Republic and the Ghost of Personal Power: The Vice or Virtue of the Latin American Republican Tradition? Projections of Sarmiento and Alberdi?s Republicanism in the Current Personalization of Argentine Politics

GABRIELA RODRIGUEZ

Santiago de Chile, República de Chile

Congreso; XXI IPSA World Congress of Political Science. Global Discontent? Dilemmas of Change?; 2009

International Political Science Association

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between republic and personal power. The personalization of politics appears to be a phenomenon associated with mass media, globalization, and even regionalization, all processes that appear to need centralized instances of decision-making and individual accountability in leaders or personal referents more than collective deliberation. However, analyzing the relationship between republicanism and personal power requires understanding the meanings and the politics of representations that were put in practice during different moments in the history of this tradition. Therefore this paper puts forward an approach on two levels.First, it is necessary to revisit the republican tradition, especially the classics of political thinking, which posed two conceptions at the very the beginning of modern age, two visions which are sometimes opposed to and at other times complement the republic. One is to see the republic as a way of life, the other to think of it as a political regime. It is in this latter case that the conceptual connection between republic and monarchy reappears not only as an asymmetric contrary relationship in the model of the Roman tradition but also as a complementary link in the process of emergence and consolidation of the national state.Secondly, we will observe the form in which this dilemma returns in the formation of the Latin American states, particularly in constitutional moments. As for the Argentine Generation of 1837, debates about the relationship between democracy and republic as well as between the institutional and symbolic space that were given to personal power in this configuration let us illuminate the internal tensions of a political discourse and project that is acritically identified with liberalism. Therefore Alberdi?s idea of the president as a neutral power and Sarmiento?s view of the republican prince both constitute a repertory of political representations that let us establish the impact of personal power in Argentine politics in a historical perspective.(El abstract y el título son transcritpos en inglés porque así fue publicado en el Programa y las actas del Congreso. La ponencia en español porque así se presentó en el congreso como parte del comité local)