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Santa Fe) between 1912 and 1930. As the book's title
suggests, Karush argues that after the passing of the
1912 electoral law, which made universal suffrage
secret and compulsory, the political elite pursued a
hegemonic project that aimed to transform workers
into classless citizens. In Rosario, however, politicians
encountered a working class with a strong identity that
refused to be transformed. The failure of the elite's
hegemonic project had significant consequences: workers were pushed away from party politics and the elite,
disenchanted with democracy, supported the 1930
military coup. For Karush, the consolidated identity of
the working class in Rosario became, therefore, an
insoluble obstacle in a political system based on a
nonpluralist vision of democracy that had its roots in
the very foundation of Argentina.
The book is divided into six chapters through which
the main argument, presented in the introduction,
chronologically unfolds. Chapter one presents the
founding visions of the country's nonpluralistic democracy drawn from the discoursen of Juan Bautista
Alberdi and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. What
made their vision nonpluralistic, it is argued, was that
neither author was concerned with the representation
of diverse interests. Instead, they insisted on the need
to create virtuous citizens who would share a belief in
a single, national interest. Chapter two describes the
social, economie, and political landscape of Rosario.
The city's characteristics conspired against the idea
that a self-conscious working class could have possibly
existed during this period. A newer city whose population quadrupled between 1869 and 1895, Rosario was
still a relatively small place with a total population of
192,000 by 1910. Almost half of its inhabitants (fortyseven percent) were foreign bom, a large percentage
of its work force was rural, and seasonal migration was
high. Social mobility was also high: immigrants and
their Argentine-born descendents predominated
among the wealthy sectors of society, and by 1910,
fifty-nine percent of the real estate was owned by
foreign-born immigrants. The manufacturing sector
was small, employing only fifteen percent of the total
work force, while two-thirds of the 649 "factories"
employed fewer than ten workers. As Karush points
out, this small, ethnically, linguistically, and socially
heterogeneous working class "did not conform in any
sense to the classical image of an industrial proletariat" (p. 44). He argues, however, that these structural
constraints were overcome by a wide circulation of
cultural artifacts (criollista literature, films, tango lyrics) that had the effect of reinforcing a working-class
identity.
Chapters three to six offer rich, detailed, and welldocumented analyses of politics in Rosario between
1912 and 1930, and of the difficulties encountered by
political parties and factions when faced by the working class. The story focuses on the two main parties of
the city, in particular on a small group from the
Radical Party lead by local politician Ricardo Caballero. His success in attracting working-class support
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
was feared by his rivals inside and outside the party, as
it was thought to encourage labor conflicts and classbased violence. These fears increased when labor
conflict peaked in 1918-1919, landmark years for the
increasing disillusion with the new democracy among
many members of the political elite.
This is a well-researched, well-written, and wellargued book. The author's reading of Alberdi and
Sarmiento could be questioned, as the nonpluralistic
nature of Argentina's democracy between 1916 and
1930 has been traditionally associated with ideas sustained by the Radical Party (in power throughout these
years) rather than those of the country's founding
fathers. And, more significantly for Karush's argument, this reviewer remains skeptical that music, literature, and film had the effect of reinforcing workingclass consciousness to the extent of overriding the
structural constraints on its development that existed
in Rosario during this period. The mere existence and
popularity of certain cultural elements does not allow
us to conclude without further evidence that such
artifacts had the described effect on those who consumed them. These issues, however, do not invalidate
the chief hypothesis of a book whose main strength is
to be found in the author's analysis of the worries of
Rosarino politicians when faced with mass-electoral
politics. Not only did they fear the potential mobilizing
power of the working class (proven many times during
these years) but also that a faction or a group would
attempt to use such power for electoral purposes.
Karush excels in his reconstruction of the dilemmas,
fears, responses, and outcomes of a political elite
suddenly confronted with new rules in the game of
party politics. The fact that he chooses to do so during
a period of the country's history in much need of
further research and in the still almost unexplored area
in Argentina of regional politics is an additional bonus.
PAULA ALONSO
University of San Andrés/CONICET
EUROPE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
NICOLE LORAUX. The Divided City: On Memory and
Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Translated by CORINNE
PACT-IE and JEFF FORT. New York: Zone Books. 2002.
Pp. 358. $30.00.
In the spring of 404 B.C.E., the Athenians surrendered
to Lysander, the Spartan general, and, for them, the
Peloponnesian War was over. Athens had been a
democracy since 507 (with one brief interruption in
411), but now the victors suppressed democracy and
installed a pro-Spartan oligarchy. The new regime was
mild at first, even popular, but its need for money soon
drove it to violent extremer. When it was overthrown
in the winter of 403-02, it came to be remembered as
the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. The overthrow was not
without bloodshed. A group of democrats exiled in
Boeotia invaded Attica, and full-scale civil war
erupted. When it became clear that the democrats had
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Europe: Ancient and Medieval
the upper hand in the fighting, a herald stepped
between the opposing lines and called for reconciliation. The outcome was that both parties swore an oath
"not to remember past evils" (mnesikakein). Each
individual citizen took the oath, and democracy was
restored. Over the years, the oath held up, preventing
serious recriminations and the possible reemergence
of civil war. Today, historians use the word "amnesty"
of the decision by the Athenians to forget past evils.
