The main object of this paper is analyze to the notion of civic nation, a concept and a politic representation which is fundamental in the production of the Generation of 1837 in Argentina The interpellation power of this concept still persists in recent moments of argentine history. To this end, we shall study, with the heuristic tools of Conceptual and Intellectual History, the uses of 'civility', civism', 'civilization', 'patria' and 'nation' in an specific corpus of Juan Bautista Alberdi and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's production. Our reading hypothesis is that for understanding the differences between these two interpretations of the civic nation and the internal tensions that each proposition has is necessary to question their discursive representations. Because it is inside these representations of civic nation we can identify oppositional conceptions of politics such as the civic republicanism and the domination of the civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]