Pragmatism versus Planning? The Peronist Project, the Economic Ideas of Perón and the Industry

Abstract

This work analyses the Peronist project through the study of Peron ́s economic discourse and the principal guidelines of the economic policy, from which is re-discussed the problem of the scope of the peronist indus-trialization and the character of its state planning. For this purpose, we distinguish within the peronist project its programmatic aspects, which shaped legitimacy criteria for the state economic intervention and its indus-trial orientation, from the pragmatic ones, that enabled adaptation to different combinations of social, politi-cal and economic problems. We argued that the internal market orientation and the industrialization were part of a consensus shared by different actors; and once the industry was defined as one of the pillars of the ́NewArgentina ́, the government implemented various policies and instruments always aimed to foster in-dustrialization. Furthermore, it is shown that the relation between industry and Peronism was strongly influ-enced by the logic of socio-political conflict andby the politicization of relations between the socio-economic actors, which strongly affected state economic intervention and its legitimacy in the face of the different actors.