Introduction

This chapter provides a background of the journeys across the postwar Americas to uncover the mid-century world to which David Lilienthal belonged and the unseen possibilities that lay within it. It starts from the idea that the fate of the US welfare state and Latin American developmental states cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Lilienthal belonged to a generation of North Americans who threw their energies into the Third World after 1945, and their work overseas did more than remake foreign lands; it shaped the possibilities of policy making at home. Within the Western Hemisphere, long exchanges between US and Latin American societies endowed their political economies with some of the same internal contradictions. When the crises of the 1970s and 1980s came, the divergent promises that they harbored became vividly apparent. The mobilization of the right and the explosive conflicts of those decades did not simply substitute one set of ideas for another, obliterating all that came before. Instead, they sorted out the elements of midcentury mixed economies, destroying some practices, redeploying others, and retrospectively redefining them all as emblems of two different eras.