The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy

A very readable, engaging, well-organized discussion which, on one hand, presents powerfuland provocative counterarguments against triumphalist Mexican historiography according to which the post-revolutionary State has succeeded in redressing the rampant injustices and inequalities that plagued Mexico from the colonial period through the early 20thcentury. On the other hand, Williams also takes issue with criticalhistories which have documented how post-revolutionary Mexican regimes (and the PRI party in particular) perpetuate old inequities and/or introduce new forms of inequality. The limitation of many such alternative approaches, he argues, is found in the fact that they unthinkingly reproduce an understanding of the political that is grounded in what Foucault terms biopolitics, and which in the case of Mexico was inherited precisely from the Porfiriato. The book will be a must-read for scholars and graduate students working on Mexico and Latin America in a variety of disciplines, including literary criticism, cultural studies, history and political thought. - Patrick Dove, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Indiana University

This is, by any standard, a superb book: carefully researched, eloquently written, theoretically sophisticated, driven by a relentless egalitarian passion, and at the same time painstakingly loyal to the wealth of literary, historical-archival, and journalistic materials at hand. Drawing from the definitions of sovereignty, police, and democracy in the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Ranciere, Gareth Williams carves out an impressive path of his own by making such theoretical questions about the limits of sovereign power bear on the concrete circumstances of twentieth and twenty-first century Mexico. The Mexican Exception will be indispensable reading for students and scholars of Mexico and Latin America for a very long time indeed. - Bruno Bosteels, Cornell University