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Between Order and Liberty: Juan Bautista Alberdi and the Intellectual Origins of Argentine Constitutionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Jeremy Adelman
Jeremy Adelman*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Abstract

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This essay explores the intellectual foundings of Argentine constitutionalism from the 1830s to the 1850s. Focusing on the writings of Juan Bautista Alberdi and some of his critics, it argues that Argentine constitutionalism had liberal roots but invoked arguments that could neither bring unity to the state-building coalition nor resolve some basic tensions within the framework of national sovereignty.

Resumo

Resumo

Enfocándose en los escritos de Juan Bautista Alberdi y sus críticos, este ensayo es un estudio de las bases intelectuales del constitucionalismo argentino en su período formativo durante las décadas claves del siglo XIX, desde la época de Rosas hasta la unión nacional. Su argumento central es que si bien el constitucionalismo argentino tiene fundamentos liberales, éstos estuvieron arraigados en discursos que nunca resolvieron tensiones lógicas y políticas básicas para la formación del estado.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 86 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

1.

A longer version of this paper was written for a conference in honor of Charles Hale at the University of Iowa, March 3–4, 2006. I am grateful for Charlie Hale's years of support and encouragement to take the history of ideas seriously, to the participants at the conference for their thoughtful suggestions, and to LARR's anonymous reviewers.

References

2. Angel Rama, The Lettered City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) 40–41.

3. Juan Bautista Alberdi, Autobiografía (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1927). Herein lies a case in which strategies of exit, voice, and loyalty are coiled into one figure, and are not mutually exclusive. See Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). On exile, see Yossi Shain, The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).

4. Paul Groussac, “El desarrollo constitucional y las Bases de Alberdi,” in Anales de la biblioteca, t. II (Provincia de Río Negro: Instituto Superior de Servicio Social de General Roca, 1902). See Natalio Botana, La tradición republicana (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1984), especially chapter 6; José Luis Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 133–159.

5. José Rafael López Rosas, Historia constitucional argentina (Buenos Aires: Ed. Astrea, 1986).

6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Brian Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993).

7. On the origins of constitutionalism, see Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Stephen M. Griffin, American Constitutionalism: Theory to Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

8. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Ira Katznelson, Liberalism's Crooked Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

9. Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), chapter 7; Bernardo Canal Feijóo, Constitución y revolución: Juan Bautista Alberdi (Buenos Aires: Hyspamérica, 1986), t. I, 56–86; Jorge Myers, Orden y virtud: El discurso republicano en el regimen rosista (Quilmes: Universidad de Quilmes, 1995).

10. Lionel Gossman, “Jules Michelet and Romantic Historiography,” in Between History of Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 152–165; Donald R. Kelley, Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 101–112.

11. Angel Castellan, “Cuando una afirmación se convierte en interrogante: Vico en Alberdi?,” in Fernando Devoto and Gianfranco Rosoli (eds.), L'Italia Nella Società Argentina (Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione, 1988), 17–43; Santiago Baqué, Influencia de Alberdi en la Organización Política del Estado argentine (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1915), 30–57. Jorge Cabral Texo, “Noticia preliminar,” in Alberdi, Fragmento (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Historia del Derecho in Buenos Aires, 1942), xv–lvi.

12. Juan Bautista Alberdi, Fragmento preliminar al estudio del derecho (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Libertad, 1837), 1–2.

13. Alberdi, Fragmento, 8–10.

14. Alberdi, Fragmento, 11–12 and 14 (quote); Karl Marx, Theses on Feurbach (1845), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 30.

15. I borrow this particular formulation from a brilliant unpublished work. See Elias José Palti, “El Pensamiento de Alberdi,” (Buenos Aires: Tesis de Licenciatura, UBA, 1989), 23. See also Raúl A. Orgaz, Alberdi y el historicismo (Córdoba: Imprenta Argentina, 1937), esp. pp. 84–89; Oben A. Ghirardi, El primer Alberdi: La filosofía de su tiempo (Buenos Aires: Ed. Astrea, 1989), esp. p. 59.

16. Alberdi, Autobiografía, 71; Jorge Mayer, Alberdi y su tiempo (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de Derecho Y Ciencias Sociales, 1973), vol. 1, 191–214.

17. Alberdi to Martiniano Chilavert, Oct. 1841, in Las cartas rosistas de Alberdi (Buenos Aires: Ed. Politeia, 1970), 28; Mayer, Alberdi y su tiempo, vol. 1, 347–381; Palti, “El pensamiento,” 78–81.

18. Alberdi, “Si y no acerca de la controversia ultramontana ó transandina,” (1844), in Obras completas, t. III (Buenos Aires: Imp. La Tribuna Nacional, 1886–87), 71.

