Contesting the Origins of Costa Rica’s Welfare State. A Review of Iván Molina Jiménez's <em>Los Pasados de la Memoria: El Origen de la Reforma Social en Costa Rica (1938-1943)</em> (Costa Rica: Editorial U Nacional, 2008)
Keywords
social reform, welfare state
Keywords
social reform, welfare state
Abstract
Los Pasados de la Memoria is a critical intervention in the historiography of the reforma social by one of Costa Rica’s most important contemporary historians. The importance of these reforms in establishing a foundation for Costa Rica’s substantial achievements in human welfare in the decades that followed, together with the unlikely political coalition that supported them, makes the history of the reforma social a fascinating and broadly relevant topic. The emphasis of the book, however, is on the historiographical question of how a set of competing narratives have been advanced to claim authorship of these reforms for particular actors, producing, Molina argues, a historiographical tradition that greatly exaggerates the role of certain individual protagonists while misrepresenting their motives and under-emphasizing the broader context of electoral competition and economic crisis. The book therefore speaks both to the historical question of the origins of the reforms and to the historiographical (but also highly political) question of how historical knowledge about them has been produced.
Published
2010-04-01
Section
Reviews: Politics, Ideology, and Social Movements