Introduction: Timeless concepts

The present chapter proposes to think about the different configurations that, according to the ideological aspects in dispute, the State in Argentina could have in the future. Anticipating the performance of the social implies a complex challenge, which embodies dangers for those who undertake such a task because past experiences carried out by prestigious authors or teams have presented a high level of error.

To this rate of fallibility – inherent in the very activity of anticipating any dimension of the course of societies – have been added the doubts on the future that were generated at the time of the crisis of 2008 and, from 2020, by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This work is divided into three sections. In the first of them we speak of the past imperfect: the models of state and public administration throughout history.

After a brief interregnum on a vaporous present, we move on to what the core of the work is: the uncertain future. In it we describe the formats, tools, and devices that the different ideological lines postulate for the state of the coming decades.

But before moving on to these developments, a few short, schematic lines about our conceptual framework.

About the state situation

Given the polysemy of many of the concepts that we will use in the text, we believe it is necessary to present a series of operative definitions, developed with the sole objective of placing the reader in our perspective.

We approach the state from three dimensions: general context, state form, and management pattern (Figure 5.1)

The general context (1) refers to the more general conditions of the environment, where the political, the economic, the social, and the cultural adopt a specific mode. In this dimension, we characterize as capitalist the Latin American period under study (last century and a half), but with differentiated stages (see Table 5.1)

Each general context has a state form (2 in Figure 5.1), that is the way in which power relations in society develop, including the role of the state in the development model and the strategy of inserting the public sector into social processes, political and productive.

Finally, we have a management pattern (3 in Figure 5.1), which refers to the values, instruments, devices, and structure that characterize each ideal type of public administration.

Let us look at this scheme from a dynamic perspective.