Adolfo Gilly, Star and Spiral. (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2023). ISBN: 978-607-445-617-2.

Abstract

Although it was not Adolfo Gilly’s intention as a writer and historian, his extensive body of work may be seen as constituting a trilogy of essays produced over the course of a decade. Across these texts, he develops a critical examination of a constellation of events and historical figures that appear to have shaped the Argentine intellectual’s worldview. In the essays collected in Historia a contrapelo (2013), El siglo del relámpago (2019), and Estrella y espiral (2023), Gilly offers a critical reflection on a heterogeneous range of social phenomena that he considered essential for understanding, in systemic terms, the dynamics of capitalism—paradoxical across its multiple historical stages—as expressed through social movements and political and revolutionary actors. The result is a detailed and analytical account of the behavior of political, social, economic, and cultural actors, as well as of the historical processes in which they are embedded.