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

Review by: Pablo Piccato

Social History, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May, 2004), pp. 245-246
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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May 2004 Reviews 245

core argument. BecomingCampesinosadvances and refines the New Cultural History of post-
revolutionary Mexico, and the book is exceptional in its clarity. It takes on a daunting array of
slippery subjects in a disarmingly straightforward manner without lapsing into jargon. Boyer
writes about Mexico's poor empathetically without ever being sanctimonious or patronizing.
The illustrations add much; my favourite is the portrait of Cardenas parleying with charroand
Catholic rebel Sim6n Cortes. For all these reasons, it would be a smart choice for the
undergraduate and graduate classroom. This book deserves to be read not just by those of us
who study post-revolutionary Mexico, but also by scholars of the rest of the world who are
curious as to how states (revolutionary and otherwise) and peasants must ultimately come to
terms.
Ben Fallaw
Colby College,Maine

Hilda Sabato, The Many and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires
(2001), 2IO (Stanford University Press, Stanford, $55.oo00,paperback $24.95).
This book tackles a central contradiction in the construction of a liberal polity in Argentina
during the second half of the nineteenth century: although, according to the law, suffrage was
universal, very few people voted in practice, and governments only enjoyed a precarious
legitimacy. Coming out of both Juan Manuel de Rosas's dictatorial power in Buenos Aires and
a long-drawn-out national dispute about the city's role in the newly unified country, republican
institutions in Buenos Aires seemed unable to represent a society characterized by the massive
arrival of immigrants and new labour relations. According to Hilda Sabato, in the I86os and
I870s Buenos Aires was a city in transition toward modernity - characterized in the book as
an unambiguous separation between civil society and the state.The elections, press debates and
meetings examined in The Many and the Few (which was originally published in Spanish in
1998) show how the process of political modernization was fraught with tensions between the
modern ideal of a rational and egalitarian public sphere and the violent and clientelistic methods
of political mobilization used by the main political factions.
The author's focus on the public sphere is part of a growing body of historiography on Latin
America that intends to revise political narratives from the perspective of a comprehensive
model of political change outlined by Jiirgen Habermas. Although Sabato's adherence to
Habermas's model is not (nor should it be) the main criterion to measure her contribution,
The Many and the Few (along with recent works by Sarah Chambers, Carlos Forment and Elias
Jose Palti, to name only three scholars of nineteenth-century Latin American history), presents
a research proposal that should have positive echoes in the discipline into the next years.
The first merit of Sabato's approach is the grounding of political practices in an historical
and spatial analysis of the city of Buenos Aires. The open streets and plazas of the capital and
main port in the country contained a highly literate and mobile population, predominantly
male and foreign, engaged in waged, unskilled work. These inhabitants constructed a 'dense
network' (32) of modern, voluntary associations that represented, yet went beyond, the diverse
national cultural identities converging in the city.The book draws interesting conclusions from
this evidence and presents an implicit conversation with the classic studies by Jose Luis Romero
and Angel Rama of the region's urban culture. One of those conclusions further stresses the
paradoxical nature of the Argentinean case: the 'associative fervour' of the period cannot be

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246 Social History VOL. 29 : NO. 2

explained in terms of class difference, but rather as an attempt to forge new and strong
connections across class lines.
These associations and spaces made possible the political mobilization that constitutes the
central object of Sabato's interest. She describes elections as ritualized events where victory was
not necessarily the result of the greater number of votes cast for one of the candidates but more
often was the outcome of the ability of the candidate's supporters to take control over the public
spaces where balloting took place. Very few indeed were the votes cast, as success was based
more on the coherence of the collective actions of men mobilized by patronage and loyalty
than on representation or ideology. Although these exclusively male events were quite bloody,
Sibato argues that they served to formalize violence and limit its cost (62). In this regard, she
contrasts elections with the sporadic rebellions which punctuated the period but that were
already less destructive than political violence in the era following independence. However,
Sibato also shows that membership of militia bodies was a requirement for voters (87). Beyond
a formality, one might add, this requisite seemed to associate electoral participation with the
masculine pride in the use of arms embraced by men of all classes in joining militias, a pride
also expressed in the right to invoke the 'revolution' to justify political rebellions (97).
Clientelistic, violent, state-sponsored elections hardly seem conducive to the creation of a
rational, egalitarian and peaceful public sphere, as proposed by Habermas. However, Sabato
argues that they did in fact promote this evolution because they at least initiated a public
discussion about leadership (92-3). Her analysis of meetings and other collective actions is more
compelling in terms of the construction of a public sphere. She describes and, in chapter 8,
closely analyses the behaviour and membership of demonstrations where women and immi-
grants played a more visible role than they did in elections, thus opening up public debates
about a range of themes. Rather than examining the substantive issues that prompted these
demonstrations at length, Sibato describes the 'culture of mobilization' (168) that made them
possible and prompted the respect of political elites for the popular right to demonstrate in the
city's streets. From the perspective of their participants, meetings were more enjoyable and
probably more effective than elections.They incarnated the unanimous opinion of'the people'
and thus provided the best tools for civil society to interact with the state (171).
In identifying the unanimity of public opinion with its influence, Sibato's assessment of the
public sphere of Buenos Aires stresses its function as a space of mediation between civil society
and the state. As a consequence, other aspects of the Habermasian idea of the public sphere are
less central to her analysis: the contents and rules of public debates themselves; the elite
sociability and rational discussion that have the leading role in historical accounts of the public
sphere centred in western Europe; and the tensions between public and private realms in the
ascent of the bourgeoisie. But these are issues of emphasis rather than substance, as the book
offers useful pointers for further research, such as its study of the press in its double function
of political actor and space of discussion. This is not so much an objection to this book as a
testimony to the possibilities it opens for students of politics in the modern period in Latin
America. Sibato has been successful in two very important aspects of any valuable historio-
graphical work: in engaging a stimulating body of theory with rich hypotheses, on the one
hand, and, on the other, in presenting a body of evidence that can stimulate debate as well as
further research.
Pablo Piccato
Columbia University

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