From Political Economy to Police: The Return to Apprehensive Paternalism

Abstract

The government’s inability to stem the generalization and deepening of the crisis at the very end of the decade doomed liberalization. The new Controller-General, Terray, metaphorically portrayed the liberal experience as “the flood” and imagined his responsibility, in part, as channeling the waters back into their natural reservoirs and building dikes capable of withstanding future inundations of any sort. But he did not take a nostalgically antediluvian approach to the task—at least he tried not to. The problem was that de-liberalization did not bring instant recovery. Terray enjoyed virtually no respite from subsistence troubles during his four year tenure and the subsistence troubles generated other political and economic problems which compounded the difficulty for him.