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Friday, October 16th, 2009
5:05 pm	Physical Characteristics of the Two Sexes: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel explains that the "difference in the physical characteristics of the two sexes has a rational basis and consequently acquires an intellectual and ethical significance." Like Rousseau before him, Hegel sees this rational basis in the complementarity of the sexes, a differentiation which is to be unified through marriage. Prior to examining Hegel's views on marriage, I will detail his position concerning the nature of this complementarity. Hegel's tenets concerning woman's nature, although expressed through the terms and values of his philosophy, end up being remarkably similar to those of Rousseau. Woman is associated with the emotions, man with reason. Woman is passive, man, active. In Hegel's words, One sex [man] is mind in its self-diremption into explicit personal self-subsistence and the knowledge and volition of free universality, i.e. the self-consciousness of conceptual thought and the volition of the objective final end. Urgent Editing services for college and university students by talented editors The other sex [woman] is mind maintaining itself in unity as knowledge and volition of the substantive, but knowledge and volition in the form of concrete individuality and feeling. In relation to externality, the former is powerful and active, the latter passive and subjective. Man's understanding is self-conscious and conceptual. He is aware of what he knows, and his knowledge is categorical in nature. Woman's understanding is intuitive and derives from her subjective feelings. Her understanding is implicit in her actions, but is not experienced at a conceptual level. Man is capable of comprehending objective, universal truths, while woman deals with the specifics of the subjective realm. Hegel's conclusions concerning the consequences of these differences for the social roles of women and men are predic. He claims that these differences dictate the exclusion of woman from the state. While man's life consists of learning, labor, and struggle within the public sphere of the state, woman is to focus on piety within the family. (Comment on this)
5:05 pm	Woman’s and Man’s Nature according to Hegel Human and divine law is interdependent in Hegel's scheme, but the former is clearly superior in being more universal. Woman, according to Hegel, is limited to the dialectically inferior realm of the family, while man, through his participation in the polis, "leaves this immediate, elemental, and therefore, strictly speaking, negative ethical life of the Family, in order to acquire and produce the ethical life that is conscious of itself and actual." The tragedy of the Greek world, according to Hegel, is the inevi opposition of human and divine law. The realms, although interdependent, are also in tension, woman representing the law of the family, man the law of the state. Antigone's decision to bury Polyneices arises out of her familial duty to bury and honor her dead brother. Creon's decree that the traitor Polyneices be denied a burial represents the law of the state. Thus human law and divine law are set in opposition. According to Hegel, the tragedy represented in the Antigone results from the fact that the unmediated opposition of these two realms leads to the inescapable destruction of the pagan world. Woman, concerned with the law of the family, is seen by Hegel as being the catalyst of this destruction. Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy--womankind in general. Educated written term paper are always online to help you with essay writing; original services! Womankind--the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community--changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end. Hegel does not, in the Phenomenology, explain why woman is destined to be the irony of the community, that is, why she embodies the law of the divine, the law of the family, while man manifests the superior human law. To find the answer, we must look at Hegel's later writings, in particular his Philosophy of Right and his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Hegel justifies his exclusion of women from the state through recourse to very traditional-sounding arguments concerning biological differences between the sexes. (Comment on this)
5:04 pm	Ethical Realm: Hegel Woman, like man, is for Hegel an ethical being. Just as man enters into an ethical community when he identifies himself as a citizen, so too the family is an ethical whole in terms of which each member, including woman, defines her or his identity. Participation in the family as well as the state constitutes a relationship with the universal, and thus through such identification one enters the ethical realm. In regard to the family, Hegel explains that although the Family is immediately determined as an ethical being, it is within itself an ethical entity only so far as it is not the natural relationship of its members, or so far as their connection is an immediate connection of separate, actual individuals; for the ethical principle is intrinsically universal, and this natural relationship is just as much a spiritual one, and it is only as a spiritual entity that it is ethical. In other words, the ethical dimension of the family arises from an identity that is not a "natural" relationship, that is, according to Hegel, not one of feeling or the relationship of love. research paper writing services - get custom research paper written from scratch by trusted writers! Rather, individuals must identify with the family itself, making the family rather than one's connections to particular individuals the end and content of one's actions. "It is not a question of this particular husband, this particular child, but simply of husband and children generally." 44 In this way one participates in the universal. Woman, thus, through her participation in the family, enters the ethical dimension. Hegel, however, clearly perceives the law of the state, human law, as superior to that of the family, divine law. The scope of human law is the society as a whole, not simply the individual family. Man, through entrance into the polis, obtains knowledge of the universal. Woman, although possessing the highest intuitive awareness of what is ethical, does not attain to consciousness of it. It is human law that Hegel identifies with the universal spirit. The Family, as the unconscious, still inner Notion [of the ethical order], stands opposed to its actual, self-conscious existence; as the element of the nation's actual existence, it stands opposed to the nation itself; as the immediate being of the ethical order, it stands over against that order which shapes and maintains itself by working for the universal; the Penates [household gods of blood and kinship] stand opposed to the universal Spirit. (Comment on this)
