IHR Latin American Seminar: "Hyisteory"

Analyses of twenty first century politics have heavily relied on the uses of Latin American populism as a template for understanding contemporary politics across the globe. Whether it was the pink tide in the region during the first decade of the new century, or the far-right movements in the U.S. and Europe during the second one, populism has become a pervasive category of analysis. In this paper, I reflect about the normative uses of history in the construction of analytical categories for the understanding of mass politics. I trace elites’ concerns about popular participation and the emphasis on comparative studies as a pivotal component of modernization theories in the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly, I explore how Argentine Peronism became a template for the analysis of modern mass politics, from the 1940s to these days. And I call for a discussion about intellectual numbness and normative uses of history in order to develop new and more insightful analytical categories.