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1196 Reviews of Books 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 OCTOBER 2003 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 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1197 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 OCTOBER 2003