La política en las calles: entre el voto y la movilización: Buenos Aires, 1862–1880

La política en las calles is an analysis of the Argentine political system during the “Age of Mitre” (1862–80; after Bartolomé Mitre, president of Argentina from 1862–68). This book explores how in Buenos Aires after the fall of Rosas in 1852 a wide range of asociaciones civiles began to emerge. Along with an active system of political journalism, these associations constituted an informal network of power, vaguely designated as “public opinion,” that Sábato, following Habermas, defines as an incipient “civil society.” This interpretation provides the basis for Sábato’s main hypothesis. Against traditional views that consider parties and elections to be the fundamental institutions that link rulers and the ruled, Sábato counters that the system of civil associations in Buenos Aires was, in the years under study, even more determinant of political practices. This system articulated a notion of political representation that was (if not in actuality, at least ideally) more inclusive, democratic, and, ultimately, “modern” than political representation organized around parties and other formal mechanisms.

Part one of La política en las calles offers a description of various forms of spontaneous social organization that flourished in the 1860s and 1870s. The first chapter in this section explores the spatial transformations that were affecting Buenos Aires during these years. Part two offers a minute analysis of political parties and elections. In addition to looking at who voted, Sábato pays particular attention to the formation and composition of “clubs”: how they were formed; the identity of their leaders and constituency; and how they served as a point of convergence for different social sectors of Buenos Aires. Part three offers a description of events that illustrate how these associations were instrumental in organizing social protest and integrating it into institutional channels. The resulting picture shows that while the more strictly-speaking “political arena” continued to be dominated by traditional clientelistic systems, immersed in endless (and often violent, although limited) conflicts, civil associations emerged as the basic mechanism that shaped substantive social identities and connected the governing class to sectors of the population beyond those that were formally exercising their political rights (the república de ciudadanos). The activity of these associations distinguishes this model of political organization, dominant from 1862 to 1880, from both the preceding authoritarian order imposed by Rosas and the conservative regime that emerged in 1880, when the role of civil associations diminished.

The premise that paved the way for a perspective centered around the informal means of political participation was one that Sábato calls the “explosion of the model of gradual expansion,” according to which progressively wider sectors of the population acquired their political rights in a process culminating in the promulgation of the 1912 Sáenz Peña Law that granted universal male suffrage. As Sábato demonstrates, this widening of the political sphere was not as linear as often thought. In actual fact, universal male suffrage was either implicit or explicit in most of the constitutions and electoral laws promulgated in Argentina after independence. And the fact that political participation was not really extensive does not necessarily mean that the actual exercise of political rights remained a privilege of society’s upper sectors. More often than not, the lower classes formed the rank and file of political parties and clubes electorales, while the middle and upper classes (the “bourgeois” public) favored other, less violent and more respectable means of making their voices heard, including popular demonstrations, journalistic campaigns, and written demands. Moreover, an increasingly greater part of this “bourgeois public” was composed of immigrants who by definition did not enjoy political rights, even though they still constituted an important political factor in the “gran aldea.” All these circumstances converged in delimiting a space for public debate that not only was broader than that of the formal political system but that also linked many different social actors and institutions that effectively conditioned the action of those in power.

By providing a new perspective on a little-studied period of Argentine political history, La política en las calles constitutes a landmark in the literature of this field. This is a key work for understanding why the mitrista political system was not merely an incomplete and intermediary stage in progress toward a “república verdadera” that crystallized in the twentieth century. As Sábato convincingly argues, this system possessed its own logic and functioning, based on a definite model of “república verdadera.” A correct understanding, therefore, demanded access to heuristic tools different from those available in traditional perspectives. The intelligent application of a set of categories better suited to understanding political processes and formations developed prior to the affirmation of a “party system” is, in short, the decisive achievement of Sábato’s book, making it an inevitable point of reference for all future studies in the field.