The struggles that rent Argentina for much of the nineteenth century revolved around several important issues. They ranged from the material, such as the distribution of collected revenues, to the political, including the allocation of constitutional privileges among the provinces, to the spiritual, such as the nature and expression of Argentine culture. Traditional historiography has lent a dyadic, inimical quality to these debates. Federalists (especially Juan Manuel de Rosas, their political icon) battled with Unitarians with the goal of winner take all. In the end, and even after the military defeat of the most ardent Unitarians in Buenos Aires, the forces of international liberalism won out over the more nationalistic, creole-oriented partisans.
More recent literature, by contrast, has pointed to the similarities found on both sides, underneath their considerably different stylistic surfaces. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Mark D. Szuchman, Jonathan C. Brown, Richard Goldman, and Ricardo Salvatore, among other scholars, have noted the continuities underlying the shifts from Unitarian periods to federalist eras and back, and the similar practices of all parties.
Jorge Myers’ book contributes to this more recent literature by focusing on the instrumental use of discourse by the political protagonists and ideological advocates. Myers targets the republican content of the discourse employed by Rosas and his supporters. Despite the language of implacable enmity Rosas used against his adversaries, the Rosista vision of the nation was fundamentally rooted in a classical, Graeco-Roman view of republicanism, enhanced with nineteenth-century updates from Europe and the United States but adapted to the agrarian conditions of life and production in Argentina.
Two basic hypotheses drive Myers’ study: that the discourse of the Rosas regime was “essentially republican,” and that the relationship between the discourse and the practice contained more complexity than normally assumed. The second point is not novel; others, beginning with Domingo Sarmiento, have long recognized the highly nuanced nature of nineteenth-century authoritarianism. In support of his first point, however, Myers highlights an angle not refracted before: that, contrary to generally held belief, a great deal of rhetoric from the liberal Rivadavian era was employed by Rosistas all of stripes, including El Restaurador himself.
The work consists of two parts. The first analyzes the different ways the republican rhetoric was employed in the institutional structures of government, the public sphere of civil society, the agrarian community, and other areas. The second part is devoted to transcriptions of documents, speeches, and newspaper articles by important figures of the Rosas era, including the propagandists Pedro de Angelis and Agustín Wright, as well as Rosas himself. This work makes an important contribution to the study of political discourse. It also underscores the need for analyzing other facets of the subject: the apparent void between rhetoric and practice; the lasting value of ideals, even if their implementation appears awkward or far removed from their original intent; and the Januslike nature of political society in the process of nationbuilding during the nineteenth century.