5:04 pm	The Place of Woman in Hegel’ Theory Hegel places woman, whether pagan or modern, within the realm he labels the "natural Ethical community," the family. Woman is thereby explicitly excluded from the political realm, but Hegel does not thereby conclude that woman's role is insubstantial or inconsequential. On the contrary, Hegel perceives the family as intimately connected to the state. It is not the romantic haven from the heartless sphere of the state. It is not difficult to Edit my essay with the advices of experienced essay editors! Make your essay flawless! It is rather one of the "ethical roots of the state." Therefore, to evaluate the role and position of woman in Hegel's philosophy, we must look closely at the nature of the Hegelian state. Hegel perceives the modern state as consisting of the family, civil society, and the state. The family is indispensable, for it constitutes the first ethical relation in which one learns to be a member of a community which transcends individual persons. Civil society furthers this developing sense of community by allowing for the development of concrete personality through labor and fulfillment of need as well as through an enlarging sense of interdependence. The state, representing the most developed moment, is a synthesis of the family and civil society. Participation in the universal community of the state is the result of self-conscious choice rather than custom or instinct. Since Hegel limits women to the first moment of ethical life, the family, I will focus initially on his discussion of the family. His first detailed description of the family and its relation to the state occurs in his work The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he examines the nature of the family in the context of the Greek polis. He directs his second discourse on the family, published fourteen years later in his Philosophy of Right, to the modern family. To understand Hegel's philosophy concerning women, we must look at his views on both of these historical periods. Hegel perceives the classical Greek society as divided into two realms: the family and the polis. Each realm embodies a different law--the family representing divine law, the polis representing human law. Nature, according to Hegel, assigns to woman the realm of divine law, to man the realm of human law. If you seek custom written essay papers, get authentic custom paper writing service online! Human law, the law of the polis, enables man to defines himself through his identity with the community, that is, define himself as a citizen. Human law is a "known law," "the form of a reality that is conscious of itself." Divine law, unlike human law, is not consciously known. It is "an implicit, inner essence which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an inner feeling and the divine element that is exempt from an existence in the real world." (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
4:03 pm	Labour strategies (organizational theory) In looking at management labour strategies, there was a thrust towards welfarism and paternalistic strategies in some British industries during the early decades of the century but it failed to become an important long-term strategy because of the opposition of labour, especially that of skilled workers and even of foremen. Not only did employer welfarism cut across any socialist impetus to state welfare benefits, it also was in conflict with the Samuel Smiles tradition of self-help which in practice meant a cocoon of co-op, building society, Friendly Society and adult education institute. But apart from trade union hostility to welfare measures and company unionism, welfarism in Britain had a restricted coverage because of the small firm structure of engineering, coal and many other industries. Systematic welfare measures could be expensive, and the slow development of large corporations and monopoly capitalism in Britain limited such a strategy to a few firms in a strong monopoly position. Customized resume writer service. Our professional CV writers are certified and can deliver a excellent resume for you! Resume within 36 hours! Zeitlin also underlines the fragmented, small-firm nature of the British engineering industry which persisted through the First World War and the 1920s. Because of the slow rate of growth of product markets, except in armaments, employers' investment decisions were guided by short or medium-term profitability. Thus, despite the Engineering Employers' Federation victories in 1897/8 and 1922 disputes there was no wholesale transformation of the division of labour parallel to that in the United States and Germany. In particular, the impact of Taylorism and the American model of management was limited up to the 1920s. British engineering employers rejected a high-wage strategy which formed a central component of Taylorism, preferring to pursue a traditional policy of low wages and labour cheapening. This policy cut across any hopes of incorporating the engineering union leaders and, perhaps, of moving towards more paternalistic strategies. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
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Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
