Romero, José Luis (1909–1977)

José Luis Romero (b. 24 March 1909; d. 2 March 1977), Argentine historian. Romero was born in Buenos Aires and earned a doctorate in history at the University of La Plata. His work developed in the areas of social history and the history of culture and ideas. As a medievalist, he studied the formation and development of the bourgeoisie in La revolución burguesa en el mundo feudal (1967) and Crisis y orden en el mundo feudoburgués (1980). He also wrote works interpreting Latin American and Argentine history, the most important of which is Latinoamérica: Las ciudades y las ideas (1976). In this book, he tries to understand the role urban societies played in the Latin American historical process from colonial days to the twentieth century. He pursued the relationships between ideologies and historical reality in Latin America in El pensamiento político de la derecha latinoamericana (1970) and Latinoamérica: Situaciones e ideologías (1967).

Romero's classic work on Argentina is A History of Argentine Political Thought (1963), an accurate and widely read synthesis. He investigated ideas in relation to societal changes in El desarrollo de las ideas en la sociedad argentina del siglo XX (1965).

Possessed of a great talent for historical interpretation, Romero also considered the history of historiography itself in De Herodoto a Pobilio (1952) and Maquiavelo historiador, 3d ed. (1986). In La historia y la vida (1945), he expressed his views on the theory of history.

See alsoAnthropology; Argentina: The Colonial Period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Félix Luna, Conversaciones con José Luis Romero sobre una Argentina con historia, política y democracia (1976).

Tulio Halperín Donghi, "José Luis Romero y su lugar en la historiografía argentina," in Desarrollo Económico 20 (1980):78.

Sergio Bagú et al., De historia e historiadores: Homenaje a José Luis Romero (1982).

Additional Bibliography

Betancourt Mendieta, Alexander. Historia, ciudad e ideas: La obra de José Luis Romero. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001.

Iturrieta, Aníbel, and Antonio Lago Carballo. El pensamiento político argentino contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1994.

                      Juan Carlos Torchia Estrada