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The Many and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-4-828

1527-1900

Paula Alonso,

Argentine historical studies

This book aims to shed light on universal questions regarding the construction and exercise of political power, on the relationship between the many and the few (the elite and the people), through the exploration of the particular world of the city of Buenos Aires in the 1860s and 1870s. The text focuses on the many (rather than the few) and the avenues they ventured upon when they chose to participate in the public realm. Sábato studied two of these avenues that are the twin pillars of the book: participation in elections, and the world of newspapers and demonstrations that constructed the public sphere—that Habermasian space of mediation between civil society and the state.The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 offers a landscape of the city, its streets and buildings, its population (with its peculiar mixing of natives and immigrants), a short overview of its political history, as well as a first introduction to two key pieces of the culture of mobilization in Buenos Aires: associations (mutual aids, by trade, and by nationality); and the press. Part 2 is devoted to elections. The analysis takes off from a point that is common knowledge: few people voted even though at the time all Argentine males over 17 years old could if they wanted to. Discarding antiquated notions that the people were kept out of the polls by the privileged few who restricted the right to vote to themselves through force and fraud, Sábato turns upside-down old questions regarding elections. Instead of asking why the people did not attend the polls, she asks why some men voted, and instead of dismissing the relevance of elections because they were fraudulent and often violent, she assesses their role in the political and institutional system of the time.Sábato addresses these issues by focusing on the two main protagonists of these events, the electorate and the electoral machines. The analysis of the former leads to the latter, as after exploring from different angles the characteristics of the voting population and analyzing the election days, she concludes that those who cast their votes were mostly railway workers, peons from the customhouse, sailors who worked for the port authority, and cart drivers, while men of social position did not attend the polls. Attention, therefore, needs to be turned to the nature of the elections and how these groups of men were led to participate. Here the picture becomes less than flattering as, far from being the exercise of free individual citizens in command of their political rights, voting was a collective event, with groups of men recruited and organized beforehand by local political machines. Voting, the author concludes, was the game played by the political parties and as such, “[i]t had little to do with the rest of the society and, therefore, fell between the political and the social realms” (p. 113). However, it was not an insignificant game since it provided a relatively peaceful and increasingly accepted way of electing representatives.Most residents of Buenos Aires preferred other ways of political participation, and these forms are the subject of part 3. With delightful detail, Sábato reconstructs the world of the mobilizations that provided the presence of “the people” in the streets. These were channeled through or organized by countless associations of different kinds that flourished in Buenos Aires during these decades of “associative fervor,” aided by the outburst of newspapers and pamphlets during these years. And while the existence of these associations has been researched in the past, in the hands of Sábato they acquire entirely new meaning. The demonstrations, she argues, originated entirely in the institutions of civil society, they exhibited similar patterns of organization, and they were formed by large numbers of residents of different nationalities and occupational backgrounds, with affiliations to a wide range of associations. Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but some turned violent (such as the burning down of a Jesuit college), and most were presented as concerning the people as a whole, though some expressed the demands of specific social sectors. The picture that results from these descriptions is highly positive. Demonstrations produced an intense public life beyond the factional strife, and notwithstanding the social, ethnic, gender and cultural differences among of the participants, these acts became “the expression of the common will of the people,” “a single public unified behind a cause” (p. 168).The two pillars of the book are carefully researched, presented, and analyzed. At times, however, some questions remained unanswered. In the sections on elections, for example, Sábato argues that the electorate was composed of a small number of people, a “relatively stable body of participants, which did not increase through time” (p. 113), that people were mostly indifferent to elections but at times the contests were agitated and vibrant, and that turnout ranged between one to six thousand men (chap. 3). There is no explanation, however, of what distinguished an exciting election from a boring one (contested or uncontested?), a participatory from a nonparticipatory contest (successful and unsuccessful electoral machinery? the campaign? the issues involved?), nor whether national elections were different from provincial ones, nor if the electoral machines operated in the same way when smaller or larger numbers of people were involved. Some of these questions spring from the author’s decision to organize the book thematically rather than chronologically. And while this is the right choice, it is not without costs. The problem is that we cannot place these elections and mobilizations in their context, that we are deprived of any account of how they evolved and mutated over time, from the birth of the republic to its eclipse—an eclipse that is mentioned but not explained.More importantly, very few bridges are built between the two pillars of the book. At times we see Adolfo Alsina and Bartolomé Mitre “cultivating their civic image” (p. 178), and political clubs increasingly involved in the civic mobilizations. Mostly the connections between these two pillars emerge by contrast: violent elections are counterpoised against peaceful demonstrations, factional party strife against the unanimity of the collective action, the diversity of those involved in the demonstrations against the singularity of those who cast their votes, the wholeness of a cause against the particular interests of party contest. And while these contrasts have interesting analytical implications, they were historically part of the same republican world in which many actors (leading political figures, associations, journalists, and newspapers) had roles in both plays. Years later, when politicians of the status of Leandro Alem or Carlos Pellegrini became nostalgic for this lost republican city, their recollections of what constituted this world were the electoral (and often violent) battles between the contesting political parties rather than the civic mobilizations or the associative fervor of those days.That these issues can be raised here is only possible because The Many and the Few is one of the most important works on urban politics in Buenos Aires published of late. It is the result of a ten-year enterprise and the arguments it presents have evolved, mutated, and, in some cases, changed altogether over this decade. This project has created in its path to maturity innovative approaches and stimulating discussions among an increasing group of historians working on Argentine politics and beyond. To appreciate the book’s relevance one has only to remember that not long ago, historians were condescending to that electoral world that they failed to understand and were totally indifferent to the political meaning of associations and the press in the making of public opinion. Historians of Latin America have been following this work with close attention. We can only hope that this much-merited translation into English will benefit those for whom language has been a barrier. After all, as the author states in the introduction, the book deals with universal questions. On election day everywhere, some remain indifferent, others cast their votes as conscientious individuals exercising their political rights, while others do it as part of a group, as members of a party, a class, an interest group. More and more, people seek representation of their interests and take public action on the sidelines of political parties, preferring other mechanisms of mediation with the state. The relationships between the many and the few, so well explored here by Sábato, transcends the particular setting of this fine book.