The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism.

• Author: Ramirez, Miguel D.

By Paul H. Lewis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Pp. xviii, 573. $49.95.

The central message of this long, and at times tedious, book is that the economic crisis afflicting Argentina is the product of a corporativist system that, over the years, has burdened the economy with excessive regulations, as well as misguided and self-serving policies. The author, a political scientists by background, attributes Argentina's seemingly permanent economic and political stalemate to the rejection of economic liberalism (in the nineteenth century sense) and the adoption of populist policies, especially with the rise to power of the charismatic and nationalist leader Juan Domingo Peron in 1943. He believes that the huge and interventionist Argentine state is an extreme example of what has ". . . emerged gradually almost everywhere in the world, but particularly in the industrial and semiindustrial West" [p. 494]. This book is essentially written for non-specialists given its relatively low economic content; it does assume, however, some degree of familiarity with Argentine economic and political history.

In addition to an introductory chapter, the book is comprised of twenty chapters distributed among four major parts that trace Argentina's economic and political evolution from 1910 to 1987. In the introductory chapter, Lewis outlines and discusses five major hypotheses that purport to explain Argentina's economic stagnation and social malaise. They are ". . . (1) the traditional cattle-raising and export merchant oligarchy's refusal to accept modern social and political change; (2) the military's increasing interference in politics, which exacerbates instability rather than avoids it; (3) the exploitation of Argentina by foreign capital; [and] (4) the personal machinations of one man, Juan Domingo Peron, who was Argentina's president from 1946 to 1995 and continued to influence its politics for two decades after that . . ." [p. 1]. The book is therefore concerned with testing the veracity of each of these hypotheses in light of the historical material presented in its four major parts.

Part I examines the emergence of Argentine industrial capitalism during the period beginning in 1910 and ending on the eve of World War II. Employing a Rostowian framework of analysis, the main theme of this part of the book is that the preconditions for growth and development along capitalist lines were firmly established in Argentina at the turn of the century. Lewis points out, correctly, in chapters 2 and 3 that Argentina possessed a small, but dynamic class of entrepreneurs that, without much help from the government, was responsible for a dramatic rise in industrial operations and investments between 1895 and 1913. Lewis attributes the rapid rate of industrial growth to the country's agricultural boom led, in turn, by forward-looking estancieros (landholders). In fact...