“Régimen y oligarquía, extremos de una equivalencia”: términos e interpretaciones sobre las elites dirigentes (1916-1930) - Panel "Las presidencias radicales"

Abstract

This article explores drifts, appropriations and debates about the term “oligarchy” that were based on various conceptual
matrices and political cultures, and that offered a series of political languages between the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth century. The fact that Radicalism won the presidency in 1916 did not mean the
disappearance of the term “oligarchy” from Radical discursive devices. If anything, there was a reformulation of the presence of
“oligarchies” that hope to find new ways of blocking the process of political regeneration that Radicalism proposed. This article
analyses arguments based on “moral” concepts that described minority groups which took advantage of their dominant
position in society and politics in an arbitrary fashion. It also attempts to study the appropriations of the term “oligarchy” by several actors during the first decades of the twentieth century as they were used in the “political” sphere, mainly during the
Radical presidencies. This is essentially an operative distinction and there is evidence of cases in which politicians, journalists and intellectuals intertwined and articulated “moral” and “political” elements in their analyses of the ruling elites.