Admitting that the likely failures will vastly outnumber the successes, writing and research which will strive for general principles and broad, ambitious perspectives is essential. There is nothing more ultimately pernicious to our discipline than its confinement to the intellectually vapid cult of the arcane. The difficulty, however, with the alternative is that most often the claim it launches for itself in the field of theory rarely stands in consonance with what is known of a phenomenon empirically. Most commonly in endeavors of this sort, information is pruned and manipulated according to easily recognizable strategems, and the final result amounts to little more than a Descartian conceit.
Reflections like this flow inexorably from Tulio Eduardo Ortiz’ book. Compared with past historical writing in Argentina, which if it sometimes lacked other qualities was at least engagé, it is highly contemplative and also, to avoid saying “deterministic” which here would evoke misleading associations, necessitarian. For this is an attempt to transpose not Marx but the safer figure of Arnold Toynbee to the republic’s affairs. It asserts the existence of “long cycles” in Argentina’s history which share the features of those expounded by Toynbee in his Study of History. Approximately half the book is an outline exegesis of Toynbee’s laws for the rise and decline of civilizations: among them the “yin” and the “yang” or cycles of quietude and advance; the influence of external challenge in molding internal social advance; the creative elites; the concept of political mimesis; military saviors during phases of disintegration; and others—all this summarized between pages 85 and 88. Beyond Toynbee, Ortiz also invokes the authority of other luminaries, Ortega y Gasset, Kondratieff, and Spengler to show what was said of civilizations is also true of nation states, and that the cycles which for Toynbee had a duration of several millenia can be deflated in Argentina’s case to ones of a mere sixty years. The second half of the book is an attempt to demonstrate these contentions, surveying aspects of the republic’s history.
The notion of long cycles in Latin American history is an intriguing one and deserves to be pursued. Equally Toynbee and the others should be read by students of history and can be a source of great inspiration to them; Kondratieff in particular has been very much in vogue in some circles during years past. On this occasion, however, idea and praxis have been conflated in a quite inadmissible fashion. The author’s discussion of Toynbee amounts to little more than an enthusiastic undergraduate essay. His attempt at historical analysis groans with the most arbitrary and tendentious manipulations of the data. His periodization of Argentina’s history is open to endless questioning of the most elementary kind. Does its history begin in 1760, as he asserts? Can it then be reduced to four alternating sixty-year cycles of advance and disintegration (that is, advance 1760-1820; decline 1820-1880; advance 1880-1940; decline 1940-2000?—herein the work’s necessitarian quality)? Or, on what warrant are Rosas and Yrigoyen saviors, and others from Hemandarias to Perón not? On occasion the author reveals a susceptibility to rather empty tautology, such as the assertion (p. 175) that “social collapse follows the disjunction of social forces and institutions.” In sum he has fallen prey to two rather serious difficulties—an ingenuous acquaintance with Toynbee and a half-digested schooling in the history of his own land. It may be reassuring that here at least Clio has ceased, on the surface, to be the paramour of dictator or demagogue. Nevertheless the passive resignation of Ortiz’ main thesis says little of the welfare of young intellectuals in the land whence it springs. At root it is an opaque, subconscious commentary not on things as they were, but as they presently are.