12:25 pm	League for the Defense of Religious Freedom In 1926 in response to the anti-religious measures of the government of General Calles, the Cristero Rebellion broke out under the leadership of the Liga de Defensa de la Libertad Religiosa ( League for the Defense of Religious Freedom). The movement was particularly strong in the rural regions of Guanajuato, Michoacán, Jalisco, and the western part of the state of Mexico. Although the Cristero campesinos were defending their right to keep their churches open and freely practice their faith, their movement also was imbued with unsatisfied agrarian ambitions and ended up involving thousands of armed men. To fight the Cristeros the government mobilized the army and agrarista peasants of Veracruz and other regions, declaring that the Revolution was threatened by the Catholic Church and the Cristeros. It was a confused and cruel war, favored by a post-Revolutionary agrarian situation in which illegality, discontent, and revolt predominated. The Cristero Rebellion was pacified in 1929 following and agreement between the government and the Catholic Church hierarchy. The Cristero campesinos in the middle believed that their interests had been abandoned in the accord, however, and some continued the fight. In 1934 the conflict erupted again in what has been termed the Segunda Cristiada or la Segunda, this time without the support of the Catholic Church. The agrarian policy and reforms of the Cárdenas period eventually absorbed the movement. In the early 1930s two currents of thought came to blows over the agrarian question. One side was represented by president Plutarco Elfas Calles, who proposed that a limit be set on land distribution to ejidos, after which the government should consolidate individual landholdings, spurring the mechanization and modernization of agriculture. This strain of thought saw the ejido as a transitional institution, ensuring a labor supply for industrial agriculture and training campesinos to be private farmers or salaried workers for agroindustry. The agraristas themselves, however, believed that agrarian reform should continue until all arable land had been redistributed. The ejido—the inalienable common lands, water, and woods of village communities—was believed to be the solution to the land problem and the basic structure of agrarian life and production, ensuring peasant control over agrarian resources yet allowing large-scale production of such cash crops as cotton and henequen. (Comment on this)
12:25 pm	Mexican Revolution and Landed Oligarchy Although the Revolution topple the landed oligarchy from power, it did not immediately change land distribution in the country. Carranza distributed 326,000 acres (132,000 hectares); Álvaro Obregón almost 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) between 1920 and 1924; and his successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, 7 million acres (3 million hectares). Nonetheless, in 1930 only 13.4 percent of cultivated land belonged to ejidos and communities. The remainder was private property, which still was concentrated in very few hands. Plots of less than 25 acres (10 hectares) numbered 614,700, accounting for 1.3 percent of Mexico's exploited surface area. There were 11,500 plots of more than 2,500 acres (1,000 hectares); these latifundia, which accounted for only 1.5 percent of the total number of properties, accounted for 82.8 percent of the exploited surface area. The 1,500 properties of more than 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares), 0.2 percent of the total number of properties, encompassed 54.5 percent of the exploited surface area. Not only had the concentration of landed property continued after the Revolution, but many of the Revolutionary chiefs had become the new hacendados, having appropriated properties directly or married into old families who sought to protect their possessions. Nonetheless, the Revolution had destroyed the ancien régime. More important, it had taught the campesinos to use the weapons that still were scattered throughout the country, while Article 27 legitimated agrarian ferment. If the early Revolutionary forces had sought to topple the political regime, however, the new agrarian movements sought to force the government to live up to the promise of the constitution. During the 1920s, then, the countryside was overrun by agrarian movements, invasions of hacienda lands, and armed peasant groups. The mobilizations of agraristas, as they came to be called, were particularly intense in the states of Veracruz, Michoacán, Guerrero, Yucatán, and Tlaxcala, although Agrarian Community Leagues arose in almost every state in the nation. In 1924 the Liga Nacional de Comunidades ( National League of Communities) was organized under the leadership of the Veracruz agrarista Ursulo Galvin. Nonetheless, many agrarian leaders—most notably Primo Tapia of Michoacán—were assassinated by landowner "white guards" or by the army. In Veracruz campesinos organized agrarian guerrilla bands to defend their lands or invade the haciendas whose lands they were reclaiming. In 1923 Adolfo de la Huerta led a political revolt against the administration of Álvaro Obregón, backed by most of the army. Obregón sought the support of the radical governor of Veracruz, Adalberto Tejada, and his armed agraristas in exchange for promises of land, which he only partially honored; the agrarista governor of Yucatán, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, was assassinated during the de la Huerta rebellion. In 1929, faced with a similar revolt led by General Escobar, President Emilio Portes Gil gave new but short-lived encouragement to land distribution to ensure peasant loyalty. It seemed that each military chief could count on campesino discontent to further his political ambitions, and military power struggles and campesinos' agrarian struggles seemed to be intertwined inextricably during those turbulent years. (Comment on this)
12:25 pm	New Constitution and Carranza's Policies In 1916 the Carrancistas convened a constitutional assembly in the city of Querétaro, approving a new constitution on February 5, 1917. One of the mainstays of the new constitution was Article 27, which established the authority of the Mexican state over soil and subsoil, creating a juridical foundation for agrarian reform (and, much later, state control of mineral resources). Article 27 recognized diverse forms of land tenure: farmer and campesino smallholdings, village ejidos (commons), and indigenous communal lands. If the Carrancista leadership hoped that Article 27 would create a legal channel for agrarian demands, however, the article only served to legitimate agrarian mobilizations. Between 1917 and 1920 the Carranza government tried to circumvent Article 27, freezing land redistribution, returning haciendas expropriated during the Revolution to their former owners, and continuing the war against the remnants of the Villista forces and the Zapatistas in the southern part of the country; on April 10, 1919, Emiliano Zapata was assassinated in a government ambush. Nonetheless, Carranza's policies only served to alienate his agrarian base of support. Drawing on the support of agrarian revolutionaries, the military rebellion of Agua Prieta overthrew the Carranza government in 1920, establishing an interim government under Adolfo de la Huerta; the leader of the revolt, Álvaro Obregón, later was elected president, serving in office between 1921 and 1924. During the revolt Obregón had cut