In This Issue

Abstract

Despite the many political and economic crises that have made doing research in and on Argentina particularly challenging over the last three decades, recent historiography has produced a veritable explosion of new scholarship, new themes, and new paradigms. The articles we have assembled here came to us independently; they were not solicited for a special issue. We decided to publish them together because we felt that reading them in concert would offer the reader a deeper sense of the current state of modern Argentine history. We also feel the questions they raise have implications and resonances for Latin American history as a whole.Paula Alonso’s article, “Ideological Tensions in the Foundational Decade of ‘Modern Argentina’: The Political Debates of the 1880s,” contests the longstanding view of the 1880s in Argentina as a decade of monolithic rule by the Partido Autonomista Nacional, during which “men of vision” managed to suppress partisan strife, establish the political consensus that became known as “el orden conservador,” and integrate the Argentine nation into a modern world of steady progress and prosperity. Alonso, through an explication of the continuing vigor of the partisan press, as well as the different visions of government, political legitimacy, and progress articulated in these dailies, casts doubt on the vaunted homogeneity of the political sector in this period. This discourse of opposition also foreshadows the political themes that will flourish in subsequent decades with the founding of the Radical Party.In “¿Oligarquía o elites? Estructura y composición de las clases altas de la ciudad de Buenos Aires entre 1880 y 1930,” Leandro Losada uses a prosopographical approach to question the still-common assumption that the dominant sectors in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires constituted an undifferentiated oligarchy. Focusing on three moments — 1885, 1905, 1925 — he finds that concentrations and connections among “elites” in the different sectors of wealth, power, prestige, and knowledge became increasingly attenuated over time. While acknowledging that the increasing autonomy of the political, social, economic, and knowledge spheres follows a narrative of “social modernization,” he goes beyond this abstraction to emphasize the emergence of distinctive fields of knowledge and action, with their own rules and markers of prestige. As a result, it became increasingly unnecessary and unlikely that an individual who achieved success in one sphere would participate intensely in another.The particular way that Argentine fascists and anti-Semites received and reinterpreted Freudian psychoanalytic theory is the subject of Federico Finchelstein’s article, “The Anti-Freudian Politics of Argentine Fascism.” Finchelstein focuses primarily on the writings of Virgilio Filippo, a Catholic priest and populist exponent of fascist ideas whose personal influence extended into the Peronist period. Finchelstein argues that Filippo’s publications provide us with broader insight into the role Freudian ideas played in the construction of fascist anti-Semitic discourses particular to Argentine Catholic circles. Marrying traditional Catholic concepts of the sacred and the suppression of base impulses with the secular language of race and sexual abnormality, writers like Filippo crafted an anti-Semitic discourse that foregrounded the sexual threat posed by Jews to the Argentine nation. In his sobering concluding remarks, Finchelstein argues that this “fateful conflation of Freudian theory, Judaism, and the idea of the internal enemy” continued to circulate in Argentine fascist circles into the era of the last military dictatorship.In “Peronist Consumer Politics and the Problem of Domesticating Markets in Argentina, 1943 – 1955,” Eduardo Elena contributes to a new area of research for Latin American historians — the politics of consumerism. While Elena notes that issues of commerce, regulation, and inflation are typically addressed as economic questions, he focuses on their political and cultural dimensions. By examining Peronist discourses and policies about consumption, as well as educative campaigns to create responsible consumers (especially women/housewives) and highly publicized inspection campaigns of potential violators of state regulations, Elena provides insight into the tensions between the populist promise of better living standards and the political and economic pressures to “discipline” the market and consumers. He also demonstrates how those policies changed over time, with the thrust of Peronist discourse shifting from the “domestication of commerce” to the “domestication of the consumer.”