Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
540 Reviews of Books that while Santiago has often been at the center of Chilean political history, historians have known relatively little about what transpired politically on the municipal level in the capital during most of the postindependence era. Walter’s book focuses on the municipal council of Santiago, whose workings, internal conflicts, and relations with the national government give us considerable insight regarding broader national problems and circumstances. As was the case with his study of Buenos Aires, Walter enters the complicated world of municipal politics—contested by Conservatives, Liberals, Radicals, Democrats, Balmacedists, and others—by examining, to a certain extent, the relationship between local government and the development, financing, and operation of the city’s foreign-owned electric streetcar company. This book is about what today is “downtown” Santiago, or Santiago Centro; it is not a study of municipal politics and urban change in the surrounding suburbs of greater Santiago. Upon making this clarification, Walter brings to bear an array of sources, including travel accounts, newspapers, magazines, census figures, correspondence, and government publications to create a vivid description of local politics, warts and all, and urban transformation. In the capital, where the streetcar system ferried people, in cars of and for different classes, beginning in 1900, elected municipal government appeared, as it did elsewhere in the country, when the smoke cleared from the Civil War of 1891, which toppled Balmaceda. The war inaugurated a period known as the Parliamentary Republic (1891–1925), which saw executive power at the national level greatly reduced, resulting in a much more powerful legislative branch. Consequences of this shift were incessant bickering in the Congress, ongoing and irresolvable conflicts between entrenched political parties, and a general political malaise that bogged down decision-making processes at a critical time of socioeconomic change. While most historians have understood what Chileans called parlamentarismo as a phenomenon that developed at the national level, Walter’s excavation of municipal-level politics reveals that parlamentarismo had very deep roots and local manifestations in the body politic, as did corruption and other questionable activities of one kind or another. Subsequent political turmoil, including more than one military intervention between 1924 and 1931, brought difficult times to local government in Santiago. A succession of mayors and local governing juntas struggled to address the needs of a municipality that was bulging at its seams, with new suburban development and expanding working and middle classes reshaping greater Santiago as well. Stability and democracy returned in 1932, signaling yet another transition for local government, and municipal elections were reestablished in 1935 after nearly a decade of local government controlled by officials hand-picked by national leaders. Meanwhile, as Walter shows, the streetcar company in question and power generation facilities were sold to AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW the U.S.-based American Foreign Power Company (AFP), reflecting a broader shift toward North American capital investment. With the onslaught of the Great Depression and the crippling of the Chilean economy, the newly elected municipal government of the mid-1930s not only had to deal with a financial crunch but also was under pressure from constituents to address the AFP’s skyrocketing electricity rates. Walter then moves on to the very interesting story of municipal government in the era of the Popular Front—a story that includes the fortunes of Santiago’s (and Chile’s) first female mayor, Graciela Contreras de Schnake, a Socialist, who assumed the important position in January 1939. Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front government allowed the municipal government to flex some muscle, as Contreras proposed new plans for further urban development. Among other things, Walter also shows how the Popular Front coalition’s quick decay created significant political and administrative problems at the local level. Concluding the book is a thoughtful comparison of Santiago and Buenos Aires, which, at least in terms of local politics and administration, makes the very different capitals seem more alike. The author also briefly takes the stories of Santiago and Buenos Aires into the 1990s, drawing attention to important issues facing municipal governments amid a continent-wide process of democratization. Historians, urban geographers, political scientists, and many others will find great value in Walter’s very detailed, informative, and well-written study. For too long, historians of Chile have failed to stop and investigate the intricacies of local government, and this book goes a long way in helping scholars piece together a political history of modern Chile from the bottom up. PATRICK BARR-MELEJ Iowa State University EUROPE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL B. M. LAVELLE. Fame, Money, and Power: The Rise of Peisistratos and “Democratic” Tyranny at Athens. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 370. $65.00. The three previously existing major studies specifically about Peisistratus were parts of general works: Fritz Schachermeyr’s “Peisistratos” in Paulys Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertums-wissenschaft 19.1 (1937): 156–191; Antony Andrewes’s “The Tyranny of Pisistratus” in the second edition of The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 3, part 3 (1982): 392– 470, and Loretana De Libero’s excursus in Die archaische Tyrannis (1996): 50–116. Therefore, the first and so far the only scholarly book exclusively on Peisistratus and his tyranny in Athens should be welcome. But this is not the only merit of B. M. Lavelle’s monograph. Lavelle changes the question of Heleen SancisiWeerdenburg, in Peisistratos and the Tyranny: A Reappraisal of the Evidence (2000), from “Where did Pei- APRIL 2006 Europe: Ancient and Medieval sistratos get his power?” into “How did Peisistratus manage to establish