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. In the latter experience, the states preceded the organization of the federal union at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. In Argentina, on the other hand, colonial unity, which survived in the early years of independence, preceded disintegration in several provinces as an effect of the civil wars. For Alberdi, federalism was therefore a concession the legislator had to make when faced with the historical impossibility of establishing a centralist constitution, as several failed attempts demonstrated.
Faced with this reality, Alberdi proposed a transaction between the opposing forces of unity and federation that would extract the best from each and combine them in a mixed formula. Hence, it was necessary to take stock of the two forces’ funds of power. The centralist tradition had its source in the colonial political order and had later gained prestige
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thanks to the collective sacrifice in the Wars of Independence, to the Argentine flag, to shared glories. The word Argentina derived from this tradition, seen as a symbol of a common sovereignty, as yet implicit but attractive nevertheless.
Diametrically opposed to what federalism meant in the United States, the federal tradition in Argentina was a result of the breakup of the old united territory; the interregnum of isolation; the diversity of the soil, climate, and production; the legacy of municipal governments that dated back to the cabildos; the exercise of power in the provinces during three decades of autonomy; and the enormous and costly distances in a space that lacked roads, canals, and transport. These traditions had engendered political and social habits that had to be merged in order to satisfy both provincial liberties and the prerogatives of the entire nation.
All things considered, this interpretation of federalism was favorable to the national government and to a centralization that—besides historical analyses of the country—had three main sources: the one responding to the federalist side of the U.S. Constitution, as illustrated by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers and Joseph Story in Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833); the one deriving from other centralist interpretations of federalism such as those of the constitutionalist Pellegrino Rossi in his classes of constitutional law at the University of Paris (1835–1837); and, finally, the precedent of the Chilean constitution Alberdi experienced while in exile during the 1840s and early 1850s.
The constitutional stability of Chile as against the unstable authoritarianism he saw in Argentina, the distinction between civil liberties common to all inhabitants and political liberties restricted to a small core of citizens, inspired in Alberdi a strong conception of a republican presidential system with monarchic overtones embodied in the predominant figure of the national executive power and of the president holding that office. As Alberdi used to say, the executive must be given all possible power, but only under the rule of a constitution. This tension between liberal ideals about limited power and the risk of presidential hegemony entailed by the centralist traditions pervades these works by Alberdi.
The first part of the Constitution of the Argentine nation, approved by the General Constituent Congress on May 1, 1853, and amended in 1860 and 1866, reveals these tensions. Although he was not directly involved in this congress, the draft constitution Alberdi appended to the edition of the Bases and the role of his colleague and friend Juan María
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Gutiérrez in the editorial committee for the final text of the Constitution both suggest Alberdi’s decisive influence, though it was by no means the only one, especially after the amendment of 1860, which by its additions brought the text closer to the model of the U.S. Constitution.
In any case, a review of the articles making up the first part of the Constitution at the time allows us to specify its main features in greater detail, both in terms of the goals of progress it stipulates and of the institutional means at its disposal. For one thing, the preamble differs from that of the U.S. Constitution in its invocation to God and its offer of the constitutional guarantees “to all men of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil.” This universal incitement to immigration is specified in Article 25, by which the federal government must promote European immigration, and Article 20, which bestows full civil rights on foreigners without them having to adopt citizenship or pay any extraordinary compulsory contributions.
These aims are guaranteed by a classical liberal repertoire of individual rights and by a representative government, mentioned specifically in Articles 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 29, and 32. Nevertheless, two instruments to consolidate national power are explicitly legislated in Article 6, through which the federal government intervenes in the territory of the provinces to defend republican government and repel external invasions or seditious acts, and in Article 23, which gives the federal government the power to declare a state of siege in any portion of the territory affected by internal unrest or external attack. With this precaution the Constitution structurally incorporated the adoption of extraordinary measures that both Alberdi and Sarmiento had observed with approval in Chilean constitutional practices.
With these favorable omens Argentina entered a long period that might be described as the heyday of liberalism.
III. LIBERALISM IN A NEW NATION (1853–1880)
The 1853 Constitution opened a new phase in Argentina’s institutional development. Some earlier problems persisted, however, the most serious being the confrontation between the Argentine Confederation and the state of Buenos Aires. This conflict came to an end in 1862, when the federal government began to establish its supremacy. Certain local conflicts continued in the following years, but the process of institutionalization now under way continued advancing with significant
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landmarks such as the 1860 constitutional reform; the creation of the Supreme Court of Justice of the nation; and the enacting of the Civil, Commercial, and Criminal codes. This was a time when ideas of liberal origin were highly influential. The contribution of President Bartolomé Mitre (1862–1868) in the formulation and dissemination of these ideas was considerable and significant. Even before taking office, Mitre had outlined a doctrine as governor of Buenos Aires Province that persisted throughout subsequent decades. In 1857, indeed, he proposed continuing a tariff policy protecting wheat cultivation in Buenos Aires while noting its provisional nature in an initial statement of commitment to the principles of free trade. Strictly speaking, this position resurfaced at the national level in 1876, after which time the protection of wheat was shelved as a result of the massive influx of Argentine wheat in international markets.
