This book aims to shed light on universal questions regarding the construction and exercise of political power, on the relationship between the many and the few (the elite and the people), through the exploration of the particular world of the city of Buenos Aires in the 1860s and 1870s. The text focuses on the many (rather than the few) and the avenues they ventured upon when they chose to participate in the public realm. Sábato studied two of these avenues that are the twin pillars of the book: participation in elections, and the world of newspapers and demonstrations that constructed the public sphere—that Habermasian space of mediation between civil society and the state.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 offers a landscape of the city, its streets and buildings, its population (with its peculiar mixing of natives and immigrants), a short overview of its political history, as...
