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 promoted a moderate protectionism influenced by the German school that was dubbed “rational” by its exponents. The transfers of sovereignty 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
