The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies by Sebastián Carassai (review)

In the 1970s, Argentina witnessed guerrilla movements, military authoritarianism, and state terror. While these years of la violencia have been the subject of a burgeoning scholarship, most works have focused on politicized actors, whether radicalized youths, revolutionaries or intellectual elites, or the perpetrators and victims of state violence. The Argentine Silent Majority breaks new ground by exploring a largely ignored collectivity: middle-class non-activists. Inspired by a Bourdieusian approach to middle-class formation, the book explores how dynamics of social differentiation and cultural distinction informed perceptions of politics and violence found among the less politicized middle-class sectors. The methodological approach combines more than 200 retrospective interviews with people from three different geographical sites (the Argentinean capital, a provincial capital, and a small town) with the study of cultural goods consumed by middle-class sectors, most importantly print media, advertising, and films.

Setting up the historical context, chapter 1 shows that from the 1950s to the 1970s, identifying as middle class in Argentina meant being anti-Peronist. Most middle-class non-activists portrayed the first Peronist government (1946–1955) as fascist, authoritarian, corrupt, and uncivilized, and against this characterization they asserted their own identity as autonomous and freethinking, and thus "enlightened" subjects. This perception was highly consequential for their understanding of political violence in Argentina. As detailed in chapters 2 and 3, Argentine middle-class sectors were largely sympathetic toward the student protests that took place during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But this solidarity was based not on political ideology but on the idea of the university as a space of moderation and rationality, two key characteristics of being middle class. Similarly, guerrilla struggle was framed as an immature, juvenile, and ultimately irrational practice that was incompatible with middle-class values.

Chapter 4 moves on to explore middle-class perceptions of the military coup in 1976 and the subsequent state terrorism—the systematic use of kidnappings, assassinations, and forced disappearances. The dominant image of the military regime was one of bringing order and reducing the violence associated with the preceding civilian government of Isabel Perón (1973–1976). This perception has drastically changed over the past four decades. When remembering el Proceso and their own role in it, middle-class interviewees describe everything that could be seen as morally wrong today in an impersonal mode (e.g., "one supported the coup"), whereas memories associated with bravery or moral conviction were stated in a personal mode (e.g., "I challenged an armed police officer").

The fascinating chapter 5 links the omnipresence of violence in everyday life to account for middle-class quiescence with state terror: "If killing a person on camera [in a television advertisement] to sell candy was an act that the company was not afraid of being associated with, this is … because murder was an act that was socially trivialized, because violence had become banal" (244). Seen in this perspective, the naturalization of violence at least partially explains middle-class acceptance of the military regime's state terror.

A particular strength of The Argentine Silent Majority is its empirical richness and the book's innovative methodological approach to unpacking prevailing middle-class ideologies. The interviews certainly provide a fascinating entry point into these issues, but I was particularly impressed by Carassai's use of diverse cultural goods such as public opinion surveys, advertisement, films, and press to explore the mental world of middle-class sectors. In fact, the book manages to weave together these different sources into a coherent and largely persuasive narrative. Moreover, the book manages to carefully blend theory into its analysis. Whether Bourdieu's class analysis, Adorno's work on the cultural industry, or Heidegger's distinction between "I" and "one"—The Argentine Silent Majority draws on a variety of theoretical approaches to make sense of the empirical materials.

My main concern about Carassai's approach is that he...