Carlos Forment has produced a highly original, intriguing, and thoroughly researched exploration of civic behavior in Latin America from the mid-1700s through 1900. He presents the provocative argument, contrary to much past research, that citizen democracy, “understood in Tocquevillian terms as a daily practice and form of life rooted in social equality, mutual recognition, and political liberty, was by the mid-nineteenth century rooted in the region” (p. xi). This book cites numerous examples and scholarship from many parts of Latin America, but Forment provides detailed evidence from Mexico and Peru. As he argues in his introduction, Latin American forms of democracy are characterized by four qualities. First, democracy is disjointed because those forms that do exist are found among individual citizens, and not between citizens and governmental institutions, which essentially imposed an authoritarian structure on society. Second, he believes that the practice of democracy is one-sided, given his evidence that it is practiced in civil society rather than in political or public life. Third, it is highly fragmented, given the failures in Latin America to meld social equality and cultural/ethnic differences. Fourth, he claims that Catholicism provided the language of public life, and that Latin Americans used it to create new democratic meanings from traditional religious terms, which he labels “Civic Catholicism.”

Each of these provocative arguments is based on a research data bank the author created by doing old-fashioned archival fieldwork, identifying 7,056 voluntary groups in four countries (Cuba and Argentina serve as the foundation for Volume 2) from a wide array of sources. He adds to the impact of this information by alluding to such distinctions as size of the organizations and their duration. For example, 80% lasted 6 years or less, but 20% continued for 16 or more years (p. 101). It is refreshing to encounter a scholarly work that provides a detailed, imaginative, and original set of sources in combination with an equally comprehensive swatch of secondary and theoretical literature, all with extensive footnotes where they belong, at the bottom of each page.

As the author admits, his work is influenced by those social scientists who are products of the Tocquevillian tradition. He creates a model for exploring core civic behavior in four sectors: civil society, political society, economic society, and the public sphere. He discovers that Latin Americans practiced democracy in civil society more than in the other three sectors. This is a major finding, which in the case of Mexico, and I suspect elsewhere in the region, is relevant to recent democratic transformations. In the Mexican case, for example, it was civic organizational activity beginning in the mid-1980s that led the way to local forms of democratic behavior. Furthermore, democracy in the public arena is a product of grassroots movements, where opposition parties achieved electoral victories over half the country's population in less than 10 years. Forment would argue that a long tradition of such civic behavior already was well ingrained in the fabric of Mexican society.

The major contradiction the author identifies is, of course, the fact that the majority of those in public life rarely practice democracy in political as distinct from civil society. He cites the interesting example of Mexican debating societies in the mid–nineteenth century. Perhaps his most original insight is that Mexicans and Peruvians created the language of Civic Catholicism to use in their public discussions, and that the central component of this language was the notion of associational life. His first explicit example dates from 1827 (p. 208).

Because Forment consistently cites a broad sweep of social science literature, contemporary and historical, the book provides many tidbits from which useful comparisons can be drawn. For example, note his declaration that “public life in Latin America bears an uncanny resemblance to Bali's Negara polity” (p. 95). Throughout the work, he touches on every conceivable type of organization, as well as every possible group in society, whether the distinction is gender, race, ethnicity, or religion.

The admirable qualities of Democracy in Latin America 1760–1900 are numerous. Two features, however, are likely to make it less accessible to readers. Anyone, even a specialist in the region, will find this work dense reading. Colleagues persuaded the author to omit several hundred additional pages, with good reason. The examples are so numerous that it is easy to miss the intellectual forest for the trees. Second, the book addresses these numerous characteristics in Peru and Mexico in some 400 pages, but waits until the final chapter to provide a well-formulated set of conclusions. The average reader, and especially the nonspecialist, would be able to extract more valuable insights from this work had each chapter included a short concluding section.

Forment offers several significant conclusions. Most broadly, he challenges Toqueville's application of his original argument—that New England democracy was successful because of a convergence between daily practices and institutional structures—to Latin America. He suggests that Toqueville believed that Latin American practices were anticivic and their institutions unstable. Thus, “the Latin American case has direct relevance for how we understand Tocqueville's work and, more generally, how we study postcolonial life. Contemporary Tocquevillians assume there is a one-to-one correspondence between daily practices in civil society and institutional structures in political society” (p. 430). The author instead concludes that democratic practices in Latin America surfaced through the fissures between daily habits and institutional structures, yet they rarely became the language of the state.

A further argument that deserves greater attention from Forment, however, is the way in which Latin Americans conceptualize and what they expect from democracy. We now know empirically that their contemporary views of this subject differ greatly from those shared by people in the United States. These differences may be a product of the variables the author explores. On the other hand, they may actually contribute to the dichotomies he so aptly discovers. Given the crucial importance of language, the meanings of civic vocabulary today and in the past are crucial building blocks for understanding the evolution and existence of democratic behavior in the region.