This monograph explores a key period in Uruguayan history, the decade from the victory of the National Party (also known as the Blancos) over the ruling Colorado Party in 1958 (after almost a century in opposition) to the state's clampdown on the Left in 1968, which culminated in the 1973 coup. During that time, public intellectuals diagnosed the reasons for what they perceived as a “structural crisis” with economic, political, cultural, and moral dimensions and suggested a therapy that seemed to be paradoxical, as Ximena Espeche argues: “The country had to be Latin American in order to not be Latin American” (p. 13). In other words, Uruguay had to critically engage with the long-standing myth of its own exceptionalism, which had as its referent President José Batlle y Ordóñez's remarkable transformation of a notorious nineteenth-century trouble spot into Latin America's first welfare state between 1903 and 1915. Batllista Uruguay depicted...

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