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.
The electoral reforms of 1912 rounded off the process that began after the events of 1890. At the beginning of the last century, Congress discussed the electoral law advocated by Joaquín V. González, President Julio A. Roca’s interior minister. Once passed, the law lasted just two years. In line with the experience of Great Britain and the United States, Roca and González proposed a single member district regime to elect national deputies and electors for president. The climate of the times—the Centenary of Independence—favored reforms designed to purge the voting proceedings of fraud and venality.
The bill backed by President Roque Sáenz Peña and Interior Minister Indalecio Gómez a decade later was more successful—so successful that the most popular opposition party, the Unión Cívica Radical, returned to the electoral fray and was victorious in the 1916 presidential elections. The central idea of these reforms was to complement the vigorous exercise of civil liberties, already visible nationwide, with the no less vigorous and transparent exercise of political freedom. In other words, social, demographic, and educational progress had to be matched by political progress based on honest, competitive elections.
These were not, of course, the only reasons for the conflicts arising in the political and social spheres. Faced by such difficulties, the therapy to rehabilitate politics in Argentina was to make the male vote compulsory. If, in 1902, Joaquín V. González defended the voluntary secret ballot, Roque Sáenz Peña persuaded Congress in 1912 to approve the compulsory secret ballot linked to a system of preference distribution called the “incomplete list.” Compulsory male suffrage was thus a master stroke incorporated in a centralizing, volitionary plan with the general recruitment of native and naturalized eighteen-year-olds fit to vote.
The implementation of this electoral legislation coincided with the impact of the First World War on the international economies and markets. This upheaval, the origin of the subsequent totalitarian regimes, triggered a wave of protectionism worldwide. Paradoxically, one of the most vigorous and consistent of the antiprotectionist liberal positions was put forward in Argentina by Juan B. Justo, who founded the Socialist
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Party in 1896. Justo’s antiprotectionist policy was added, in the Socialist Party program, to the protection of the currency’s value against inflationary monetary emission and the preaching of free cooperation among voluntary associations.
This program was intended to increase workers’ wages, or at least to shore up their buying power against the threat of “inept businessmen,” as Justo called them, setting up monopolies sheltered by the high tariffs of customs protectionism. In light of these debates, it is possible to see a liberal moment in the Argentine socialism of the time similar to those seen in other schools of thought such as conservatism, republicanism, and radicalism.
The 1922 ruling by the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice that a law approved by the national Congress authorizing the regulation of urban leases was constitutional marked the beginning of the end of liberal ideas in Argentina. The ruling revealed a substantive change in the doctrine previously upheld by the Supreme Court in matters relating to economic and commercial activity. Although endorsed by most of the Supreme Court, however, the ruling received a dissenting vote from the Court’s president, Antonio Bermejo, who based his position primarily on the ideas of Juan Bautista Alberdi and emphasized the fact that the decision was a significant departure from the liberal premises of the national Constitution. Bermejo warned that “if the faculty of public powers to fix rents is accepted … it would be necessary to accept also the power of fixing the price of labor and of all things that are the object of trade among men.” The episode was short-lived, and the law was abandoned a year later when the causes that had prompted it disappeared. Its importance was not, however, negligible for the evolution of ideas.
Another liberal moment worthy of consideration came during the presidency of Unión Cívica Radical leader Marcelo T. de Alvear on the occasion of the bill his interior minister, José N. Matienzo, introduced to the Congress to declare the need for partial reform of the Constitution. The Committee of Constitutional Affairs of the Senate, where the bill was sent, did not even consider it, revealing the scant attention merited by such liberal reformism in the 1920s.
The reforms proposed, which followed recent precedents in the United States, included the direct election of senators. The presence in this bill of an evolutionist criterion in constitutional matters also merits attention. Both Alvear and Matienzo shared the idea that the fundamental
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law should gradually be improved by amendments warranted by experience. These criteria did not thrive in Argentina in subsequent decades, and evolutionism and gradual limited reforms were the main victims.
Similar problems became evident on the fiscal front. The bill President Alvear introduced to Congress in 1924, this time jointly signed with his finance minister, Víctor M. Molina, exemplifies the fiscal anarchy that had emerged in Argentina as a result of the superimposition of national and provincial taxes. In the earlier view of Adam Smith, summarized by Alberdi in his Sistema, the liberal temper of tax legislation had to draw inspiration from the criteria of simplicity and taxpayers’ perception of them.
The reality reflected by this bill is quite different. It rather refers to a crowded, mazelike fiscal regime in which consumer goods are taxed simultaneously by the federal government and the provinces. Leaving aside the rather involved remedies
