Argentinean popular nationalism: a reaction to the Civilizadores' liberal project?

This article studies the political ideas of popular nationalism in Argentina as articulated by the influential publicist Arturo Jauretche. Nationalists in Argentina typically argued that vernacular liberals such as Alberdi, Sarmiento, Echeverria and Mitre imposed institutions modelled on foreign examples and aimed to re-craft society to make it fit these institutions. I argue that despite their condemnation of the so-called liberal civilizadores, Jauretche and some other nationalists shared with them an important theoretical commitment. More specifically, it is their common endorsement of what I call 'social emanativism' that helps explain the puzzling lack of interest on the part of popular nationalists in reforming the institutions they denounced as products of liberal imposition.