Towards a Transnational Legal History of the Administrative State in Latin America

Described recently as an ineffectual “Paper Leviathan”, the nineteenth century Latin American state was hardly an omnipresent figure. By the mid-twentieth century, the outlook was quite different. Latin American states were providers of a wide arrange of public goods, its sheer size had grown dramatically, and political and administrative centralization seemed dominant. Economic growth via integration to the expansion of Atlantic capitalism facilitated the process of state building by the gradual improvement of state capacities. At the same time, new global currents of legal thought offered a reconceptualization of the normative frameworks in which the states operated. This chapter traces these changes in the structure of the Latin American states and its conceptual bases in legal thought. This process led to a gradual displacement of the classic liberal constitutional models that had framed the independent new nations, in favor of innovative principles organizing ever-expanding state activities.

All sessions of the MPI-TAU Transnational Legal History Workshop will be conducted on Zoom, and are based on pre-circulated papers. Registration for participation is required and open until one week prior to the event. Please register here.