Mariano Grondona on the Psychobiography of Argentine Politicians

Mariano Grondona is one of Argentina’s best known intellectuals and newspaper columnists, and one of very few who incorporates a psychohistorical worldview in his work. His book La Realidad: El Despertar del Sueño Argentino (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2002) is a psychologically sensitive account of Argentine political culture. Now he is turning to psychobiography for insights into the behavior of the Argentine leadership. In a column called “The Psychobiography of Our Politicians” in a leading Buenos Aires newspaper (La Nación, September 2005), he observes that “it is common to evaluate our politicians by the goals they propose and the methods they use to achieve them. This means paying attention only to their rational side, as if they were chess players. A new vision of politicians has developed in the last few years, one which views them not as chess players but as beings of flesh and bone, with their passions and complexes, with their irrational side.”