a deal with the Zapatistas, and once in power he acceded to many of their agrarian demands in Morelos. Even after defeat agrarian forces continued to influence the destiny of the Mexican nation. At the start of the Revolution in 1910 there were 8,431 haciendas and 48,633 ranchos in existence, making a total of 57,064 properties; 96.9 percent of the heads of rural families, however, owned no land at all. Historian Frank Tannenbaum cites some examples of this concentration of landed property: three haciendas occupied the 200 miles (300 kilometers) between the cities of Saltillo and Zacatecas; the Terrazas family properties in Chihuahua encompassed as much land as the entire nation of Costa Rica; in the state of Hidalgo the railway ran 100 miles (150 kilometers) without leaving the properties of the Escandón family; foreign companies owned 78 percent of the land in Baja California; and the Hearst family owned 30,000 square miles (77,700 square kilometers) in Chihuahua, the largest latifundium in the country. (Comment on this)
12:25 pm	Agrarian Revolution In October 1914 the Revolutionary leaders met in the city of Aguascalientes to patch together an agreement regarding the future organization of the country. Far from creating consensus, however, the Convention at Aguascalientes only widened the divisions between the Carranza and Sonorans on the one hand, and the agrarian Revolutionaries under Zapata and Villa on the other. Eventually the Constitutionalists under Carranza withdrew from the convention, once again plunging the country into civil war. Although Zapata's Liberating Army of the South and Villa's Division of the North were on the same side in conflict, they had divergent ideas regarding the agrarian question, reflecting the quite different organization of peasant communities in the two parts of the country as well as military exigencies. The Villistas eventually hoped to divide the haciendas and reestablish the military colonies and peasant landholdings; however, the actual division of land in Villista territory was to be postponed until the end of the Revolution. Villa feared that if the agrarian reform took place before victory, the Revolutionary soldiers who were fighting far from their home villages would be left out. The Zapatista agrarian utopia, however, hearkened back to the traditional communal village organization of the region; since Zapatista guerrillas tended to remain within their particular region, agrarian reform could take place immediately. In December 1914 the Villistas and Zapatistas took Mexico City, establishing a Conventionist government and forcing the Constitutionalists to retreat to the port of Veracruz, where Carranza established a rump government. The occupation of the capital by agrarian forces was a decisive moment in Mexican history, even though Mexico City was retaken by the Constitutionalist army under Álvaro Obregón in early 1915. To prepare his offensive against the agrarian revolution, the Carranza rump government in Veracruz promulgated the agrarian law of January 6, 1915. The law called for the distribution of land in areas under Constitutionalist control and the right of campesinos to seek restitution before the law. These promises proved decisive in broadening the Constitutionalists' base of support. Between 1915 and 1916, the Constitutionalists won several decisive victories. Between April and June 1915 they destroyed the Division of the North in four battles in the Bajío region of north-central Mexico. Although the Constitutionalists were able to corner the Zapatistas, they were unable to dislodge them from their Morelos stronghold. The United States government recognized the Carrancista government the same year. Nonetheless, innumerable bands of campesino guerrillas continue to operating throughout Mexico; one of the result of this dispersed agrarian war was Villa's attack on the town of Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916. (Comment on this)
12:24 pm	Hacendado Elite and Mexican Revolution The initial direction of the Revolution, however, came from a specific sector of the hacendado elite, owners of modern capitalist haciendas, who tended to be concentrated in northern Mexico. If land had not ceased to be a badge of social prestige for this sector, it still was regarded as a business enterprise and investment. Francisco Madero came from a hacendado family from the northern cotton-producing region of La Laguna; similarly, the Sonoran dynasty that controlled the post-Revolutionary state between 1920 and 1934 through the presidents Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Eláas Calles also owned large agroindustrial holdings in the state of Sonora. The first phase of the Mexican Revolution, then, was an alliance between capitalist hacendados and campesinos against the Porfirian oligarchy. The democratically inclined and upwardly mobile middle class that had emerged during the Pax Porfiriana also made common cause against the Porfirian regime. This phase was short-lived: the treaty of Ciudad Juárez and the resignation of Porfirio Díaz in May 1911 closed the cycle of power of the landholding oligarchy in Mexico much earlier than in any other Latin American country. Scarcely had the question of land tenure come into the open, however, when conflict broke out among the various Revolutionary factions. The first agrarian rebellion was led by Emiliano Zapata in November 1911. His Plan de Ayala demanded the restitution of lands to villages and called on campesinos to take back their lands by force of arms, going well beyond the call for legal restitution in Madero's Plan de San Luis Potosí. If during the Porfirian regime the burden of proof had been on the villages, under the Plan de Ayala the burden of proof was on the hacendados, who could contest restitution only after villagers already had taken back their lands. Between 1912 and 1918 the Zapatista forces gained control of the state of Morelos just south of Mexico City, as well as parts of the states of Tlaxcala, Guerrero, and Puebla. The Zapatista government dictated far-reaching legislation on land, water rights, government, education, and municipal administration. The fall of Madero and his assassination in February 1913 at the hands of the Federal army under Victoriano Huerta unleashed the second phase of the Mexican Revolution, the Constitutionalist revolt led by the hacendado and former governor of Coahuila Venustiano Carranza. Although Carranza's Plan de Guadalupe failed to mention the agrarian question, the agrarian Revolutionaries of the south made common cause with the Constitutionalists of the north against the Huerta dictatorship. Moreover, an important faction within the Constitutionalist ranks was concerned fundamentally with land distribution—the Division of the North headed by the peasant caudillo Pancho Villa. Villa's forces proved militarily decisive, breaking the Federal forces in the Battle of Zacatecas in June 1914. Soon after the Constitutionalist victory, however, the Villistas clashed with the Carrancista leadership over their differing conceptions of the agrarian question. (Comment on this)
