Populism and Constitutionalism in Argentina: considerations from Conceptual Legal History

Abstract This study attempts to explore the conceptual relationship between populism and popular sovereignty within the legal discourse of constitutionalism in contemporary Argentina. To this end, the methodology chosen was based on conceptual history -Begriffsgeschichte-, which allows decomposing the “common senses” of the constitutional discourse through a double operation. The first is semasiology, which implies a study of the emergence of the word “populism” and its conceptual function as an indicator and factor of a political context which defined the preconceptions of Argentine jurists from the 1950s onwards. This approach derives in the study of onomasiology, which observes the way in which such voice was inserted in a tension between two “constitutional traditions”. One liberal -1870-1930-, hostile to popular sovereignty, understanding it as tyranny of the majorities; and the other based on an unlimited popular constituent coming from the Schmittian reading of Sieyès, which culminated with the sanction of the National Constitution of 1949 during the first Peronism. The historical-conceptual key allows us to explain the use of “populism” at the level of juridical discourse, as a form of rehabilitation of the classical liberal tradition that counterposes the Constitution to the excess of a popular constituent conceived as potentially dangerous.