The chair of Political Economy at the University of Buenos Aires (1823-1866)
This doctoral thesis project aims, first of all, to reconstruct the evolution of the Political Economy chair at the University of Buenos Aires from its establishment until 1866. Considering the end of the Spanish-American war of independence with the battle of Ayacucho (1824) and the organization of the modern Argentine national State with the presidential inauguration of Bartolomé Mitre in 1862, the selected period comprises almost half a century, in which the teaching of Political Economy became part of the university curriculum in Buenos Aires (before it did in several European and North American institutions) and accompanied the first stages of the consolidation of the Argentine national economy. During that period, the chair of Political Economy was established and suppressed at least twice, which allows for the study of the interaction between decision-making in the educational institution and the influence that local contemporary politics could have had on those procedures. Secondly, this project proposes to trace the way in which teaching and learning took place at the university level in the River Plate region at that time. In particular, the study of the interaction between professors and students in a peripheral space such as Buenos Aires can also offer material for better understanding the circulation of economic ideas in the Atlantic world. Thus, the proposed analysis can make a significant contribution to the scientific discussion on intellectual training as a factor in the development of the identities and social structures of the upper classes of urban Argentina and as a factor in the legitimization of structures for generating and distributing national wealth.
