Argentina's middle class has always been considered the largest middle class in Latin America. According to traditional narratives, the emergence of this group was the product of the spectacular process of economic growth and social change that characterised the 1880–1914 period. During this golden age of export-led development, the economy grew ninefold, and income per capita tripled. Economic growth and labour scarcity translated into salaries higher than those paid in Mediterranean Europe, and at the same time created widespread opportunities for economic and social advancement. As a result of superior technical skills, hard work, thrift and greed, immigrants outdid natives and became the core of the growing middle-income sectors of the early twentieth-century decades. Since the pioneering work of Gino Germani, it is common to state that at the outbreak of the Great War this mostly immigrant middle class (20 to 30 percent of the total population) had become a visible presence in Argentine society, particularly in the pampean region, both in social and economic terms.

Argentina's economic star began to dwindle in the interwar period, but the middle class continued to expand at a rapid pace well into the 1960s, when one out of two Argentines belonged to this group. By then, the traditional elite had largely vanished from the public realm. The emergence of Peronism and of powerful labour organisations profoundly altered the balance of power but failed to challenge the cultural and social ascendancy of the middle class (partly because significant segments of the upper echelons of the working class embraced middle-class values). Even though there is much debate on the political weight and ideological inclinations of the middle class, most academics agree that this group stands out as one of the most salient features of the Argentine social structure. The social and cultural history of twentieth-century Argentina cannot be written without direct reference to the middle class.

According to Ezequiel Adamovsky, however, this historical narrative is simply a myth that serves reactionary politics. Rather than a social, cultural or political history of the middle class, what his Historia de la clase media argentina has to offer is a strongly biased history of the emergence and development of the idea of the middle class. Adamovsky focuses on the making and evolution of the political identity of the middle class. He argues that lack of clear-cut boundaries between the middle class and those below and above it makes it impossible to define this group in economic and social terms. He goes on to state that the identity of the middle class was constructed in the realm of discourse. Income, property, values, family structure and ideals, place of residence, education and so on played no role whatsoever in the making of the identity of the middle class.

Furthermore, Adamovsky's approach to his subject is somewhat nominalistic. According to him, common usage of the expression ‘middle class’ is the only true marker of the existence of the middle class. Meaning and experience do not bother him. Adamovsky's solution to the well-known problem of how to define the middle class is, indeed, a fallacious one. He seems unaware that social mobility and blurred boundaries do not imply absence of a stable middle-class core, whose history cannot be described and analysed without reference to the tools provided by social and economic history. Also, he neglects the fact that his way of reasoning – to define the middle class as a purely discursive construction – may also apply to the elite (and for that matter to any other social group), since social mobility in Argentina was not limited to entrance to, and descent from, the middle class. However, he chooses to portray the elite in more conventional, deterministic terms (the wealthy, the powerful) because this group plays a central part in his reasoning. Very much like in vulgar Marxism, Adamovsky suggests that the middle classes lack a ‘true’ place in society, and thus fluctuate between the two fundamental social classes of capitalist society. Furthermore, in Argentina middle-class identity was in the first place a product of the labours of Argentina's all-powerful elite, and bears the mark of its anti-popular origins.

The middle class was a discursive construction created from above to divide the popular movement and destroy the political potential of the masses. Adamovsky states that the expression ‘middle class’ gained some currency in the wake of the revolutionary upheaval of 1917–22. Up to that moment, he contends, people in the middle did not see themselves as middle class, nor were they regarded as such by other members of society. Faced with growing popular political activity and social unrest, members of the elite began to talk of the middle class in order to instil new ideals of respectability within the popular classes. But it was after the emergence of Peronism and its plebeian politics that middle-class identity became fully entrenched in society. When the masses moved towards the centre of the political arena, middle-class identity crystallised as its reactionary opposite. Thereafter, middle-class identity became a bulwark against social change, preventing the popular movement from uniting and breaking free from the grip of the elite.

In the last part of the book, Adamovsky takes his story to the present time. The chapters devoted to the last 30 years are less interesting than the rest of the volume. His command of the literature becomes even more sketchy, his sources of information more unreliable, his views more partisan. Adamovsky concludes that the so-called ‘disappearance of the middle class’, much debated in the last two decades, is perhaps good news. Rather than a testimony to Argentina's economic and social failure, he regards the crisis of the middle class as the crisis of a reactionary political identity. The hardship brought about by neoliberalism is eroding the myth of Argentina as a middle-class country. This may help bridge the gap between the oppressed, whether workers, unemployed or ‘middle class’, creating wider opportunities for revolutionary, emancipatory politics.

Adamovsky's most insightful pages are devoted to the relationship between class structure and ethnicity. This is not enough, however, to justify such a long and ambitious book. Written with more feeling than thought, Historia de la clase media argentina poses no challenge to the existing literature on the history of the middle classes. It is a pity that Adamovsky's effort bore so few fruits. The Argentine middle class – a vast, complex and largely neglected subject – still awaits its historian.