Among the barbarians: for a history of the reception of ideas in Argentina (1912-1955)

Abstract

Peer-reviewed article

As happened in many countries considered "peripheral" within the circuit of knowledge circulation, this article highlights the so-called problem of 'reception of ideas', which has had an enormous importance in Argentine cultural history. In this regard, these pages propose a periodization of the different theoretical recognitions that this problem has received; while they also suggest that it was a methodological problem that has remained both outside the historiographic revisions of Argentine history and the philosophical historiography itself. In a second moment, the present text argues that the problem becomes explicit in the heat of the academic professionalization of philosophy and history as disciplines. The so-called “anti-positivist reaction” also involved a question about how to historicize the country's cultural production. This question was embodied in a series of historiographic works by philosophy professors. According to the proposed reading, it was the main referents of philosophy university departments who addressed the problem of how to historicize the European thought in Argentine history and, therefore, also how to think about the reception of ideas. We pointed out the different theoretical schemes under which it was suggested to think about this problem ―the philosophical sociology of José Ingenieros, the Crocean axiology of Alejandro Korn, the “empirical axiology” of Coriolano Alberini, the undeveloped "idealistic sociology" of Carlos Cossio― and the proposed ways to escape from this problem ―the philosophical essay on the national being, the internalist readings or the election ofa theoretical philosophy disconnected from concrete political contexts. Therefore, it was not a problem tackled by the first generations of professional historians at least until the stabilisation of José Luis Romero's historiographic project from 1945 onwards. In relation to this hypothesis, the third section examines two ways in which the philosophical field tried to escape out of this problem. From this moment on, the identitarian philosophical essay and the internalist historiographic readings seem to impose themselves and these two kinds of texts that prevail finally during the following decades.

Received 28/06/2019

Acepted 12/8/2019