and, even more important, maintain his rule until his death in 527?” To answer the latter question, he departs from the traditional rationalizing of Peisistratus’s tyranny as a form of aristocratic infighting. Lavelle’s detailed examination of the surviving evidence about cultural, legal, religious, economic, military, ideological, and other aspects of Peisistratus’s tyranny treats them as the ways in which Peisistratus built up popular support. The author’s main thesis about Peisistratus’s “democratic tyranny” might look surprising. But once “democratic” is understood as referring not to demokratia as a political system with its specific institutions and principles but to the support of the people (demos), Lavelle’s approach becomes clear. From this point of view, his idea that the demos was a “partner” in the tyranny of Peisistratus (p. vii) follows naturally. By emphasizing the importance of popular support for Peisistratus’s tyranny, Lavelle does not argue against the idea about the political insignificance of the demos. Just the other way around: focusing on public support allows Lavelle to expose the regimes of Solon, Peisistratus, and Cleisthenes as representing a certain continuum. Whereas the idea about the continuity of public politics in Athens throughout the sixth century is not new, it has been rationalized in political terms: A. J. White spoke of Athenian politicians entreating the demos, irrespective of political regime, and Michael T. W. Arnheim, in Aristocracy in Greek Society (1977), while presenting Solon, Peisistratus, and Cleisthenes as a series of aristocratic “champions of the people,” stressed the mutual dependence of the demos and such “champions.” It is from this political perspective that Antony Andrewes, in The Greek Tyrants (1963), described the tyranny of Peisistratus as “preparing ground for democracy.” Accentuating Peisistratus’s social politics, Lavelle offers a more nuanced approach to the ways that allowed Peisistratus to largely preserve the Solonian “constitution” and which, in Lavelle’s opinion, Cleisthenes would also use to secure social support for his own political reforms; the tyrant Peisistratus thus served as the model and “the prototype for later democratic leaders” (pp. 163, 166). Whereas the intended readership is nowhere clearly indicated, explanations in passing, such as those for metic (p. 201: “a non-Athenian”), me troxenoi (p. 321: “mother-foreignness” [sic]), or kle rouchoi (“colonists”), suggest a general audience as well as college and graduate students. The extensive bibliography comprises mostly “mainstream” publications, leaving out, for example, Dimitris Paleothodoros, “Pisistrate et Dionysos: Mythes et réalités de l’érudition moderne,” Les Études classiques 67 (1999): 321–340, and Harijs Tumans, “Ideological Aspects of the Authority of Peisistratus,” Vestnik Drevnei Istorii 239 (2001): 12– 45. The index, detailed as it is, would have benefited from avoiding repetition, as well as from paying more attention to non-English words and phrases. Further uniformity could be extended to transliteration and the use of ital- AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 541 icized words. These and a few other minor slips, which are oversights of the press, cannot prevent this book, with its clear style, innovative approach, use of numerous sources of different kinds, and impressive bibliography, from gaining a well-deserved place on required reading lists in general surveys as well as upper-level classes and undergraduate and graduate seminars in history, political sciences, and sociology. SVIATOSLAV DMITRIEV Ball State University ELKE STEIN-HÖLKESKAMP. Das Römische Gastmahl: Eine Kulturgeschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck. 2005. Pp. 364. €29.90. The past two decades have seen an impressive amount of research on ancient convivial institutions, but this research has focused more on the archaic Greek symposium than on the Roman banquet (convivium). Rome is not altogether neglected, as, most recently, Catherine Dunbabin’s splendid The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (2004) and Konrad Vössing’s Mensa regia: Das Bankett beim hellenistischen König und beim römischen Princeps (2004) demonstrated. But the Roman banquet has never received the general overview that Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp presents in this book, which is aimed equally at the specialist scholar and the more general reader. The book covers the convivium in the period between Cicero and Pliny the Younger, and it gives an account of the basic stability as well as the developments and changes in this central institution of Roman aristocratic society. Unlike the antiquarians of a century ago, Stein-Hölkeskamp keeps carefully away from constructing an immutable ideal type. After all, for the Roman elite the banquet was the main space of communication and a major tool of self-representation (not only in the period on which this book focuses); and, at the same time, the discourses about the banquet that we receive from ancient authors give insight into the norms, ideals, and expectations of this same elite. The changes in the convivium mirror the considerable changes in Roman society between the time of Cicero and that of Trajan. After a short introduction on method, with an amazing amount of name-dropping (from Max Weber to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu), the author systematically leads the reader through all the aspects of the banquet as the central institution of Rome’s elite. The first chapter explores the ubiquity of the banquet and its key role in the daily routine of a member of Rome’s upper class (and those, like the rich freedmen, who imitated them). The following chapters present all relevant aspects along the sequencing of the event itself: the invitation, a surprisingly complex social ritual; the participants, from Cicero to the emperors, poets, and women, who had to be seated in hierarchically correct positions; the highly standardized time and the physical space of the convivium, its precious furniture and furnishings; the food, the wine, and the moralistic rejection of contemporary dining habits by the Stoic APRIL 2006