Origins of Argentina's Revolution of the Right (Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development)

The Origins of Argentina's Revolution of the Right traces the ideological roots and political impact of Argentine right-wing nationalism as it developed in the 1930s and 1940s. In this spirited book, Alberto Spektorowski focuses on the attempt by a new brand of nonconformist intellectuals to shift the concept of Argentine nationalism from its liberal incarnation to an integralist-populist one and, simultaneously, to change Argentina's path of development from liberalism to a "third road" of economic autarky. Spektorowski maintains that the "third road" developed in 1930s Argentina through the juxtaposition of two apparently opposing types of anti-liberal ideological currents: a right-wing authoritarian current reliant upon counterrevolutionary European sources, and an anti-imperialist, populist current. He shows that both of these wings rejected liberal institutions, bourgeois society, cosmopolitanism, and old-type conservatism, and became profoundly anti-imperialist. Both defended a "pro-Axis" neutrality during World War II, and both set the ideological stage for Argentina's sociopolitical shift of the 1940s. Spektorowski concludes that both of these currents produced a single nationalist ideology that became the intellectual framework in which the "repertoire" of political values of the 1943 military regime and Peronism was subsequently elaborated.