Mitre’s third document deals with a subject that pervaded Argentine literature in subsequent decades, namely, the importance of immigration in the settlement and development of Argentine territory. Mitre rejected projects that sought to promote what he called “artificial immigration” and came out clearly in favor of a spontaneous free flow. Interestingly, in an age of belief in the superiority of immigration from Northern Europe, Mitre emphasized the contributions made in various fields by inhabitants of Italian extraction.
Liberal positions were sometimes accompanied by notions bound up with the construction of the new national state. This situation introduced a degree of conceptual tension to which Bartolomé Mitre’s thinking was not immune. This was apparent in his article “Gobiernos Empresarios” (Governments as business managers) about the role of the state in certain activities. Basing his position on Chevalier’s above-mentioned studies on the United States, Mitre supported state participation in certain activities such as the development of communications. Mitre’s article was refuted in an article by José Hernández, author of the Argentine classic Martín Fierro. Hernández defended a rigid antistate position, even in the development of communications, one of the exceptions (“roads”) accepted by Adam Smith.
An influential text at the time was Nicolás Avellaneda’s study of the 1865 public land laws. Avellaneda, later president of the Republic (1874–1880), was heavily influenced by what he interpreted as the experience of the United States in this area. For Avellaneda, any legislation had to clearly state the principle of private property in the distribution of public lands, and he therefore rejected the idea of leasing them. A reading of the text and the discussions of the day gives the impression that what Avellaneda rejected was the method of emphyteusis practiced since the
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days of Rivadavia in the early 1820s.5 He viewed any system that did not directly grant private property as conspiring against attracting immigrants to populate the new lands.
Education, both primary and secondary, was a recurring concern throughout this period. Leandro N. Alem referred to this issue in his speech in the parliamentary discussion about the role of the state in the development of education. Alem expressed hostility to the central power’s interference in education, which in his view should be in the hands “of the district, the township, the neighborhood, and even individual initiative.” Alem cited the experience of the United States and stressed the success of the localized system there. It is interesting that in this and other cases of the period, the U.S. experience dominated political debates. Alem’s address expresses a concern that would become a permanent feature of his thinking, namely, that interference by public authorities would negatively affect citizens’ activity and creativity. He exhorted citizens to participate. “What will become of higher education if the central government is not responsible for it! … But, by God, I would and do say in turn, work a little, stir yourselves … rise up like important figures in order to exert the influence you are entitled to in the political movement of the country, without relying on external inspiration!”
Toward the end of this period, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento published an article in the bold and aggressive tones typical of his writings. In this work, Sarmiento rejected the idea of the social contract as developed by J. J. Rousseau (Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique, 1762) and Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791). He illustrated the critique with a description of the disastrous effects this principle had had on the French Revolution: “The revolution, to render equality, fraternity, and freedom the universal law, led to the empire of a fortunate soldier, and the free people knew no other law than the military discipline of armies, nor any equality other than that of one man attaining the rank of marshal for every 100,000 who died in the battlefields.” While Sarmiento did not quote Tocqueville (L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1857) or Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1791), the influence of both thinkers, especially the latter, is clear.
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Sarmiento’s analysis pointed to what he considered the right path to follow—the one taken in England, where a gradual evolutionary process that kept in mind earlier traditions had achieved far sounder institutional results than those achieved in France. Sarmiento’s preferred model did not refer just to the British experience, but also took in and valued developments in the United States of America.
The concern reflected by Sarmiento’s remarks on the social contract and the French and British experiences was of course meant for local ears: for those preparing for a war that threatened institutional stability in the name of the right to rebellion based on the existence of a “previous contract.” In a way, the text can be read as a bid to consolidate Argentina’s institutional development, which was in its infancy.
IV. LIBERALISM IN GOVERNMENT AND IN OPPOSITION (1880–1910)
The 1880s opened with two works significantly influenced by Benjamin Constant’s classic speech of 1819 about ancient and modern liberty (La liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes, 1819). In the first, by Leandro N. Alem, this influence operated through the writings of another Frenchman, Édouard Laboulaye (Le Parti liberal: son programme et son avenir, 1861). The second, by Juan Bautista Alberdi, showed the impact of Constant via the historian Fustel de Coulanges (La cité antique, 1864). Adam Smith (“the king of economists,” according to Alberdi) and Herbert Spencer (Essays Intellectual, Moral and Physical, 1861) were also major influences.
Alem’s speech was intended to voice opposition to the plan to federalize the city of Buenos Aires, a measure that in his view would seriously damage the federal system of the Constitution and leave “the fate of the Federal Argentine Republic … to the will and passions of the head of the national executive.” The text is possibly one of the more influential in Alem’s long opposition to the central power.
Alem felt that this increase in the power of central government authority threatened the initiative and vigor of the citizenry. The remedy he suggested was expressed in orthodox classical liberal terms: “Govern as little as possible, for the less external government man has, the more freedom advances, the more he governs himself, and the more his initiative strengthens and his activity develops.”
Alberdi reached similar conclusions in his work, albeit with other
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aims: “The omnipotence of the Fatherland inevitably becomes the omnipotence of the government in which it is embodied. This is not only the negation of liberty, but also of social progress, for it suppresses private initiative in the work of such progress.” Alberdi also claimed that the “patriotic” enthusiasm typical of the “freedom of the ancients” necessarily leads to war and not “to freedom, which is fueled by peace.”
Alberdi felt that this attitude lay at the root of some of the problems besetting South America. The great heroes of the continent (San Martín, Bolívar, Pueyrredón, etc.) had taken the notions of homeland and freedom from Spain, and were thus undoubtedly “champions of freedom,” but in the sense of the homeland’s independence from Spain, not its freedom from state interference. In the United States, in contrast, the notion of independence was tied to the idea of individual freedom inherited from Great Britain.
Shortly afterward, however, in 1881, Alberdi published La República Argentina consolidada con Buenos Aires como capital, in which he returned to positions that were at odds with the teachings of his earlier piece. In this later work he effectively celebrated the consolidation of the national executive, which he considered an essential factor in the construction of Argentine nationality. This tradition became established in the following decades, leading to liberalism of a conservative kind that was perhaps most emphatically expressed by Julio A. Roca, who ruled Argentina from 1880 to 1886. This period saw a series of centralizing measures that tended to transfer sovereignty from the provincial states to the national government. These measures affected the army, the currency, and the recently incorporated new territories, and