It is a generally accepted fact that interpretations of Peronism assumed hierarchy and academic rigour after the decisive interventions that the sociologist Gino Germani (1911–79) began to carry out immediately after the fall of the first Peronist government (1946–55). His theses were reaffirmed, criticised and discussed for several decades, while the figure of Germani himself has been, justifiably, the object of analysis in relation to both the intellectual history and the history of sociology in Argentina. In contrast, less attention has been given to the study of the changes that Germani was introducing in his reading of Peronism over three decades and the motivations that could have pushed him to revise his ideas and renew his concepts.

In El movimiento nacional-popular. Gino Germani y el peronismo, Samuel Amaral devotes himself to this task in detail, developing it in three parts: ‘Discovery’, ‘Context’ and ‘Analysis’. In the first, he analyses the different characterisations that Germani was building of Peronism. In 1956 Germani initially located it within the category of fascism but shortly thereafter, in 1961, he categorised it more precisely as a ‘national-popular movement’ – this is probably his most enduring contribution within studies of Peronism. By using this term, Germani alluded to a political phenomenon that differed both from representative democracy and from totalitarianism. It was characterised by a direct relationship between the leader and their supporters and by its ideological hybridity (i.e. it was not homogeneously of Right or Left), and represented an alternative type of popular participation, different from that offered by developed democracies.

In Germani's journey to this formulation, Amaral reconstructs the influence exerted by Seymour M. Lipset's theses, especially those that linked authoritarianism and the working class, which would have allowed Germani to distinguish between the phenomena of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and to locate Peronism among the latter. It also demonstrates the impossibility that a reading of Gramsci – little known in the Argentina of the 1950s – had any influence on the new category proposed by Germani. Amaral suggests that although the terms ‘national’ and ‘popular’ were indeed part of the political language of the time, only with Germani did they acquire academic rigour. This first part of the book ends with an analysis of the different evaluations that Germani elaborated not of Peronism but of fascism. In the fifties, Germani considered fascism as a movement that generated an illusion of participation; later on he would consider it in relation to its ability to mobilise the middle classes (1968) or demobilise the lower classes (1975–8).

The second part of the book analyses the context in which Germani's investigations into Peronism and fascism developed. Amaral reiterates here the novelty that Lipset's category of authoritarianism implied for Germani who, until then, had classified the political orders exclusively according to a democracy–totalitarianism polarity. Here the author deals with the variations in the meaning of authoritarianism from the 1940s onwards, referring to a heterogeneous series of authors ranging from Max Horkheimer to Alain Rouquié, through Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Raymond Aron, Juan J. Linz and William Ebenstein, among others. The sixties were the years in which the concept of authoritarianism was disseminated, Amaral concludes. As for Germani and his characterisation of Peronism, the sociologist was ceasing to use the term authoritarianism as a descriptor of the political order now best described as a national-popular movement. When he used it in his last works (1975–8), he would rather refer to the authoritarian attitudes of individuals, not of government regimes.

The third part of the book addresses Germani's theses on Peronism in relation to four aspects: its place in Argentine history, its historical origins (undoubtedly the best known argument), its classification, and its meaning. Although they are analysed here in detail, Amaral has already alluded to almost all of them previously, a fact that diminishes the novelty of this part and adds repetition to his narrative. In general terms, Amaral identifies three moments in Germani's evaluation of Peronism.

In the mid-fifties, and with the background of a global crisis of modernisation that in Argentina translated into rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, Peronism constituted an atypical case of fascism, the result of the anomie of migrants (‘available masses’) who, although manipulated by a leader rather than autonomous, experienced real freedom. The Peronist Revolution, whilst ineffectual at the structural level, was effective at the psychosocial level (regarding workers’ self-awareness and recognition of their rights). At the beginning of the 1960s, Germani thought of Peronism as an authoritarian phenomenon rather than a totalitarian one, a national-popular movement that provided an effective degree of participation, albeit passive, to popular sectors mobilised by elites rather than a leader. Ideologically hybrid, Peronism constituted a democratic pathway to authoritarianism. In the 1970s, the ‘national-popular movement’, as a category, would be equated to populism. Defined according to the criteria of mobilisation, Peronism was a populist movement in which the people were more important than norms, they participated in an active way, and related without institutional mediation to Perón (to whom, according to Amaral, Germani pays attention for the first time). Responding to criticism, the sociologist then recognised the role of unionised workers in the emergence of Peronism and the multi-classist character of the movement, without abandoning his initial idea about the decisive support of the new migrants – to whom, however, he now granted greater autonomy than before. Probably affected by the results of the return to power of Peronism in 1973, Germani concluded that Peronism had been a ‘historical misunderstanding’.

The changes in Germani's evaluation of Peronism, in short, are the great contribution of this book. It should be noted, however, that in Política y sociedad en una época de transición (1962) Germani included as consecutive chapters, without altering their contents, works in which he considered Peronism as fascism (1956), as authoritarianism (1957) and as a national-popular movement (1961). The latter category, as Amaral points out, ‘is not announced by Germani in a way that allows us to notice the novelty in his work or in general’ (p. 68). So the variations in the naming of the political phenomenon might have lacked for Germani the relevance they have for Amaral. This would help explain why, even after creating the new category, Germani refers to Peronism as a ‘populist movement’ or, ‘interchangeably’, as a ‘national-popular movement, national populism, and populism’ (p. 177), without specifying differences or changes. Towards the end of El movimiento nacional-popular, the objective of the book loses focus and the ideas of Germani or their analysis are alternated with the opinions of the author himself on the challenges of representative democracy, on the dangers of demanding too much participation, or on Argentina as a case of relative political involution. For the most part, however, Amaral remains faithful to the purpose of studying the different ways in which Germani approached Peronism over three decades. Through that effort, he reveals that what moved Germani to study Peronism was, as in the case of fascism, his concern with a kind of relationship between rulers and governed capable of threatening the foundations of representative democracy.