The Antinomies of Ruling Class Culture: The Buenos Aires Elite, 1880–1910

Abstract

Abstract To legitimate their privileged, rentier position, and to trumpet Argentine progress, the rulers of Buenos Aires lavished much of their extraordinary wealth on a cosmopolitan style of consumption designed to imitate, if not outdo, the elites of Paris and London. But, the local relations of production and politics lagged behind this ruling class’ advanced status as consumers. Hence the unresolved tension in its desire to create a modern, cosmopolitan city out of western European commodities and styles, and the aristocratic, conservative, even provincial meaning it gave that imported modernity. It is the hard fate of new aristocracies that the element of error, with them, has to be contemporary—not relegated to the dimness of the past, but receiving the full modern glare, a light fatal to the fond theory that the best society, everywhere, has grown, in all sorts of ways, in spite of itself. Henry James The American Scene