We define four central characteristics of the Peruvian political economy in the era of developmentalism: the sequence of export bonanzas of various raw materials that limited the demand for industrial policy; the historical state weakness, largely the product of political instability; social fractures, with important ethnic and geographical dimensions; and the virtual absence of economists towards the beginning of the 1960s. The consensus of national economic-political power circles was and continues to be that the progress of the national economy demands little state intervention.