12:24 pm	The Fourth and Fifth Mexican Lands Systems All of these systems of land tenure were founded on the idea that land belonged to those who cultivate it. They also formed the basis of village autonomy and local campesino democracy. However, each also corresponded to different traditions, histories, and worldviews that would help determine different strategies during the Revolution. A fourth system of land tenure was that of the old haciendas. Here the rent of land and the labor of the campesino was a source of profit for the landowner, but the ownership of land also was a source of prestige and power. The old hacienda system might best be termed a symbiosis of traditional seigniory typical of the ancien régime and the new spirit of capitalist enterprise. Porfirian haciendas combined these two elements in varying degrees, just as they found innumerable ways to combine servile labor and salaried work. A fifth group, that of rancheros and rich campesinos, owned medium-sized individual and family properties (ranchos) that also had emerged alongside the haciendas. The rancheros had taken advantage of the expropriation of village lands, contracted work, and could rent part of their properties to poor campesinos. Members of this rural middle class, whose size is difficult to estimate based on census records, acted as intermediaries between villages and haciendas and, depending on the region, took different sides during the Revolution. Nonetheless, the power of the Porfirian regime linked tightly to the landowning elites in symbiosis with the new "steam lords" of the emerging industrial sector. In the mentality of this landholding aristocracy, social prestige, political and military power, and investment capital were the sole determinants of elite membership. All three campesino groups—communal villages, former military colonists, and indigenous groups of the northeast—fought against this social regime, capturing or destroying haciendas everywhere Revolutionary battles took place. (Comment on this)
12:24 pm	General Systems of Land In 1910 Francisco I. Madero called for armed revolt in defense of presidential nonreelection. In his Plan de San Luis Potosí Madero included a call for the restitution through legal channels of illegally seized lands. From the first, the Mexican Revolution was the culmination of complex processes in which systems of land tenure helped define social divisions and hierarchies. The Revolutionary process that established the institutional norms for the Mexican state in the Constitution of 1917 also was an agrarian war as differing conceptions regarding the possession and use of land entered the conflict. This explains the central position of Article 27 in the Constitution, which gave the state the authority to implement agrarian reform. At the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, five general systems of land tenure helped define the experience and perspective of the Mexican people. The first was the land of campesino (peasant) and indigenous villages, a combination of communal lands and family plots that had been handed down since pre-Hispanic times. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Dfaz ( 1876-1910), however, capitalist haciendas grew at the expense of communal landholdings. It has been estimated that at the beginning of the nineteenth century 40 percent of the arable lands in central and southern Mexico were village communal properties, but by 1910 this fraction had dropped to 5 percent. This process of appropriation and dispossession was fresh in memory of the Revolutionary generation. The expectations of communal villagers went far beyond Madero's call for legal restitution and ended up being formally codified in November 1911 in the Plan de Ayala of Emiliano Zapata's Liberating Army of the South. The second system of land tenure was organized around the military colonies that had been established in northern Mexico, particularly the state of Chihuahua, during the nineteenth-century wars against nomadic tribes. The owner of the land was the armed campesino who had taken possession of the land and made it productive. Once the so-called Apache Wars were over, however, the former military colonies lost many of their juridical rights and privileges, and capitalist haciendas grew at the expense of individual and family plots. In 1905 Governor Enrique Creel of Chihuahua promulgated a new law that forced the colonists' lands onto the open market. The opposition to these measures by the colonists and other campesinos later found expression in Francisco "Pancho" Villa's Division of the North. In the northeast, lands also were held by indigenous groups, most notably in the Yaqui and Mayo valleys of Sonora. For the Yaquis and Mayos land and water formed the body of the community in a sacred bond uniting the community and the basis of time as conceived by their ancestors. This relationship of the people with the land was alien to the spirit of capitalist enterprise that in the 1890s inspired Sonoran hacienda owners to appropriate Yaqui and Mayo lands in a prolonged and bloody war. (Comment on this)
