ntellectual networks and the Cold War: The Argentine agenda of the Congress for the Freedom of Culture

Abstract

The Asociación Argentina por la Libertad de la Cultura (AALC) was created in 1955 as a branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Berlin, 1950), product of the confrontation between East and West in the middle of the Cold War in cultural field. The expansion of this Congress in Argentina is constitutive of a period in which the liberal dominant elites of the fifties began to lose hegemony, and they are being pushed by the new left. In a rupture moment, opposite intellectuals to Peronism, ideologically settled on the basis of cultural liberalism, created the AALC, which it extends over networks of old progressive intelligentsia of groups like Sur, Liberalis and Imago Mundi reviews; organizations like the SADE, the CLES and ASCUA; and the cultural sites of Socialist Party. Between Buenos Aires and Cordoba, the AALC sponsored a complex publishing network, promoted meetings at national universities and took a commitment of solidarity with different international causes, behind the idea of anti-totalitarianism.  In a complex scenario that included not only the anti-Peronism/Peronism dichotomy but also the intervention of the Communist world with slogans for peace, democracy (popular) and anti-imperialism, the onset of the association can be read as a moment of rupture in the field of culture that will lead to the decline of the old intelligentsia and the solidification of the new left generation, which will overshadow the political and cultural scene in the following decades.