This book is a welcome addition to the relatively scant literature on Argentine intellectual history. It focuses on five well-known figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely, Miguel Cané, José María Ramos Mejía, Carlos Octavio Bunge, Ernesto Quesada, and José Ingenieros. Through an examination of their lives and thoughts, it aims to show the various ways in which they tried to analyze the past, present, and future of their fast-changing nation, undergoing a remarkable transformation from an economically backward and unruly state to Latin America’s most advanced and wealthiest country by the beginning of the twentieth century.
All five had some reservations about the pace and direction of change. Cané, for example, like many of his peers, feared the materialist striving that seemed to dominate the era, joining a growing critique of the liberal “modernization” model reflected in José Enrique Rodo’s Ariel. This included, as with...
