At the end of World War II, Argentina was the most industrialized nation in Latin America, with a highly urbanized, literate, and pluralistic society. But over the past four decades, the country has suffered political and economic crises of increasing intensity that have stalled industrial growth, sharpened class conflict, and led to long periods of military rule. In this book, Paul Lewis attempts to explain how that happened. Lewis begins by describing the early development of Argentine industry, from just before the turn of the century to the eve of Juan Peron's rise to power after World War II. He discusses the emergence of the new industrialists and urban workers and delineates the relationships between those classes and the traditional agrarian elites who controlled the state. Under Peron, the country shifted from an essentially liberal strategy of development to a more corporatist approach. Whereas most writers view Peron as a pragmatist, if not opportunist, Lewis treats him as an ideologue whose views remained consistent throughout his career, and he holds Peron, along with his military colleagues, chiefly responsible for ending the evolution of Argentina's economy toward dynamic capitalism. Lewis describes the political stalemate between Peronists and anti-Peronists from 1955 to 1987 and shows how the failure of post-Peron governments to incorporate the trade union movement into the political and economic mainstream resulted in political polarization, economic stagnation, and a growing level of violence. He then recounts Peron's triumphal return to power and the subsequent inability of his government to restore order and economic vigor through a return to corporatist measures. Finally, Lewis examines the equally disappointing failures of the succeeding military regime under General Videla and the restoration of democracy under President Raul Alfonsin to revive the free market. By focusing on the organization, development, and political activities of pressure groups rather than on parties or governmental institutions, Lewis gets to the root causes of Argentina's instability and decline--what he calls "the politics of political stagnation." At the same time, he provides important information about Argentina's entrepreneurial classes and their relation to labor, government, the military, and foreign capital. The book is unique in the wealth of its detail and the depth of its analysis.

The author carefully reconstructs the crisis of Argentine political economy over the past 25 years. He examines the roles of the major protagonists in contemporary Argentine politics.

Argentina started the 20th century as one of the ten richest countries in the world. It had a per capita income much higher than that of Japan and Italy and comparable to that of France. However, it ended the century on the eve of the largest default in history. This volume examines how this dramatic change came about.

In 2001- 02, Argentina experienced one of the worst economic crises in its history. A default on government debt, which occurred against the backdrop of a prolonged recession, sent the Argentine currency and economy into a tailspin. Although the economy has since recovered from the worst, the crisis has imposed hardships on the people of Argentina, and the road back to sustained growth and stability is long. The crisis was all the more troubling in light of the fact that Argentina was widely considered a model reformer and was engaged in a succession of IMF-supported programs through much of the 1990s. This Occasional Paper examines the origins of the crisis and its evolution up to early 2002 and draws general policy lessons, both for countries’ efforts to prevent crises and for the IMF’s surveillance and use of its financial resources.

There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis. In different ways, the films selected for discussion testify to the social consequences of growing unemployment, rising crime, marginalization, and the expansion of the informal economy. Page focuses particularly on films associated with New Argentine Cinema, but she also discusses highly experimental films and genre movies that borrow from the conventions of crime thrillers, Westerns, and film noir. She analyzes films that have received wide international recognition alongside others that have rarely been shown outside Argentina. What unites all the films she examines is their attention to shifts in subjectivity provoked by political or economic conditions and events. Page emphasizes the paradoxes arising from the circulation of Argentine films within the same global economy they so often critique, and she argues that while Argentine cinema has been intent on narrating the collapse of the nation-state, it has also contributed to the nation’s reconstruction. She brings the films into dialogue with a broader range of issues in contemporary film criticism, including the role of national and transnational film studies, theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, and the relationship between private and public spheres.

This diagnostic history of Argentina's economic prostration is full of timely lessons for readers in the United States about how an irresponsible capitalist elite and cynical politicians can lead a wealthy nation to throw it all away. They say those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. Thus the importance of this book. The Agony of Argentine Capitalism: From Menem to the Kirchners is the capstone of a magisterial trilogy exploring the reasons for Argentina's shocking "reversal of development." In the early 20th century, Argentina was a rising star. It was one of the world's ten richest countries, on course to a place among the most advanced and prosperous liberal democracies in the world. Then, in 1929, Argentina fell into an economic coma from which no political or military shock treatment has been able to rouse it. The collapse of Argentina's capitalist class has been so devastating that little support remains for free enterprise or free trade. Her fate poses an intellectual challenge for First World capitalist countries. As famed economist Paul Samuelson warned: "Argentina is the pattern no modern capitalist may face without crossing himself and saying, 'There but for the grace of God....'"

This book is a political history of economic life. Through a description of the convulsions of long-term change from colony to republic in Buenos Aires, Republic of Capital explores Atlantic world transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tracing the transition from colonial Natural Law to instrumental legal understandings of property, the book shows that the developments of constitutionalism and property law were more than coincidences: the polity shaped the rituals and practices arbitrating economic justice, while the crisis of property animated the support for a centralized and executive-dominated state. In dialectical fashion, politics shaped private law while the effort to formalize the domain of property directed the course of political struggles. In studying the legal and political foundations of Argentine capitalism, the author shows how merchants and capitalists coped with massive political upheaval and how political writers and intellectuals sought to forge a model of liberal republicanism. Among the topics examined are the transformation of commercial law, the evolution of liberal political credos, and the saga of political and constitutional turmoil after the collapse of Spanish authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, statemakers, capitalists, and liberal intellectuals settled on a model of political economy that aimed for open markets but closed the polity to widespread participation. The author concludes by exploring the long-term consequences of nineteenth-century statehood for the following century's efforts to promote sustained economic growth and democratize the political arena, and argues that many of Argentina's recent problems can be traced back to the framework and foundations of Argentine statehood in the nineteenth century.