Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone

Quite a good book. Most writers who examined the subject in the 80s (i.e. Guillermo O'Donnell) focused purely on macroeconomic factors that led to coups, and on examining the strategies of agro-export elites versus ISI industrialists that led to political gridlock and thus the coup d'etat. Curiously, few of them deeply examined the military, which is obviously a major component of a military coup.Stepan begins to address this defect in the literature, and places the Brazilian military in its historical context in a way often underplayed or ignored by others. Particularly useful is his formulation of the "moderator model" as explaining the inclination of the Brazilian military to intervene in politics, and the tendency by all sectors of society to view this as legitimate.This lays a foundation for explaining not only right wing coups, but left wing coups such as Portugal. Absolutely necessary for the student of civil-military relations.