Los antecedentes constitucionales argentinos (La historia de la constitución)

This is a textbook for students of early Argentine constitutional history. In less than 200 pages, the author describes the successive institutions of government from the revolution of May, 1810, to the Constitution of 1853. There is some effort to place these descriptions in social-economic context, principally through references to other secondary sources, but the work is mainly valuable as a textual analysis of the various laws and constitutions. The last 130 pages of the book are devoted to an exhaustive Appendix, including the full texts of the principal organic laws from the Acta del Cabildo de Buenos Aires of May 25, 1810, to the present amended version of the Constitution of 1853. (Perón’s 1949 Constitution is omitted. A non-political justification for the omission is that the work stops with the adoption of the Constitution of 1853; amendments to that document are included simply to round out the presentation.) Of particular interest is Chapter IX, on the origins of the provincial governments and on their earliest (pre-1825) constitutions. The author’s footnotes include many references to the literature of Argentine political history.