12:23 pm	Díaz and Mexican Economy Díaz reoriented the Liberal project for agrarian Mexico. He continued to favor the privatization of community lands, but he left implementation to local initiative. Local elites often promoted privatization, while poorer villagers opposed it. When conflicts developed Díaz tried to mediate negotiated solutions rather than impose ideological programs. Privatization finally was implemented on a broad scale across Mexico in the 1880s, provoking many local conflicts. Few escalated into challenges to the national regime. While promoting privatization in carefully limited ways, Díaz backed away from the more ideological Liberals' program of cultural secularization. Having reached an accommodation with the Catholic Church on the national level, he understood the risks of forcing rural communities to limit their annual religious festivities. Thus, when communities faced privatization during the Díaz era, conflicts over land were less often linked to challenges to local religious cultures. The result was a tendency for agrarian conflicts to become localized and less threatening to the national state and the Liberal development project. If the consolidation of the Díaz regime and its moderation of the Liberal agrarian program successfully ended the post-Independence era of agrarian insurrections, Díaz's development project simultaneously brought new pressures to rural Mexico and new patterns of agrarian conflict and resistance. The rapid incorporation of Mexico into the expanding Atlantic economy, and with it the sudden explosion of export development, brought new demands for land and labor across agrarian Mexico. Entrepreneurs seeking profit—with regime backing—often coveted land and water resources customarily used by villagers and rancheros. Such lands might have been obtained through privatization, the surveying of untitled lands, purchase, or a variety of less legal pressures. Porfirian development thus set off a spate of local land and labor disputes, leading to varied negotiations, court challenges, local demonstrations, stealthy violence, and periodic riots. They rarely led to enduring insurrections, except in peripheral regions— Papantla, Veracruz, the Yaqui Valley of Sonora, and Tomochic, Chihuahua—where long-isolated regions faced sudden incursions of state power and economic developments that challenged both the economic welfare and the cultural independence of local peoples. There, the Díaz regime faced major uprisings in the 1890s. For most rural Mexicans, the Díaz era brought agrarian compression. Among the agrarian majority, population growth intersected with land loss, declining wages, and insecure tenancies to produce widespread economic deterioration. Yet regime stability, coupled with limited mediation of disputes, inhibited insurrectionary resistance. Conflict was generally contained within communities, there to re-emerge as crime and family violence. Yet pressures mounted and conditions worsened. In 1910, when unresolved issues of political succession broke the Díaz regime, beginning a decade of political conflict, the compressed and contained agrarian grievances generated during the decades of Porfirian peace exploded to fuel agrarian forces within a social revolution that would eventually reconfigure state and society in twentiethcentury Mexico. (Comment on this)
12:23 pm	The Policy of Privatization The policy of privatization provoked widespread resistance among villagers in diverse regions, including many who had been the Liberals' allies in the recent national conflict. And in many communities, resistance to privatization was stiffened by opposition to Liberal attempts to prohibit public expression of community religious cultures. Again, the nature of the resistance varied. Many villagers simply ignored the Liberal edicts, maintaining community lands and staging very public religious festivals. With their allies in the Sierra de Puebla, the Liberals were pressed to negotiate limited privatizations that left most community lands intact. Elsewhere, in regions ranging from Chalco, to the Mezquital and the Puebla Basin in the central highlands, to more distant regions from Chiapas to Tepic and Sonora, the late 1860s brought renewed regional insurrections that challenged the Liberal vision for rural Mexico. Once again, the rebellions eventually were contained. But the broad range of resistance in the late 1860s slowed the implementation of the Liberal program in many regions and made clear the high price Liberals would pay for any rapid assertion of radical reform. The mid- 1870s brought the last nineteenth-century contest over national power, as Porfirio Díaz challenged Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada for control of the Liberal movement and the national state. Simultaneously, the last nineteenth-century era of agrarian insurrections challenged the Liberal vision of the Mexican nation. In part, the uprisings of the 1870s were one more instance of rural poor people taking advantage of elite conflicts to press their demands. Yet Porfirio Díaz also played to rural discontent in his move to claim national power. Earlier he had been active in mobilizing agrarian support for the war against the French in the Sierra de Puebla. He was more sensitive to agrarian grievances than the more urban, ideological Liberals who looked to Lerdo for leadership—and, of course, Lerdo shared the name of the law (named for his late brother) that demanded the privatization of village lands. Díaz never campaigned for village tradition; he never publicly opposed Liberal agrarian policies. However, he did not promote them although he emphasized his support of local and municipal autonomy: an open position that might attract rancheros as well as many villagers. Thus, Díaz's campaign for the presidency both responded to and promoted rural resistance to Lerdo and the ideological Liberals. Díaz's regime, established in 1876, came to power having raised expectations of a new approach to agrarian justice. With the consolidation of Díaz's rule, rural resistance took new directions. The massive, enduring regional insurrections that seemed to define agrarian Mexico from the 1840s through the 1870s receded. Conflict did not disappear, but became more local, more negotiated, and less threatening to the national state and regime. What had changed? The consolidation of the state inhibited insurrectionary violence. The reduction of political conflict, the acceleration of economic development, and the integration of the nation via railroads and telegraphs all consolidated state power and limited the space for overt rebellion. (Comment on this)
