Claudio Belini departs from established interpretation which had emphasised industrialists’ opposition to Juan Perón's government, to offer a more satisfactory and nuanced analysis of the relationship of the country's industrialists to the Perón regime and its policies. An introductory chapter provides a comprehensive and cogent review of the historical scholarship on industrialists, industrialisation, and industrial policy before and during Perón's government. However, most interesting are the chapters on subjects generally neglected in the scholarship: the role of the state bureaucracies and the political parties in influencing industrial policy under Perón. Belini notes that although industrial policy was not a priority in political debates, both the Peronist majority and opposition parties did nonetheless give it some attention. What is most striking is, despite some disagreements on specific policies, a consensus across party lines for economic nationalism and support for national industry. Even more important was the role of the state bureaucracies in the elaboration and implementation of industrial policies. The attempts at economic planning by the Secretaría de Industria y Comercio and Ministerio de Asuntos Técnicos, in the form of the two Five-Year Plans is just one of a number of bureaucracies whose history and precise role Bellini manages to illuminate while arguing persuasively for the primordial role that such entities had in the Peronist government's industrial policies. Subsequent chapters on the Five-Year Plans themselves and industrial promotion policies offer new insights on Argentina's once promising but ultimately floundering industrialisation process, as it was overtaken by both Brazil and Mexico by the end of the Peronist period. Belini employs a wide array of interesting and untapped sources in these chapters.

The chapter on Perón's relationship with industrialists and their associations is the most problematic of the book, specifically on the role of the Confederación General Económica (CGE). Unlike other parts of Belini's study, the research is not particularly deep here, confined largely to the CGE's officially published bulletin, and he advances some arguments at odds with the CGE's own archive and those of its provincial federations. Belini portrays the CGE as an organisation largely dominated by its industrial wing, indeed conflates the association with industrial interests, when in fact it was the confederations representing agriculture and especially commerce that wielded the greatest influence in its early history from 1952 to 1955. Of the founding members of the CGE's first executive committee, none were big industrialists and the industrial wing, Confederación General de la Industria (CGI) would not become the dominant one, and never completely so, in the CGE until after the fall of Perón. Unlike the case of the other two confederations, the industrialists’ confederation met infrequently in the period from 1952 to 1955 and its presence in the CGE's deliberations and internal debates was slight. Similarly, though Belini disputes the idea of any special predisposition for economic nationalism and affinity with Peronism in the interior (p. 131), debates on economic policy in the provincial economic federations on such matters as credit policies, economic planning and modernisation were ongoing and intense, albeit not confined to questions of industrialisation but to broader ones on national capitalist development. A number of these provinces such as Tucumán and the Chaco became Peronist political strongholds. The CGI would indeed come to prominence within the CGE, but only in the two decades that followed Perón's overthrow, coincided with the building of the industrial empires of its four leading members (José Ber Gelbard, Julio Broner, Idelfonso Recalde and Israel Dujovne) and the rise of active provincial industrial lobbies such as those of the metallurgical industries in Córdoba and Rosario.

Belini's Convenciendo al capital is a highly accomplished work of economic history and specifically of economic policy as it relates to industry. Social and cultural variables do not figure in his approach, making the analysis somewhat narrow, a study of industrialists as strictly economic actors rather than of the Argentine bourgeoisie as social and political ones. By way of example, with regard to Perón's Second Year Plan, Eduardo Elena's superb book, Dignifying Argentina (curiously absent from Belini's treatment of the subject) surely demonstrates that the elaborate publicity campaign and the government's ambitious outreach endeavours to enlist popular support were collectively more than just something which ‘remained limited merely to an informational function’ (p. 66), that they had great resonance and meaning, including for industrialists, in terms of Argentina's political culture and society's relationship to Perón and his movement. But within the strict genre of economic history and political economy, Belini's book certainly constitutes the definitive, most detailed study on the subject, the essential book for anyone interested in the history of industrialists, industrial planning and industrial policy in those years.