Abstract

Many of the policies that shaped Argentinean politics and society in the second half of the nineteenth century, most notably the project behind the 1853 constitution and its proposed immigration policies, can be traced to lawyer, publicist and political thinker Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-84). In this article I chart the modifications in the way Alberdi appropriates French Doctrinaire thought. I argue that while in the young Alberdi we see a strong emphasis on the historicist element of Doctrinarism, on later stages Alberdi reduces Doctrinaire thought to its central sociological thesis. It is this impoverished version of French Doctrinaire thought conjoined with a number of negative appraisals about the Argentinean population, which led eventually to his proposal to rely on demographic engineering as a means for infusing life into Argentina's democratic constitution