12:23 pm	Responses of the Agrarian The responses of rural Mexicans to the War with the United States in the 1840s and the French invasion and occupation of the 1860s differed sharply. When the United States invaded in 1846, the agrarian majority showed little inclination to defend the nation, and substantial numbers took the opportunity to challenge the state, further weakening the war effort. When the French invaded two decades later, few took the conflict as an opportunity for insurrection, and at least in the Puebla highlands, strategic groups of indigenous villagers joined the Liberals in fighting for the national state. The differing responses of the agrarian majority to the two midcentury invasions of Mexico by external powers are little understood. Why did the U.S. invasion become an opportunity for mass regional insurrections, while the French invasion did not? Why did few rural Mexicans join the fight against the Yankees, while more were ready to resist the French? Had a new nationalism begun to permeate the rural majority? Were U.S. aims—focused on the acquisition of distant and little-populated northern territories—seen as irrelevant to the agrarian majority? Were French designs on internal dominance viewed as a more direct threat to rural villagers? National resistance led by Liberals and supported by strategic agrarian allies defeated the French in 1867. The national victory, however, did not lead to agrarian peace. Once the Liberals, led by President Benito Juárez, consolidated national power, they returned to their agenda for agrarian Mexico. They pressed for the privatization of community lands and for the secularization of public culture. The privatization program consolidated Liberal support among many rancheros, who could establish ownership of properties leased from traditional communities. (Comment on this)
12:22 pm	Critical Juncture All the regional uprisings were eventually contained after the war ended. Their number and extent reveal not only indigenous peoples' discontent with the direction of national developments, they demonstrate that many Mexicans did not then identify with the emerging nation-state. Rather than join that state in its conflict with the United States, peoples of Yucatán, Tehuantepec, and the Sierra Gorda saw the war as an opportunity to challenge those who ruled the struggling Mexican nation. The late 1840s brought Mexico to a critical juncture. Elites had to face both failure in war and failure to forge a national society. The leaders of numerous Mexican states concluded that it was time to legislate a liberal agrarian reform: the privatization of community lands. Expecting resistance, the same states created rural police. Yet most lacked the administrative organization to privatize community lands effectively and the financial resources to create effective police. As a result, the primary outcome of postwar attempts to weaken the power of indigenous communities was to set off waves of rural conflict that began in the late 1840s and recurred in the 1850s, the late 1860s, and again in the 1870s. Across the central highlands, the conflicts provoked by the agrarian reforms of midcentury took forms that included passive resistance, legal challenges, political support for the Liberals' Conservative opposition, local riots, and regional uprisings that might last several months. These were less massive insurrectionary movements than the uprisings of the war years, yet they proved widespread, enduring, and a real challenge to attempts to implement the Liberal agrarian reform. Such conflicts developed in Mexico State and the Cuernavaca basin in the late 1840s and early 1850s. When Liberals seized national power in the mid-1850s and made the privatization of community lands national policy through the Ley Lerdo of 1856, resistance became widespread. Such resistance ensured that there was little effective privatization before a decade of civil war postponed the issue. From 1858 through 1860, Mexican Conservatives fought Mexican Liberals for control of the national state. Following the Liberal victory, from 1862 to 1867, Mexican Liberals fought French invaders and the French-imposed empire of Maximilian—allied with surviving Conservatives—for national power. Rural Mexicans faced new conflicts and new decisions in rapid succession. Their responses were complex and varied, but important patterns emerged. Rancheros, whether small proprietors, squatters, or tenants of estates or communities, tended toward the Liberals—promoters of small property in rural Mexico. Peasant villagers faced more difficult decisions. The Liberals aimed to assault their community lands. Yet Conservatives were often the very landlords with whom they had contested local lands and labor relations for decades. Many chose to avoid entanglement in the Liberal-Conservative conflict of 1858 to 1860. The conflicts with the French after 1862, however, brought new considerations. Now the nation was at risk. In that context, some peasant villagers—notably in the Sierra de Puebla—allied with the Liberals, and their assistance proved critical to the eventual defeat of the invaders. (Comment on this)
12:22 pm	Economic Disorganization in Mexico Many rural Mexicans took advantage of economic disorganization and political instability to leave villages and haciendas and to move into long-isolated upland regions. There they often settled apparently untitled lands and created ranchero communities, escaping the power of estates and the state. The first decades after Independence brought political instability and economic disorganization, accompanied by a consolidation of village and ranchero production. That change was caused in part by the institutional collapse, disruption in communications, and loss of a reliable market for agricultural exports. Yet changes favorable to the agrarian majority also resulted from pressures by rural villagers, estate residents, and rancheros working within the context of postIndependence disorganization to promote their own versions of independence. The years from 1821 into the 1840s saw few major insurrections; yet agrarian resistance proved persistent and often successful. The 1840s brought a return to more violent agrarian conflicts. The national state remained weak and in dispute, but provincial governments began to consolidate their powers and to promote more effectively the interests of landed elites. Local conflicts over lands and labor relations emerged across a large area of southern Mexico from Oaxaca, through Guerrero, to Morelos. Yet violent conflicts remained limited until the outbreak of war against the United States in 1846. With state power locked in international conflict, indigenous peoples in several Mexican regions took the opportunity to challenge programs and policies that assaulted their visions of a just society. The largest, most violent, most enduring, and best known of the wartime insurrections was the Caste War of Yucatán. Maya villagers, long stoic in their subjection to colonial rule, faced a post-Independence state that promoted land privatization and commercial development, while challenging community control of ancestral lands. Local political conflicts had armed many Mayas and promised them gains, only to leave them victims of elite disputes. When international war provided the opportunity, Maya peasants rose in armed protest over land losses