This article explores a decisive moment in the construction of historiographical discourse in the River Plate: that of Romanticism, marked by the reception of topics and concepts forged in the course of philosophical, political and social debates in Europe during the 1820s and 1830s. It emphasizes the importance, in the River Plate, of a certain Geschichtsphilosophie for the crystallization of a historical discourse which emphasized general interpretation and the identification of “general laws” of historical development . The main hypotheses are: a) that reference to the “nation” as the basic object of historical discourse first appeared in the works analyzed here; b) that the effort to articulate a “national history” had as its precondition the fact of having been produced in exile, a situation that also conditioned its subject-matter. This article emphasizes the role historical context exercises in the historical reconstruction of the meanings of political, social and historiographical discourse.
Argentinian Romanticism; Geschichtsphilosophie; transnational national discours