Alberdi’s analysis in this essay takes account of the fact that the revolution for independence in Argentina immediately turned into a civil war between two irreconcilable camps. Alberdi believed that neither freedom nor the civilization deriving from it could emerge from war. Consequently if the historical process gave rise to a de facto power—the dictatorship of Rosas—that could later be limited by a constitution.
In Alberdi’s view, Rosas’ power in those years was imposed in response to external aggression and domestic conflict. This perhaps utopian idea referred to the ancient philosopher’s dream of the tyrant’s passion being restrained by reason. Rosas the dictator emerges from this text as a figure representative of colonial tradition and a symbol of power obtained exclusively by force, while Alberdi presented himself as emblematic of the constitution and of individual liberties. Power without
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a constitution was tyranny, while a constitution without power, as revealed by Alberdi’s review of thirty-seven years of Argentine history, was synonymous with anarchy.
This approach reveals a connection between the intentions of the actors and their unforeseeable consequences that resembles many of the theoretical assumptions of the Scottish Enlightenment: for example, the fact that the idea of unity advocated by the centralist faction was imposed by Rosas’ federal faction, which defended the opposing project of decentralization. Both parties had contributed to the outcome that power, without which political society and civil freedom are impossible, was to emerge from the war fully formed.
With these reflections Alberdi began to lay the foundation for an analysis both philosophical and historical which, according to the lessons provided by Montesquieu in De l’esprit des lois (1748), had to take into account the particular features of nations, their habits, and their customs.
Such a theoretical view had precedents in the writings of several of Alberdi’s contemporaries, including his teacher, Esteban Echeverría, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Echeverría was a romantic poet and political writer who assimilated the ideas that originated in France and Italy (not yet consolidated as a nation) in the 1830s and were presented, with the force of a creed, mainly through four authors: Giuseppe Mazzini, Alexis de Tocqueville, Félicité de Lamennais, and François Guizot.
In 1837, as Rosas began to tighten his iron grip on freedom of opinion, a literary salon was organized in Buenos Aires under the influence of the Mazzini-inspired organization Young Europe:3 the Asociación de la Joven Generación Argentina (Association of the Young Argentine Generation). Echeverría authored its Palabras simbólicas (Symbolic words).
This text uses Tocqueville’s idea expounded in the first part of De la démocratie en Amérique (1835) as a preamble to a disquisition on the concepts of association, progress, fraternity, equality, liberty, Christianity, and democracy. Echeverría adopted Tocqueville’s principle that equality in the modern world is both providential and unavoidable. The function of liberty consists in limiting this force, which is in many respects blind
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and given to establishing new forms of despotism. In this sense, Echeverría saw the Rosist system, built as it was on state-controlled universal male suffrage, as a Creole version of the Bonapartism in which the process begun by the French Revolution culminated.
Given this point of departure, the effort of “the new generation,” as Echeverría called it, should be oriented toward the formation of a democratic regime based on an interpretation of the role of Christianity that flowed from Lamennais’ thinking in De la religion considerée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et social (1826). This way of conceiving liberal Catholicism in France distinguished the religious from the political sphere and guaranteed freedom of worship. Christianity was for Echeverría a force capable of inbuing civil society with the values of fraternity without the clericalism typical of the Hispanic world.
Acting together, liberty, equality, and fraternity should culminate in the establishment of a political regime founded on a limited concept of sovereignty, or “sovereignty of reason,” according to the theory put forward by Guizot in several of his books, especially Du gouvernement représentatif et de l’état actuel de la France (1816). In accordance with the sovereignty of reason, democracy entailed the broadest individual and civil freedom, but political freedom was to be exercised only by the sensible, rational part of society. Democracy for Echeverría was not therefore synonymous with the absolute despotism of the masses and the majority. The most ignorant and indigent group of the population had to be prevented from exercising their right to vote. This principle of universal application of civil liberties with a restricted application of political liberties would endure in Argentina long after Echeverría.
Shortly after Echeverría published his Palabras simbólicas, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento began his work as a journalist and educator from his exile in Chile. In 1845, after publishing several texts on grammar and pedagogy, Sarmiento serialized the work that would make him famous in the pages of a newspaper. He entitled the work Civilización y barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (Civilization and barbarism: The life of Juan Facundo Quiroga) and presented himself as an emulator of Tocqueville. Rather than being the biography of one of Argentina’s more representative caudillos, however, Civilización y barbarie is a powerful and convincing sociological, cultural, and political re-creation of Argentina at the time.
The title of the work posits a dualist interpretation of society that,
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according to French eclectic philosophy as expounded among others by Victor Cousin (Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie moderne, 1829) and François Guizot (Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe, 1828), must find its resolution in a transcendent synthesis. Civilization and barbarism are two opposite worlds—the Argentine cities and the hostile countryside surrounding them—that intertwine and, following the rhythm of revolution and war, create new realities. The appeal of this point of view lay not so much in Sarmiento’s ability to transfer the romantic myth of barbarism to the Argentine plains, but in his revelation of the presence of caudillos contesting the established society of urban patricians. Revolution thus awakened a previously unknown history.
Sarmiento’s account of the revolution breaks down into two stages. The first arises in the cities that inherit the colonial order; the second buries these attempts at civilization and sets rural society in motion. The men of the independence and the first legislators belong to the pioneering phase, and caudillos such as Quiroga to the second phase. Both will be destroyed by the urban tyranny that Rosas establishes in Buenos Aires.
Civilización y barbarie, having taken readers on a tour of Argentina’s geography, customs, peoples, and social and political processes at its formative period, ends with a paradox: Rosas is indeed merely repeating the old story of despotism motivated by reciprocal terror. But this despotism, while practicing vice, unwittingly creates the opportunity to restore some virtue.
With the Rosas regime overthrown, Argentina will be ripe for a transforming liberal policy. Barbarous society can be transmuted into civil society through education, immigration, the distribution of agricultural property, and foreign capital investment: this was Sarmiento’s program in Civilización y barbarie.
It was a program left incomplete, perhaps due to a lack of appropriate models. Also in 1845, Sarmiento embarked on a trip through Europe, Africa, and America commissioned by the Chilean government to study those countries’ education systems and immigration policies. Sarmiento collected his observations, written in letter form, in two volumes that were published between 1849 and 1851 under the title Viajes por Europa, África y América, 1845–1847 (Travels in Europe, Africa, and America, 1845–1847). The letters assemble his critical judgments on the politics and society of France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Prussia. Sarmiento
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could not abide the battered legitimacy of regimes unable to find a positive solution to the conflict between tradition and modernity that opened up toward