that were challenges to a cosmic order built on community landholding and family maize cultivation. The conflict raged intensely for nearly a decade, and when the state finally gained the upper hand, a remnant of Maya rebels retreated into the back country to maintain an independent society and religious culture through the end of the nineteenth century. Parallel conflicts occurred during the war at the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec and in the Sierra Gorda, north of the national capital. At Tehuantepec, simmering conflicts over liberal state policies promoting the privatization of valuable salt beds and favoring large estates in land disputes exploded into violent conflict when the Zapotecs of Juchitán and nearby villagers refused to recognize state law during the war years. Governor Benito Juárez responded with force, setting off years of violent conflict. In the rugged highlands of the Sierra Gorda, indigenous peoples had long resisted colonial rule, joined in the Independence-era insurgencies, and in the 1840s again used the context of larger political conflicts to rise against the incursions of large landowners and commercial exploitation. (Comment on this)
12:22 pm	Resistance and Rebellion in Mexican Economy Independence brought new patterns of rural resistance. During the late colonial era, large and enduring insurrections were few and generally confined to peripheral regions. Most resistance took the form of brief local riots, as much demonstrations as uprisings. They claimed the attention of the authorities and brought disputes over such issues as lands, work, and taxes into the colonial courts. The goal was to force judicial mediation by the colonial courts. The Hidalgo Revolt of 1810 began a decade of insurrection. Within the diverse conflicts over Independence, rural Mexicans, ranging from estate residents in the Bajío, to villagers in Jalisco, to rancheros in the Pacific hot country, took arms to demand their versions of justice and independence. The conflicts that began in 1810 added an insurrectionary tradition to the history of resistance among rural Mexicans. The Independence engineered in 1821 by elites and the military brought only a short-term recession of insurrectionary conflicts. The rural poor did not stop pressing their interests and resisting the designs of those who would rule them. The post-Independence years brought two decades of weak, divided, and disorganized state powers, allowing the pursuit of agrarian goals through more local and less violent means. In the Bajío region of north-central Mexico, where insurrection had been most intense and enduring after 1810, in the 1820s rural families pressured estates into dividing lands into tenant holdings, effectively decentralizing estate production and creating a family-based ranchero economy. In the Valley of Toluca in central Mexico, villagers around Tenango del Valle went to court and in 1826 won long-disputed lands from the Condes de Santiago Calimaya, among the colony's greatest landlords. That judicial victory—although later reversed—reverberated among villages across the central highlands, leading many communities to reopen old disputes. At Chalco, post-Independence financial difficulties among landed elites allowed villagers to press estates for higher wages and more favorable working conditions. It was in the context of such agrarian pressures that the 1824 Constitutional Convention considered the privatization of community lands. Many delegates supported such a program, but they chose not to implement it, fearing destabilizing resistance. (Comment on this)
12:21 pm	Revolutionary Mobilization and Mexican Exonomy Revolutionary mobilization was regionally intense in the central highlands. Where booming estates pressed hardest on villagers yet offered only limited seasonal employment (often because mechanization allowed production increases without parallel labor demands), insurrection demanding the return to peasant production and village autonomy became intense, particularly in Morelos (Emiliano Zapata's homeland) and in adjacent regions of the states of Mexico, Puebla, and Guerrero. In other regions, highland Oaxaca, for example, limited estate development and limited pressures on villagers and peasant families led to fewer, more sporadic local uprisings. Rancheros also faced Revolution and responded in diverse ways. Many in the north, having profited from economic boom while being pressured by large estates operated by politically linked oligarchs, became adamant Revolutionaries. In the Bajío, rancheros had profited from Porfirian development without competing with large estates and rarely joined the Revolution. Others in the uplands where Michoacán joins Jalisco had remained isolated from Porfirian developments and ignored the revolution. Rancheros in Hidalgo and Guerrero led Revolutionary movements that challenged landed elites and claimed local political power. The complex transformations of land and labor regimes during the nineteenth century left diverse legacies to Revolutionary Mexico. The creation of the Mexican nation was a long and contested process. Elite visions of a national state and society were challenged in diverse ways by popular alternatives. Elites sought a national state that would serve such elite interests as economic development and national power. The agrarian majority often had alternative priorities, including subsistence production and family and community autonomy. After 1821, growing numbers of influential leaders promoted liberal ideals: they aimed to turn community lands into private property, they worked to limit the role of the Catholic Church and religion in public affairs, and they demanded the education of the Mexican majority to transform peasant villagers into liberal citizens. Many among the agrarian majority, however, preferred communal landholding, held religion as essential to community culture, and resisted any transformation about which they were not consulted. The result was a long era of post-Independence negotiation and conflict, punctuated between 1840 and 1880 by a series of major regional insurrections. Resistance, of course, takes diverse forms. It may range from ignoring the edicts of the powerful, to hard negotiations over work, to legal challenges, to brief riots, to massive and violent insurrections. All developed in Mexico during the century after Independence, although the historical record privileges the more public and violent challenges to the emerging nation-state and the developing liberal project. (Comment on this)