Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837–1940. Группа авторов
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it was in many ways exemplary, Sarmiento criticized European culture for its inequality. He was unhappy with this spectacle until he arrived in the United States. Like Tocqueville before him (in the two volumes of De la démocratie en Amérique, published in 1835 and 1840), and alongside James Fenimore Cooper (The American Democrat, 1838) and George Bancroft (History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, 1838), the American experience opened Sarmiento’s eyes to a possible future capable of combining liberty and equality with science and education.
In the United States he saw a society on the move, a representative republic whose popular base was getting broader, that reproduced, in spite of the blemish of slavery, the founding covenant of the New England Pilgrim fathers. These contractual forms were anchored in politics and society. They re-created a civic and private associationism; cleared virgin territories; built towns with churches, newspapers, and schools; and organized businesses that fueled a consumer society. Steamships, railroads, and a market network traversed the nation; advertisements transmitted images of products to the furthest territories in which the Native American populations had been brought to bay or annihilated; and this whole process was crowned by public schools that provided popular instruction.
In the United States, Sarmiento discovered a culture of pioneers and educators such as Horace Mann4 in which the theoretical principles of knowledge were destroying the rigidity of an aristocratic society and distributing practical rationality, inventions, and technology. Above all, that “disparate” (folly), as he termed it, was propounding a convergence of the republic as a form of government and democracy as a form of society. Sarmiento introduced the liberal outlook of the United States to Argentina in opposition to the European liberal tradition, which—with
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certain exceptions—had predominated since the beginnings of Independence.
II. THE FRAMEWORK OF THE NATIONAL CONSTITUTION (1852–1860)
When Alberdi wrote La República Argentina 37 años después de su Revolución de Mayo, he did not foresee that five years later an uprising starting in Entre Ríos Province with the backing of the Brazilian Empire would topple Rosas once and for all. The insurrection, led by Justo José de Urquiza, was waged in the name of the constitution that the country needed after four decades of war and dictatorship.
Alberdi published two works between 1852 and 1855 that display a tension between two liberal visions of society: Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (Bases and starting points for the political organization of the Argentine Republic) and Sistema económico y rentístico de la Confederación Argentina según su Constitución de 1853 (The economic and revenue system of the Argentine Confederation according to its Constitution of 1853). Against the backdrop of conflicts surrounding the Constituent Congress summoned by Urquiza, Alberdi formulated a theory in which the idea of a society based on immigration, railroads, and industry coexisted with the order born of the spontaneous exercise of individual freedom.
In these two works Alberdi struck up a dialogue between the liberal schools of thought arising out of the tradition of Saint-Simon in France (for example, Michel Chevalier in his Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord avec une carte des États-Unis d’Amérique, 1836) and the classical liberalism of Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776) followed up by Jean-Baptiste Say (Cours complet d’économie politique, 1828–1829). If, on the one hand, the protagonist of Alberdian society is the individual without obstacles or impediments, the exclusive subject of freedom, the other side of this abstract definition is the European immigrant who brings to Argentina in his knapsack the living matter of industrial civilization, the working practices, and the practical education grounded in his experience.
It is no simple task to accurately gauge the primacy of one view or the other. But reducing the nuances to a pattern, the Bases can be seen as a eulogy to mores as creators of liberty, and the Sistema as a eulogy to liberty as creator of mores. Along the lines of Montesquieu, Alberdi
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wanted to renew, in the far south of America, a special relationship between individual freedom and the customs that offer this human faculty firm ground on which to settle.
But the Bases and the Sistema were also written to enable Argentina to procure a republican constitution and an economic regime suited to its purposes. This principle of legitimacy was effectively the only way to achieve the ends of European civilization in America. The constitution brought together all that was permanent and necessary (the rule of law, rights and guarantees, the form of government) with an explicit program of civilization. The constitution thus stood for both authority and progress. Although it was addressed to the Republic’s inhabitants, for whom the constitution guaranteed the exercise of freedom, Bases based these principles on the fertility of the new civilization of immigrants.
Thus conceived, the program aimed not just to transplant populations, but to establish the free action of labor, capital, and property in Argentina. In his Sistema, Alberdi adduced that the true reformer had nothing to do with a ruler determined on enacting particular laws, creating monopolies, or satisfying the interests of some inhabitants at the expense of others. He conceived of the constitution as a supreme law that, in order to promote liberty, repealed the mass of laws and regulations constituting past servitude. The reforms he proposed translated an ideal that found repugnant both the privileges of colonial mercantilism and the will of a government that becomes a banker or entrepreneur of industry and communication.
All this called for an overhaul of the federal treasury. Nationalizing the custom house, eliminating the provincial customs offices, became necessary conditions for the development of the state’s revenue system. Given such an assumption, the main fiscal resource came from indirect taxation in the form of customs duties on imports, provided these taxes were legislated by a spartan government motivated by the prudent use of public credit.
In order to prosper and gain legitimacy, this ambitious plan had to be based on religious tolerance and a historic pact that, thanks to a mixed formula of government, would reconcile the warring centralist and federal factions. Alberdi was a steadfast defender of the Catholic religion in the liberal manner of Montesquieu and Tocqueville. He believed the dilemma was inevitable: either Argentina practiced intolerant Catholicism and remained a backward, sparsely populated territory, or it became a
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prosperous, religiously tolerant nation. Hence, religion was a springboard for the social order as an indirect means to political organization.
Alberdi believed that religious beliefs ought to curb the passions, coinciding, in this case, with the work ethic of the industrial order and with the education given by the example of a life more civilized than that prevailing in Argentina. This kind of spontaneous education, produced by transplanting the most advanced foreign populations, should not be confused with the kind of public instruction that the likes of Sarmiento advocated with an enthusiasm from which he never wavered during his long life. Alberdi accordingly adopted an idea of education through customs and good habits that had to fend off a misunderstood concept of popular instruction based on military hero worship.
Liberators such as José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar, rural caudillos, and warmongering presidents belonged, in Alberdi’s mind, to a colonial legacy that spawned violence, charlatanism, and idleness. Tired of orators and rhetoricians, lawyers and theologians, Alberdi dreamed of a society regenerated by engineers, geologists, and naturalists trained in the applied sciences.
The keystone of Alberdi’s new policy was the national Constitution, conceived, in his words, as the legal and historical expression of a “possible republic.” This proposal was original because it took into account the historical background of the civil war between the centralist and federal factions, and at the same time recognized and valued the dominance of the executive power in Spanish American political culture.
On the first point, Alberdi advanced a theory of federalism different from the one that prevailed in the United States.