This study analyzes a sector of Argentine thought from the 1930s, represented in the essays on the national 'soul' or character. This essay writing produced a number of texts that were transformed, through critical appraisal, into classics on the country itself - such as Radiografía de la pampa by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, and Historia de una pasión argentina by Eduardo Mallea - and which emerged out of a political crisis - whose first notable effect was the 1930 coup d'état - and a more widespread disruption of the intellectual points of reference caused by the exhaustion of positivism as a paradigm among the cultural elites. The unease provoked by the national political context merged with the unease stemming from European thought concerning the crisis - the crisis of spirit, of the liberal order and of capitalism - and this amalgam fed a state of intellectual discontent that took concrete form in the essay. In an ever broader way, this genre stimulated a profound revision of liberal Argentina. Among the texts involved in this process we can highlight the essays by Martínez Estrada and Mallea, analyzed in the final part of the study.
National being; Americanism; Intuitionism; Intellectuals