19. Alberdi, “Acción de la Europa en América,” El Mercurio, 10–11 agosto, 1845, in Obras completas, t. III, 80.

20. Alberdi to Patricio Ramos, 13 enero, 1846, Alberdi Papers, Los Talas.

21. Alberdi, “La República Argentine 37 años despues de su Revolución de Mayo,” (25 Mayo, 1847), in Obras colectas, t. III,. 219–242.

22. Ibid, 237.

23. Alberdi, “Carta sobre los estudios convenientes para formar un abogado con arreglo á las necesidades de la sociedad actual en Sud-América,” (1850), in Obras completas, t. III, 351.

24. Gutiérrez to Alberdi, 12 enero, 1848, and undated letter numbered 4748, Alberdi Papers.

25. Jorge E. Dotti, Las vetas del texto: Una lectura filosófica de Alberdi, los positivistas, Juan B. Justo (Buenos Aires: Puntosur, 1990), 24–27; Adelman, “Socialism and Democracy in Argentina in the Age of the Second International.” Hispanic American Historical Review 72: 2 (May, 1992), 211–238.

26. Gutiérrez to Félix Frías, April 28, 1849, in Jorge M. Mayer and Ernesto A. Martínez, Cartas inéditas de Juan Bautista Alberdi a Juan María Gutiérrez y a Félix Frías (Buenos Aires: Ed. Luz del Día, 1953), 246.

27. Alberdi to Gutiérrez, 8 julio, 1852, in Mayer and Martinez, Cartas inéditas, 54–55; Alberdi to Frías, 9 abril, 1852, in Ibid, 255. Gutiérrez called the tract “very important for our association and for the diffusion of the best ideas of the century.” Gutiérrez to Alberdi, undated letter No. 4750, Alberdi Papers.

28. Alberdi to Urquiza, 30 Mayo, 1852; Urquiza to Alberdi, 22 julio, 1852, in Ramón J. Cárcano, Urquiza y Alberdi. Intimidades de una política (Buenos Aires: La Facultad, 1938), 3–7.

29. Mayer, Alberdi y su tiempo, t. I, 550–557. Alberdi, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 4th ed., 1981).

30. This is from the preface of the first edition. Cited in Alberdi, Bases, 17–19.

31. Alberdi, Bases, 123.

32. Natalio Botana, La tradición republicana: Alberdi, Sarmiento y las ideas políticas de su tiempo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1984); Baqué, La influencia de Alberdi en la organización política, 95–109.

33. J. G. A. Pocock, “Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 51–71.

34. Ibid, 108, 126, and 285; Oscar Terán, Alberdi póstumo (Buenos Aires: Puntosur, 1988), 39. On the domesticating powers of trade, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

35. Alberdi, Bases, 28–29. See Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf, 2003), 145–147.

36. Alberdi, Bases, 151–154 and 160; Alberdi to Gutiérrez, 15 agosto, 1852, in Mayer and Martínez, Cartas, 55.

37. Adelman, Republic of Capital, 198–208 for more detail.

38. Alberdi to Rafael Corvalan, December 2, 1852, Alberdi Papers.

39. Mariano E. de Sarratea to Alberdi, August 20, 1852, Alberdi Papers; Alberdi to Frías, July 15, 1852, in Mayer and Martínez, Cartas, 257; Canal Feijóo, Constitución y revolución, t. II, 200–211.

40. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Comentarios de la Constitución de la Confederación Argentina (Santiago, 1853), iv.

41. “Primera Carta Quillotana,” January 1853, in Obras colectas, 12–18; Alberdi to Frías, December 13, 1852, in Mayer and Martínez, Cartas, 267.

42. “Estudios sobre la Constitución Argentina de 1853 en que se establece su mente alterada por comentarios hostiles,” (Valparaiso, 1853), in Obras Escogidas, t. III (Buenos Aires: Ed. Luz del Día, 1953), 40–43; Alberdi to Frías, December 13, 1852, in Mayer and Martínez, Cartas, 268. Elements appear briefly in “Examen de la Constitución Provincial de Buenos Aires,” (Valparaiso, 1854), in Obras Escogidas, t. III, 285–328.

43. Alberdi to Frías, September 14, 1852 and Alberdi to Gutiérrez, September 19, 1852, in Mayer and Martínez, Cartas, 58 and 260.

44. Mayer, Alberdi y su tiempo, t. I, 591–593.

45. Alberdi, Derecho público provincial argentino (Buenos Aires: Cultura Argentina, 1917), 24 and 52.

46. Alberdi, Derecho público, 81–89

47. Alberdi, Derecho público, 54–55 and 106.

48. Alberdi to Urquiza, October, 1854, in Carcano, Urquiza, 32–33.

49. See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Pitts, A Turn to Empire.