Transformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930-1955

Jorge A. Nallim , Transformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930-1955. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2012. 263 pp. ISBN 978-0-8229-6203- 8.As an epistemology with pretensions to the 'universal', no discourse has had more profound 'local' effects on Latin America than liberalism. As an ideal enshrined in revolutions, national constitutions and trade policies, liberalism as a practice seems to have entrenched political-economic dependency in the first 150 years after independence. The counter-reactions to liberal order over the twentieth century were varied and powerful: populism (Cardenas, Peron), state interventionism (import-substitution industrialization), identity formation (mestizaje and transculturation), the list goes on.Although Jorge A. Nallim's first book does not critique liberalism per se, it does offer a valuable history of the discourse during a critical juncture in Argentine politics between the military coup of 1930 and the fall of Peron in 1955. Beginning with a succinct overview of political history from 1820 to 1938 (Chapters 1-2), Nallim stakes some rather significant claims. First, while Argentine liberalism succeeded in incorporating the country into the world market, the discourse served to justify multiple, and often opposed, political-economic agendas during the heyday of the Argentine economy (1870-1929). Second, while liberalism is typically associated with nineteenth-century hegemony, it only coalesces as a unifying political discourse in the late 1930s - precisely that era when 'traditional' liberalism is typically thought to have entered into rigor mortis. As a hegemonic discourse par excellence, Nallim strongly implies that liberalism has hardly, if ever, exercised hegemony.Nallim's focus on liberalism allows him to make sense of the often-confounding complexities of Argentine politics at midcentury. In the wake of Yrigoyen's personalismo, various actors in the public sphere in the 1930s reclaimed liberalism in an effort to 'return' the nation to its 'traditional' roots (as shown in chapters 3-4 particularly). But such reclamations were often oriented towards competing goals: liberalism as the protection of individual political rights, liberalism as a basis for social justice, liberalism as an argument against state intervention in the economy. Liberalism thus united conservatives, progressives, Catholics and socialists in opposition to the military regimes of Uriburu and Justo; but since each faction adopted distinct visions of liberalism, political opposition remained fractured and ineffective.Moreover, already tenuous oppositional alliances - because they were formed as external opposition to the ruling regimes - most often existed at a purely discursive level outside the realm of official power. Nallim's work is well researched and documented, but its particular strength lies in his attention to non-state arenas like journalism, literature, religion and education. The author traces liberal discourse through a surprising collection of archival sources: the literary journal Sur, the Catholic journal Orden Cristiana, the newspaper La Prensa, the political magazine Argentina Libre (later re-dubbed Antinazi), the proceedings of the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, and many others. …