Latin American Populism: Tentative Reflections for a Global Historiographical Perspective

Abstract

Latin American populism has usually been considered as an integrationist strategy towards the urban working classes in the context of mass democracy and import substitution industrialization. Among its features, the following ones can be identified: support from the working classes, charismatic leadership, nationalism and anti-intellectualism, anti-communism, state-centered conception of historical change, and corporatism. Recent writings influenced by the “linguistic” and “cultural” turns, despite their different social ontologies, also proclaim Latin American populisms’ peculiarity. In these cases the notion of “political style” prevails over socio-economic explanations. The available investigations are often based on national experiences or comparative approaches among two (or three) cases like Peronism and Varguism, or Cardenism. In so doing they provide a catalogue of “populisms” instead of a common understanding of the so called “Latin American” populism. This paper aims to review the very question of “Latin American populism” from a critical understanding of a global historiographical perspective. From this complex point of view it will be argued that historical analysis requires a globalizing critique of the prevailing social theory, and of the often implicit historiographical assumptions. The core of the argumentation will be focused on the Western distinction between state politics and civil society.