Between Revolution and the Ballot Box: The Origins of the Argentine Radical Party (review)

In the past decade and a half, political history has reemerged as a crucial topic in Argentine historiography. The focus and tools are different than they had been previously, leading to new understanding of what politics was really like. Paula Alonso's book is an extremely important contribution to this exciting trend. When we add her work to that of Hilda Sábato, particularly La política en las calles (1998), our understanding of the nature of politics in Buenos Aires in the second half of the nineteenth century has been completely transformed. It has become immensely more complex and nuanced, no longer just imposed by an elite.

The core of Alonso's study, the early years of the Radical Party from the upheavals in 1890 that led to its founding to its temporary dissolution in 1898, is of critical importance. Not only has the Radical Party continued to play a crucial role in Argentine politics, but its traditions and mythology remain important. It is possible to argue that these have come to dominate much of the political discourse of Argentina. The Peronists claim to have picked up the dropped banner of Hipólito Yrigoyen.

Until now the dominant picture of the Radical Party has been that of a modernizing party that had a particular appeal to the newly rising middle class, though little real attention has been paid to the initial period of the party. It was just assumed that its later tactics, such as abstention from elections, were followed from the very beginning. The picture that Alonso paints for her readers is a very different one indeed, and it is extremely convincing. She examines the party's goals and tactics through looking at relationships of the key personalities involved, as well as their discourse. In a prose that is nicely free from the jargon that hurts so much of the use of discourse, we see that the early history of the Radical Party is very different than it has usually been pictured. The party, dominated by elites, can be described as backward looking, in that it was trying to return to the more competitive and less centralized politics of the 1860s and 1870s. The Radical Party did not seem to be particularly interested in creating a more modern political system and its introduction of such devices as conventions was shared with other parties. What seemed to set the Radicals apart from the other challengers to the dominant PAN (Partido Autonomista Nacional) was their continual endorsement of the idea of using violence to achieve power and their unwillingness to form alliances with other political forces. One sees emerging very early among the Radicals a political style, which was not without precedent, but which was to have a major impact on the nature of politics, which was that only they are acceptable and no one else.

The Radicals in this early period did not follow their famous electoral strategy of abstention, but they competed in elections with some success in both the capital and the Province of Buenos Aires. However, the party collapsed and in 1897 dissolved after the suicide of its first leader, Leandro Alem, and quarrels between other important figures over strategy and power. Alonso is careful to stress that her arguments cover only this first period but as she points out, this epoch is crucial in establishing the mystique of Radicalism.

The only real weakness of the book is the lack of attention to the regions away from Buenos Aires (city and province) but that is more than overshadowed by the book's many strengths. The reader also longs for the author to carry the analysis through at least the beginning of the rebuilding of the party by Yrigoyen. This complaint is unfair and just demonstrates the...