Joseph de Maistre, Donoso Cortés and Argentina’s Catholic Right: The Integralist Rebellion against Modernity

Abstract

Early twentieth‐century Argentina is identified with military authoritarianism as manifested in Felix de Uriburu’s coup d’état in 1930 and subsequently in the 1943 military junta regime that preceded Peronism. This article offers a new analysis of the tradition of Argentinian political thought that served to legitimise authoritarian projects during this tumultuous era. Focusing on the work of key Catholic thinkers, such as Menendez y Pelayo, Bonald, Belloc, Degrieff, and particularly Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés, it argues that they were synthesised by Catholic intellectuals in Argentina into an integralist concept of power that differed from both fascism and simple political authoritarianism, and reflected a particular view of the relationship between the social and the political, and the secular and the religious under the impact of modernity. What emerges is that not only was integralist authoritarianism non‐fascist, but it actually attempted to create a theoretical barrier against fascism.