour in the post-Mao period.

The heart of his analysis is the view that "the fundamental dynamic ofChinese politics is a continuous tension between the imperative of consensusand conformity, on the one hand, and the belief, on the other hand, that one canfind security only in special, particularistic relationships, which by their verynature tend to threaten the principle of consensus" (4). He contends that thebehavioural consequence of this cultural paradox is a constant process ofofficials jockeying into shifting factional groupings; a process, ironically, thathas actually been strengthened rather than diminished by Maoist andpost-Maoist attempts to contain factionalism.

Pye presents a "composite model" which combines elements of both theconflict and consensus approaches now prominent in the field. He is, however,characteristically iconoclastic in rejecting the patron-client and interest groupapproaches to factional behaviour. Even more iconoclastic is his understandingof, first, the relationship between factional competition and the policy processand, second, the origins of factional identification. In a single sentence hechallenges almost all of the extant explanations of elite conflict, observing that"Chinese factions are not formed primarily in response to policy issues,bureaucratic interests, generational differences, geographical bases... orideological considerations" (7). Most of the first half of the book is a defence ofthe position that while organizational affiliation, ideological dispositions, age,and other elements of career background help explain the identification ofindividuals with specific factional networks, these factors rarely influence thepositions adopted by competing factions. He suggests that it is guanxi (a sense ofmutual indebtedness) and calculations of career self-interest that are crucial tofactional identification. And he comes close to real politik in his contention thatit is power politics, not policy preferences, that determine factional interaction.Pointing to the prevailing attitudes of political participants, he isolates power asthe key to their behaviour because to these participants it is "the leastambiguous and most predictive of all factors in social life" (127).

The scope of Pye's discussion is as broad as it is provocative. Among thetopics discussed are the following: the influence of cultural attitudes aboutauthority and dependency on factional identification, the rules for factionalmobilization, communication, and competition (including the pattern of purges