In 1940 Argentina had a per capita income and a degree of social development that placed her among the most ‘advanced’ countries in the world.1 By 1970 she was already a wellestablished member of the Third World. Argentina's decline, or as some wit once aptly put it, ‘the miracle of Argentine under development’, has led to the formulation of a constellation of explanations, none too satisfactory. Dependency theories and (on the other extreme) theories based on endogenous social and cultural dynamics, generally either failed to explain Argentina's previous success, or distorted Argentina's history previous to 1940 in order to make it fit the necessities of the causal model adopted.2 Nor were theories based on historic accident convincing: Perón’s perverse role in the ruin of Argentina, alleged by some, has always sounded more like a caricature of history and a propaganda piece than sound social science.