Whatever the intention, amnesty was the effect. Nicole
Loraux takes on the daunting task of explaining this
remarkable reconciliation.
As Loraux argues, there were times when the Greeks
thought of their city-states as extended families. This
means that the miasma of civil war was not merely the
stamn of political murder; it bore implications of fratricide. At the conclusion of hostilities, the problem was
to find a way of bringing about domestic peace. The
resolution to forget past evils is both simple and
problematic: simple because it leaves little doubt as to
its intended effect, problematic because the conscious
act of forgetting is a contradiction in terms. For
Loraux, both the Greek attitude to civil war and their
strategy of resolution deserve unique attention. Her
approach is to set the problem in what she calls "the
city of anthropology" (17-18). This city "renews its
identity in the atemporal return of ritual gestures . . it
is discourse on the human whose essential propositions, taken up again and again, are used to separate
the normal from the strange or else lend themselves to
the mixed signals and distortions that provoke
thought." Loraux's anthropology takes the reader on a
sometimes bewildering ramble through literature and
inscriptions from Homer and Aeschylus to Sigmund
Freud.
What Loraux calls an anthropology I would call an
exploration. Like many explorers, Loraux frequently
wanders down blind alleys. It is the journey that is
important, however, and much is discovered along the
way. This book is impressive, a mass of astute observations not all of which blend into a coherent thesis.
The scholar will treasure the wealth of documentation
(most of which is in the endnotes), which the publishers have made as difficult as they can to locate on a
random basis. The publishers have also spared little
cost cutting in the preparation of the index (less than
3.25 pages), which completely ignores the seventyseven pages of endnotes.
I value the anthropology but am less convinced by
Loraux's conceptualization of the historical problem.
It is not clear that the Athenians really needed to
forget the "fratricide" of civil war. Citizen had killed
citizen during the struggle against the Peisistratid
tyranny from 514 to 510. Far from choosing to forget,
the Athenian state erected a statue to commemorate
the murder of Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Before 403, mnesikakein "call evils to mind"
was used not of civil war but of the catastrophic losses
the Athenians suffered as a result of the debacle in
Sicily in 413. Indeed, when the oligarchs reached
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reconciliation with the democrats, both sides had much
to benefit from forgetting: the oligarchs did not want
their collusion with the Thirty remembered against
them, and the democrats needed their opponents to
forget the dismal record of the democracy in managing
the Peloponnesian War. Occasionally, democracy had
disintegrated into mob rule, and the people had been
gulled again and again by demagogues. It was this
rather than citizen blood that the democrats needed to
put behind them if they were to reestablish popular
government in the coming years.
GORDON SHRIMPTON
University of Victoria
ANDREW WOLPERT. Remembering Defeat: Civil War and
Civic Memoty in Ancient Athens. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp xviii, 190. $42.50.
Regime change is never easy. It is a trauma to the body
politie, and, as with any trauma, the body uses selective
memory to help the healing process. Andrew Wolpert
finds this creative use of memory at work in the ways
the Athenians remembered the brief civil war (403—
402 B.C.) and amnesty that followed Athens's defeat in
the Peloponnesian War. During this time, Athens was
ruled by an oligarchie regime known as the Thirty.
Subsequently, the oligarchie revolution was treated as
an interlude, the violence and lawlessness of which
only underscored the deeper continuity and legitimacy
of democratic traditions. Wolpert argues that the
public discourse that emerged once democracy was
restored in 402 relied on the manipulation of memory.
Publicly the Athenians agreed not to recall wrongs
committed under the tyrannical regime of the Thirty.
(Amnesty, after all, means "not remembering.") Thus
the state was preserved from an endless cycle of
recriminations and revenge. The community shared
the fiction that everyone had been opposed to the
Thirty and did not admit that many had been complicit
or passive. Individually, however, Athenian litigants
could and frequently did refer to deeds done under the
reign of the Thirty.
The first half of the book, entitled "The Historical
Setting," begins with a conventional survey of the
sources for the civil war itself: Xenophon and Aristotle. Wolpert then discusses modern treatments of the
legal issues at the heart of the oligarchie revolution.
This is a vexed area in Greek history, because the
military and political upheavals in Athens in the last
decade of the fifth century occurred at the same time
as a comprehensive overhaul of the Athenian legal
code. Try to imagine the United States completely
rewriting the Constitution while waging (unsuccessfully) a world war. Wolpert's contribution is disappointing, consisting of little more than a cursory review of
some of the better-known scholarly opinions accompanied by the occasional demur. Noel Robertson, for
example, has argued a minimalist line for the rewriting
of the Athenian legal code, suggesting that the anagrapheis (recorders) were merely making fresh copies
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