After World War II, Latin America experienced the rise and fall of several major economic development paradigms whose fortunes were closely tied to the region's volatile economic performance. The painful adjustment to the debt crisis of the 1980s marked the end of the import-substitution industrialization approach promoted by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) since the 1950s. After the failure of the last heterodox stabilization programs in the late 1980s, the ideological and political dominance of neoliberalism in Latin America was virtually complete, even though there are still unresolved debates as to whether the region's embrace of the Washington consensus was based on a genuine domestic embrace of neoliberalism or whether it was imposed by the West and the international financial institutions. Despite its early successes in combating inflation and restarting growth, by the late 1990s neoliberalism was under attack for failing to address the region's persistent poverty and high inequality, and the Argentine default of 2001 delivered the final blow to the neoliberal model.

Fernando Leiva's new book documents the most recent chapter in the region's ideological odyssey through a critical analysis of Latin American neostructuralism. The author uses a combination of political economy and literary analysis to reveal the strengths and limitations of neostructuralism based on a critical reading of key official documents published by the ECLAC in the last quarter century. Building on this analysis, the book offers a detailed and historically informed account of the evolution of neostructuralist efforts to articulate an ideological response and a set of policy alternatives to the neoliberal hegemony of the early 1990s. Leiva highlights several of the key conceptual innovations of neostructuralism—including the emphasis on a purposeful insertion into global markets, the claim that there need not be a trade-off between growth and equity, and a more activist vision of the state in providing nonmarket forms of coordination—and the book offers a useful and engaging overview of the ideological differences between neoliberalism and neostructuralism.

The more important contribution of the book, however, is its critique of Latin American neostructuralism. Thus, Leiva documents a series of methodological retreats of neostructuralism, which abandoned some of the key tenets of original structural thinking, such as the analytical use of the “economic surplus” concept and the emphasis on power relations. As a result, despite its critique of “neoliberal dogmatism,” neostructuralism unwittingly reinforced global capitalism and produced a heterodox paradox whereby the “economic and social policies aimed at expanding the role of ‘participatory governance’ and ‘civil society’ result in deepening the subordination of the public sphere and society's non-economic realm to the logic of transnational capital” (p. xxxi). In addition, Leiva takes aim at the practical outcomes of the neostructuralist search for a “high road to globalization” by emphasizing the developmental limitations of the neostructuralist poster child: post-Pinochet Chile. This critique is part of a conscious effort to revitalize “Latin American critical thinking in the tradition of radical political economy,” and thus the author is trying as much to make intellectual history (by debunking the neostructural paradigm and promoting a return to classical structuralist thinking) as he is to write about it.

Despite this ambitious agenda—or perhaps in part because of it—the book suffers from a number of limitations. Thus, the claim of critiquing the predominant intellectual paradigm of post-neoliberal Latin America seems to be at odds with the author's choice to focus on a small selection of official documents produced by ECLAC headquarters and to ignore the work of U.S. and European neostructuralists, as well as work done at ECLAC's Latin American field offices. This is problematic because much of the theoretical critique of neostructuralism is based on identifying areas that are supposedly ignored/glossed over by neostructuralists. While some of these sins of omission are probably real, others may well be an artifice of the narrow range of documents analyzed in the book. Even if we ignore the work by sociologists and political scientists on this topic, it is surprising that Leiva's list of key neostructuralist documents does not include the edited volume Beyond Reforms: Structural Dynamics and the Macroeconomic Theory, published in 2005 by ECLAC, whose contributors acknowledge some of the limitations of the growth-with-equity paradigm and seek to revive the classical structuralist paradigm to a much greater extent than Leiva acknowledges.

Alternatively, the narrow focus on a handful of official ECLAC documents would be justifiable if one could show that ECLAC had a decisive influence on Latin American economic policies in the last two decades. While the author argues that this is the case more broadly given the recent rise of center-left regimes in the region (p. xix), the actual analysis only documents this influence in Chile (and, to a much lesser extent, Brazil.) For the rest of the region, where ECLAC's influence was even more circumscribed, blaming its socioeconomic problems on ECLAC's policy prescriptions seems even less tenable. After all, this was a region that for most of the 1990s was firmly in the neoliberal camp. More importantly, even to the extent that leftist presidents (such as Lula in Brazil) came to power, their ability to change the status quo was fairly limited. While the author is keen to blame these failures on the intellectual retreats of neostructuralism, his analysis does not sufficiently address the obvious alternative explanation—that they were pragmatic responses to the domestic and international constraints facing Latin American reformers. Therefore, the reader is left with a lot of important unanswered questions about the politics underlying the ideological retreat of neostructuralism, both at ECLAC—the intellectual cradle of classical structuralism—and among Latin American policymakers.

As a result, it is unclear that Latin American Neo-Structuralism succeeds in its stated objective to challenge the neostructuralist claim of being the only viable and credible alternative to neoliberalism in present historical circumstances. While the analysis provides a number of useful insights into the shortcomings of neostructuralism, it is less persuasive in providing a viable alternative, given that neither the revival of classical structuralist policies nor the examples of Bolivia and Venezuela, which Leiva describes as two “theoretically informed and politically vibrant … status quo-transforming neodevelopmentalist strategies” provide a sufficiently coherent blueprint for such an alternative developmental paradigm (p. 225). That said, the issues raised by the book are likely to be increasingly important as both Latin American politicians and international elites continue to wrestle with the deficiencies of the neoliberal model.