The Legal Foundations of Inequality

Roberto Gargarella is a Professor of Constitutional Theory and Political Philosophy at the Law School of the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad Di Tella and a researcher for CONICET in Buenos Aires and the Christian Michelsen Institute in Norway. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Columbia, New York University, and Harvard and Visiting Professor at universities in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. He received a John Simon Guggenheim grant in 2000 and a Harry Frank Guggenheim grant in 2002–3 and has published on issues of legal and political philosophy, as well as on US and Latin American constitutionalism.

“Most notable for its broad comparative approach is Roberto Gargarella’s excellent study of evolving tensions between competing political projects in the nineteenth century and their impact on institutional arrangements that would affect inequality in later years…he presents a provocative and nuanced understanding of the evolution of inequality, showing that there were moments in which the institutional arrangements underpinning inequality came under challenge or were in flux in Latin America. In this, his book provides a welcome alternative to the widespread notion that inequality in the region is simply a persistent legacy of colonial times” -Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, University of Maryland, Latin American Research Review

• 1. Radicalism: honoring the 'general will'; 2. Conservatism: the moral cement of society; 3. Liberalism: between tyranny and anarchy; 4. The quest for equality.