The Invention of Community. The Sanitary Program for Social Work in Developmentalist Argentina

Abstract

This paper aims to show, from a genealogical perspective, how the sanitarian discourse, characteristic of the so-called developmentalist era in Argentina, helped to shape a new model of state intervention in society that is based, fundamentally, on the idea of community. Several social welfare and social promotion devices were introduced around this notion, for which sanitarism provided a significant support (both theoretical and operational) through proposals of executive decentralization and regulatory centralization, on the one hand, and development and social participation, on the other. This “invention” of the community as a new subject-object of social interventions by the Government will have decisive implications on social work, destined to become a central actor as an “agent of change”, promoter of development that will leave deep marks, the traces of which can still be found in the proposals regarding professional intervention.