Jorge A. Nallim. Transformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930-1955

Liberalism is a subject that has occupied the attention of much of the new historical scholarship on Latin America. Earlier interpretations viewed liberalism's policies as being in conflict with the values of the popular classes, especially the peasantry. The recent cultural turn has posited something very different: a popular liberalism that embraced, in its historical moment, a revolutionary idea that allowed its proponents to protect established folkways, especially rights to land, and in the process contribute to state formation. Jorge A. Nállim argues that liberalism in Argentina was never “popular” in the way historians such as Florencia Mallon, Guy Thomson, and others have argued was the case in Mexico. On the contrary, liberalism in Argentina was associated with the centralizing, secular objectives of the porteño elite, the so-called unitarios, who were fiercely resisted by the country's rural classes led by local caudillos, including the most famous, fiercest caudillo of them all, Facundo Quiroga. Nállim might well have ventured that the case for a popular liberalism in Mexico itself has to be qualified, confined to very peculiar regional contexts and in competition and conflict with something at least as important: a popular conservatism in defense of patronage, rights to land, religion, and hostile to the at times rabid anticlericalism of Mexican liberalism. In Argentina's case, what Nállim does say is undoubtedly true. There is barely a trace of the popular liberalism that historians have discovered in Mexico.

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