The crisis of liberalism and the formation of exceptional regulations (Sonderordnungen) in Argentina in the 20th century
Research Project
The topic of diversity, coming mainly from the social and cultural sciences, has permeated legal discourse in Latin America. In this context, the general principle of “equality,” a pillar of the structural bases of modern Continental law, has eroded. In its place, a new scheme more attentive to the demand for justice, which privileges diversity as a founding element of the social order, has begun to exercise greater influence. From the historical-legal perspective, equality and diversity were often in tension with one another during the development of the juridical disciplines and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This tension, often obscured, has been reinvigorated and made more visible when cast in the new light of contemporary discourses of diversity.
The theoretical framework that structures the Cross-cutting issue "Law and Diversity – Perspectives from Legal History" allows us to better understand the complexities of the history of the Latin American juridical tradition and enables us to avoid repeating the anachronisms and mystifications which plagued the formation of legal disciplines as a consequence of intrinsic “scientific developments”.
My main contribution to this research collaboration is an investigation of the adjustment tools that jurists developed when faced with the legitimization crisis of the formal equality paradigm of the liberal model in Argentina. The research is composed of three elements. The first one is the analysis of the crisis of law that, since the 1930s, enabled the reception of anti-liberal and corporate legal theories, which, following the query for justice, sought to reorganize the tension between equality and diversity. The second is to analyze the conceptual development of the disciplines of public law that produce a diversity of treatment (Constitutional law, Labor law, Administrative Law, Social Security Law, etc.) which, without intending to disrupt the paradigm of equality, would produce new juridical subjectivities. Finally, it seeks to investigate the extension of the concept of "State" in Argentine legal thought, and its narrative use as a cohesive element of a corporate project that sought to provide "order" to the diverse members of a complex society in the face of the crisis of legitimacy of the formal-liberal egalitarian model.