Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837–1940. Группа авторов
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principal characteristics of one: it is universal, it is lasting, it escapes every day from human power; all events, like all men, serve its development.”13
Democracy is the government of the majorities or the uniform consent of the reason of all men, working for the creation of the law and to decide supremely over all that interests society.
That general and uniform consent constitutes the sovereignty of the people.
The sovereignty of the people is unlimited in all that belongs to society, in politics, in philosophy, in religion; but the people are not sovereign as regards the individual, his conscience, his property, his life, and his liberty.
Association has been established for the good of all men; it is the common foundation of all individual interests or the animated symbol of the strength and intelligence of each one.
The goal of society is to organize democracy and ensure to each and every one of its members the broadest and most free enjoyment of their natural rights; the broadest and freest exercise of their faculties.
Therefore the sovereign people or the majority cannot violate those individual rights, limit the exercise of those faculties, which are at once the origin, the bond, the condition, and the goal of society.
From the moment it violates them, the pact is broken, society dissolves,
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and each man shall be the absolute owner of his will and his actions and derive his right from his strength.
It follows from here that the limit of collective reason is the right; and the limit of individual reason, the sovereignty of the reason of the people.
The rights of man come before the rights of society. The individual under God’s law and the law of mankind is the sole owner of his life, his property, his conscience, and his liberty: his life is a gift from God; his property, the sweat of his brow; his conscience, the eye of his soul and the intimate judge of his actions; his freedom, the necessary condition for the development of the faculties that God has given him so that he might live happily, the very essence of his life, as life without freedom is death.
The right of the association is therefore circumscribed by the orbit of individual rights.
The sovereign, the people, the majority dictate the social and positive law with the goal of strengthening and enacting the primeval law, the natural law of the individual. So it is that, far from denying man part of his freedom and rights when he enters society, he has, on the contrary, come together with the others and formed the association in order to ensure and extend them.
If the positive law of the sovereign follows natural law, that right is legitimate and all must obey it, on pain of punishment as offenders; if it violates it, it is illegitimate and tyrannical and no one is obliged to obey it.
The individual’s right to resist the tyrannical decisions of the sovereign people or of the majority is therefore legitimate, as is the right to repel force with force, and to kill the thief or murderer who attacks our property or our lives, as this is born from the very conditions of the social pact.
The sovereignty of the people is unlimited as long as it respects the right of man: first principle.
The sovereignty of the people is absolute as long as reason is its norm: second principle.
Only collective reason is sovereign, not the collective will. The will is blind, whimsical, irrational; the will wants, reason examines, weighs, and decides.
It therefore follows that the sovereignty of the people may reside only
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in the reason of the people, and that only the sensible and rational part of the social community is summoned to exercise it.
The ignorant part remains under the protection and safeguard of the law dictated by the uniform consent of the rational people.
Democracy, then, is not the absolute despotism of the masses, nor of the majorities; it is the rule of reason.
Sovereignty is the greatest and most solemn act of reason of a free people. How can those who do not know of its importance take part in this act? Those who through their lack of enlightenment are incapable of discerning right from wrong in terms of public affairs? Those who, ignorant as they are of what best suits them, have no opinion of their own and are therefore exposed to yield to the suggestions of the malicious? Those who through their imprudent vote might compromise the liberty of the country and the existence of society? I say, how could the blind see, the crippled walk, the mute speak; that is, how could he who has neither capacity nor independence take part in sovereign acts?
Another condition for the exercise of sovereignty is industry. The idler, the vagabond, he who has no trade, cannot be part of the sovereign, because he is not tied by any interest whatsoever to society and will easily give his vote for gold or threats.
He whose well-being depends on the will of another and enjoys no personal independence cannot be entitled to sovereignty, as he would hardly sacrifice his interests for the independence of his reason.
The tutelage of the ignorant, of the vagabond, of he who does not have personal independence, is therefore necessary. The law does not prevent them from exercising sovereign rights per se, only as long as they remain minors; it does not divest them of these but imposes a condition for possessing them; the condition of emancipating themselves.
But the people, the masses, do not always have the means in their hands to gain their emancipation. Society or the government that represents it must put it within their reach.
It should foster industry, destroy the fiscal laws that hinder its development, not overburden it with taxation but leave it to exercise its activity freely and austerely.
It should spread enlightenment throughout society and hold out a beneficent hand to the poor and the destitute. It should seek to raise the proletarian class to the level of the other classes, emancipating first its body in order to then emancipate its reason.
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To emancipate the ignorant masses and open for them the road to sovereignty it is necessary to educate them. The masses have only their instincts; they are more sensitive than rational; they want the good, but they do not know where to find it; they wish to be free, but they do not know the path to freedom.
Education for the masses must be systematized.
By giving them morals, religion will make fertile in their hearts the seeds of good habits. Elementary education will put them in a position to attain greater enlightenment and one day grasp the rights and duties imposed on them by citizenship.14
The ignorant masses, however, while temporarily deprived of the exercise of the rights of sovereignty or political liberty, fully enjoy their individual liberty; like all members of society, their natural rights are inviolable; in addition, civil liberty protects them, as it does everyone; the same civil, penal, and constitutional law, dictated by the sovereign, protects their lives, their property, their conscience, and their liberty; it brings them to court when they commit a crime, condemning them or absolving them.
They cannot participate in the creation of the law that forms the rights and duties of the associate members as long as they remain under tutelage or in minority of age, but that same law gives them the means to emancipate themselves and keeps them in the meantime under its protection and defense.
Democracy works to even out conditions and make the classes equal.
Class equality includes individual liberty, civil liberty, and political liberty. When all members of the association are in full and absolute possession of these liberties and jointly exercise sovereignty, democracy shall have been definitively constituted on the indestructible basis of class equality; this is the third principle.
We have unraveled the spirit of democracy and set out the limits of the sovereignty of the people. Let us now examine how the sovereign acts, or in other words, what apparent or visible