Singularidad

"I think Guillermo O’Donnell’s piece, “State and Alliances in Argentina,” is brilliant. I always give it to my students as the country study. Yet Argentina is a unique case. If one does, as I eventually did, regressions of various kinds for the whole world, you find that Argentina is always standard deviations out. It had, by far, the largest number of regime transitions of all countries. And it had democracies that did not survive when the country was relatively wealthy. In fact, the wealthiest instances where democracy fell are Argentina in 1976, Argentina in 1966, and Argentina in 1962. Argentina was among the ten most developed countries in the world in 1900, but now it’s in the doldrums. It’s the weirdest country in the world. What does this all mean? It means that when you start theorizing on the basis of Argentina you are going to get very little generality."

Adam Przeworski
(en “Capitalism, Democracy and Science”, entrevista de Gerardo Munck)

("La mazamorra" de Fernando Fader - 1927)