Argentina: A Hundred and Fifty Years of Democratic Praxis

Between Revolution and the Ballot Box: the Origins of the Argentine Radical Party In the 1890s. By Paula Alonso. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 242. $52.95 cloth.)

Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. By Javier Auyero. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. 271. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest For Recognition. By Javier Auyero. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. 248. $18.95 paper.)

Patriotas, Cosmopolitas Y Nacionalistas: La Construccià�n De La Nacionalidad Argentina A Fines Del Siglo XIX. By Lilia Ana Bertoni. (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Argentina, 2001. Pp. 319. N.p.)

the Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political HistorY, 1860-1945. By Roy Hora. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 264. $70.00 cloth.)

Argentina: A Short HistorY. By Colin M. Lewis. (Oxford, UK: One World Publications, 2002. N.p.)

Workers Or Citizens: Democracy and Identity In Rosario, Argentina (1912-1930). By Matthew B. Karush. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Pp.272. N.p.)

A History of Argentina In the Twentieth Century. By Luis Alberto Romero. Translated by James P. Brennan. (University Park: the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Pp. 349. $60.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.)

The workings of democracy dominate the current writing on Argentina. By making democracy its centerpiece, the impressive synthesis of the twentieth-century history of Argentina by Luis Alberto Romero exemplifies the genre. Romero starts his book with the democratic election of Radical leader Hipólito Yrigoyen as president in 1916 and concludes it with the overthrow of another elected Radical, Fernando de la Rà�a, in 2001. Other recently published authors address historical topics that fall between the revolución de julio of 1890 and the revolución de septiembre of 1930. The former movement was meant to impose democracy and the latter to overthrow it. Paula Alonso and Matthew Karush brandish the word democracy or a synonym in their titles. Roy Hora and Lilia Ana Bertoni frame their inquiries into power and citizenship from quasi-democratic perspectives of inclusiveness and participation. Colin M. Lewis, an economic historian, employs a context of long-term development to examine the giddy rise and the disastrous fall of the democracy of the 1990s built on privatization and a convertible currency. Two books by sociologist Javier Auyero explore democracy among the poor in its contrasting present-day forms.

Several of these works explore the relationship between power and social class. Hora, for example, emphasizes the disparity between the high social status of the pampas landowners and their low political power. He questions the standard interpretation of the late nineteenth-century Argentine State as a landowning oligarchy, in which social prestige and political power became coterminous. Writing on the early years of the Radical Party in the 1890s, Alonso argues that the aspiration to democracy did not arise from a quest for something new, but as nostalgia among members of an established elite for a form of politics that died long before 1890. Democracy became a means to protect social status. Bertoni analyzes the efforts of upper class opinion makers in the 1880s and 1890s to use patriotic symbols to forge a sense of national identity in a society of immigrants. Her work broadens a subject usually viewed from the single perspective of using voting rights for political containment and social control. Karush's study documents the attempts of politicians in Rosario to use democracy to build a stronger sense of equal citizenship and to undermine and supersede class loyalties among workers. Romero's book includes discussions of grass-roots party organization. He stresses the importance of the comités under the post-1912 Radicals and of the unidades básicas under the post-1943 Peronists. Lewis replaces the old term "oligarchy" with the fashionable...