A world in crisis

Abstract

This study analyzes a sector of Argentine thought from the 1930s, represented in the essays on the national 'soul' or character. This essay writing produced a number of texts that were transformed, through critical appraisal, into classics on the country itself - such as Radiografía de la pampa by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, and Historia de una pasión argentina by Eduardo Mallea - and which emerged out of a political crisis - whose first notable effect was the 1930 coup d'état - and a more widespread disruption of the intellectual points of reference caused by the exhaustion of positivism as a paradigm among the cultural elites. The unease provoked by the national political context merged with the unease stemming from European thought concerning the crisis - the crisis of spirit, of the liberal order and of capitalism - and this amalgam fed a state of intellectual discontent that took concrete form in the essay. In an ever broader way, this genre stimulated a profound revision of liberal Argentina. Among the texts involved in this process we can highlight the essays by Martínez Estrada and Mallea, analyzed in the final part of the study.