Civility and Politics in the Origins of the Argentine Nation

This is not a new book. Its appearance in English is only the latest step in a long journey that has led its Argentine author to an academic post in Paris and has already resulted in a French dissertation (1992), a French book (1999), and a Spanish translation (2000). This transatlantic evolution is interesting in itself, not least because in recent decades Argentine historians have aligned themselves more closely with British and North American scholarship. While the French influence on Argentine historiography persists in some subfields (notably late colonial social history), overall it has waned now that Oxbridge and the California universities attract so many outstanding Argentine doctoral candidates. One of the strengths of this book is that it breaks with this recent pattern even as it follows an older and well-worn path in the intellectual history of Argentina: like Esteban Echeverría, Julio Cortázar, and many others before her, Pilar González Bernaldo de Quirós has gone to Paris in search of Buenos Aires.Since the inception of this project, the issues at its core have become central to the study of nineteenth-century Latin America: nation building, the creation of a modern public sphere, and the relationship of civil society to political culture. Although González rarely refers to broader hemispheric developments, specialists on other countries will be interested in her attempt to link changes in the public life of Buenos Aires to the formation of the Argentine nation. Unlike previous studies of the crucial city-nation dynamic in nineteenth-century Argentina, this book does not analyze the problem of national unification in terms of the long struggle between Buenos Aires and the other provinces over the process of institutional organization. Instead, drawing on the sociocultural approach to political history pioneered by Maurice Agulhon, González focuses on the relationship between changing forms of “sociability” (associative practices) in the city itself and the gradual emergence of a new representation of the nation as a “community of belonging” (p. 3). Apart from the widely recognized originality of this approach in Argentine historiography, the study also offers an alternative research model for historians interested in bridging the gap between Habermasian formulations of the public sphere and Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” view of the nation.It would be hard to envision a more thorough or creative investigation of social practices in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. González uses the collective biography of some five thousand individuals to show the growing importance of public associations for elite social life and political careers, especially after the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852. She employs what she calls “experimental cartography” (p. 8) to map the declining influence of the parish neighborhood as the locus of urban community. She analyzes institutional documents to illustrate explicit and implicit connections between associative life, nation building, and electoral politics. The empirical findings alone justify the project, since they challenge a number of entrenched but impressionistic views about the impact of the Rosas era on the public sphere, the roles of specific societies like African brotherhoods and Masonic organizations in Argentine politics, the evolving cultural relationship between the city center and outlying neighborhoods, and the liberal elite’s insistence on civility as a cornerstone of national identity.By contrast, the author’s attempt to connect this rich material with a broader explanation of the origins of the Argentine nation comes across as forced. Putting aside the paradox of restricting the story of national unification to developments within Buenos Aires, González argues that the growth of urban sociability fashioned a new “representation” of the nation, but her research focuses much more on social practices (forms) than on ideas or images (contents). González also assumes from the outset that “contractual” forms of sociability lie at the heart of the modern nation. Since the liberal elite supported this view rhetorically and in practice, the author tends to treat them as the authentic national community, even when they were in exile. Not only does this give the argument a strong teleological thrust (the nation came into its own after the liberals returned in 1852), it downplays other sources of nationality (culture) while precluding other readings of the associative life of the liberals (cosmopolitanism).Unfortunately, the book’s shaky, unimaginative translation obscures the author’s provocative ideas. Small errors compound the confusion produced by a literalist approach, in which the original syntax survives regardless of its clarity in English. One typical example: “The effects of this measure where [sic] not felt immediately, firstly because the authorities had difficulties in enforcing the decree, as seen in a denunciation published in the local press of ‘gatherings of idle workers’ ” (p. 204). The lack of an index adds to the impression that quick publication took precedence over careful editing. After such a long wait, readers deserved a more accessible final product. Those whose research interests overlap with the book’s topic will likely find themselves consulting the French or Spanish version more often than this edition

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