What the people want: State planning and political participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946-1955

Abstract

This study examines an episode in the social history of state planning by focusing on the 1951 Peronist letter writing campaign. Perón's request for popular suggestions to the Second Five-Year Plan was met with enthusiasm from men and women across Argentina. As with other cases of state planning in the postwar world, the Peronist model of planned progress inspired many popular sector individuals and organisations, in part by offering them an intimate mode of political participation within an increasingly restrictive order. This appeal cannot be attributed to Peronist mass politics alone; rather, the regime's ideal of macro-level national planning also reinforced pre-existing practices of social activism in Argentine local communities. © 2005 Cambridge University Press.