Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837–1940. Группа авторов
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also affected the Catholic Church: a law passed in 1884 placed primary education within the sphere of the national government, and shortly after that, in 1887, the Civil Registry Office was created.
The controversy over public elementary education produced positions rooted in a dubious liberalism. Pedro Goyena defended the continuation of religious education in elementary school, while Delfín Gallo, a deputy for the ruling party, justified the official measure. Among other things Gallo cited the need to create a favorable environment for immigrants of different religious backgrounds, but also to establish the supremacy of the national Congress over and above the will
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of the “popes.” The ideology prevalent in the 1880s, however, abounded with liberal turns of phrase. Roca himself expressed his intention in 1883 to contribute to the creation of “a nation open to all currents of the spirit without castes, with no religious or social concerns, no tyrannies or Commune … consecrating every freedom and every right of man.” In 1889, at a conference of the Pan-American Union, Foreign Affairs Minister Roque Sáenz Peña voiced this spirit in no uncertain terms. Sáenz Peña successfully opposed U.S. plans to create a continental customs union, which he saw as a threat to the Argentine government’s liberal policy on immigration (“the immigrant is our friend”). He favored keeping the customhouses open and recommended a return to Gournay’s old motto: “Laissez faire, laissez passer.”
Opposition to the governments of the day lay mainly in the hands of two political forces: the Unión Cívica (Civic Union), founded in 1890, and the Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union), founded in 1891 and headed by Leandro N. Alem, who set about the task with ideas from both classical liberalism and civic republicanism. He voiced the liberal view in a speech in the Argentine Senate in which he pointed out that Macaulay’s contention in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843–1844) about England’s Glorious Revolution as compared to the French Revolution could also be applied to his party’s position. For Alem, who had led a rebellion against the established government, the revolution had been in defense of the rights and freedoms established by the national Constitution. He argued that the movement he led was conservative in nature because it defended established institutions. He combined this attitude with John Locke’s view that when an authority exceeds the legitimate limits of its power, it endorses the right to rebellion (Two Treatises of Government, 1699).
From this point on, Alem’s position began to lean toward civic republicanism, an attitude expressed in the provincial uprisings he led in 1893. During this period, which ended tragically with his suicide in 1896, the Radical leader’s attitudes continued to be heavily influenced by distinctly liberal ideas. In 1891, for example, as president of the Unión Cívica, he strongly criticized the existence of official banks (“the union of bank and rifle”), which he saw as another expression of the “damned centralizing tendency.”
Under Alem’s leadership, the party he founded was perhaps the fullest expression of classical liberalism in terms of the central place this
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body of ideas conferred on the limitation of power. Francisco Barroetaveña, one of Alem’s collaborators, expressed this view in his opposition in 1894 to a bill to make Spanish compulsory in primary education. Barroetaveña viewed this measure as a crime against the increasing numbers of immigrants of different nationalities who were settling in Argentine territory. Using the writings of Laboulaye (L’état et ses limites, 1863) and John Stuart Mill (Considerations on Representative Government, 1865) in his exposition, he warned of the dangers of setting the precedent of language unity, as the next thing would be to call for “religious unity, racial unity, other centralist unities, which in addition to conspiring against the Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees, would conspire against the prosperity and civilization of the Republic.”
In 1894, the Radical Party newspaper, El Argentino, embarked on a long-drawn-out controversy with the pro-government La Tribuna about protection and free trade. La Tribuna stood for moderate “rational protection,” while El Argentino took a line more favorable to free trade. Barroetaveña defended this position in the Chamber of Deputies when he requested a reduction in the customs tariffs in force, arguing that free trade had promoted “astonishing development” without any protection for cattle breeding and agriculture—development that should not be checked by a protectionist policy.
The echoes of the position taken by Alem and his followers were still being heard after the Radical leader’s death. In 1904 one of Alem’s old disciples, Pedro Coronado, outlined related ideas in Parliament on the occasion of the debate on the Residence Act, an instrument empowering the president of the Republic to expel anarchist immigrants involved in acts of “sedition,” without a judge’s intervention. Coronado objected to the unconstitutional powers bestowed on the president and referred in his argument to what William Pitt the Younger had stated in what he called the Bible of the English Constitution: “I shall tell what is done with a child entering school for the first time. The teacher approaches him and says: ‘Every man’s home is his castle.’ The child asks: ‘Is it surrounded by a moat or ramparts?’ ‘No,’ replies the teacher, ‘The wind may blow through it, the rain may penetrate it, but not the King.’ How different from what happens in our country!”
Liberal ideas also influenced some of the positions of the newly created Socialist Party (1896). Its founder, Juan B. Justo, steadfastly championed two principles cherished by liberal economists: free trade and
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the gold standard. Regarding the latter, Justo criticized Eteocle Lorini’s defense of the 1899 Currency Conversion Act (in Lorini’s La Repubblica Argentina e i suoi maggiore probleme de economia e di finanza, 1902–4) and his emphasis on the positive advantages that inconvertibility had had for Argentine economic development. Justo viewed the Italian’s position as unacceptable from both a scientific and a social point of view, in the latter case, because inconvertibility had always played a negative role in the Argentine worker’s standard of living. Justo and the socialists of the day believed that only the gold standard was capable of ensuring wage stability.
The last contribution in this period was José Nicolás Matienzo’s analysis of the federal representative government of the Argentine Republic. Matienzo, a member of Alem’s Radical Party, had different views on some of Argentina’s institutional troubles. Some of these woes, such as electoral fraud and corruption, he viewed as to a large extent being a consequence of the effect of the constitutional reform of 1860 in strengthening the power wielded by the provincial governors. Unlike Alem, Matienzo saw the solution to what he considered serious political problems in a decrease of the power of governors and a proportionally incremental presence of central government. He felt that the right path had been taken not by the United States but by Canada, where any power not delegated to the provinces was allocated to the federal government. This position allowed Matienzo to go on defending the continued existence of the federal system, which he saw as deeply rooted in Argentine national history. In his harsh critique of the political system of the day, Matienzo still managed to praise some achievements of the period beginning in 1880: “Institutional deficiencies have not prevented the Argentine Republic from progressing in terms of population, wealth, culture, and civil liberties, more so than any other Latin American country.”
V. LIBERALISM ON THE DEFENSIVE (1912–1940)
The period between 1912 and 1940 saw a gradual decline of liberalism in Argentina that extended into later periods not dealt with here. Yet there was no shortage of voices promoting the defense of liberal ideals via different political schools ranging from reformist conservatism through radicalism to socialism. Several aspects merit highlighting: political liberalism, which sought, via a new electoral law and reforms to the national
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Constitution, to improve electoral practices; the fight against protectionist tendencies; the defense of contracts as voluntary agreements not subject to specific legislation; the evolutionist view of society as a creator of civilized values; and the condemnation of totalitarian dictatorship in its various guises.
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