Los dos rostros de la anfisbena: constitucionalismo beligerante y república posible

Abstract

As part of an ongoing research on the antagonism established between political identities and their relationship with the institutional configurations that Argentina adopted, this brief essay presents questions and hypotheses about lectures that conceive the Argentinian Constitution —from its historical version and going through its various reforms— as a legal artifact that contains antinomic principles. It begins with an exploration of the hypotheses about the “República verdadera” and the “República posible” established by Bartolomé Mitre and continues with extracts from the works of Juan Bautista Alberdi as well as various jurists of the 20th century. In a second section, considerations from political sociology, legal theory and linguistics are introduced to think about the indetermination and possible interpretations given to the open texture of texts and the existence of potentially dichotomous principles —the liberal, the democratic, the republican, the electoral— in the modern representative project. Based on these considerations, some preliminary hypotheses and observations are made about the possible hyper politicization of the Argentinian constitutional text and the Alberdian “specter” in times of reform and conflict.