Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837–1940. Группа авторовЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 proposed by this legislation, it is important to stress the trend already prevailing in the 1920s, a trend that would become more pronounced in later years. This description of the tax system in Argentina also shows the difficulties inherent in the federal regime where tax collection was concerned, and the need, acknowledged in Article 4 of the bill, to compensate provinces levying internal taxes on general consumer goods in Argentina with proportional cuts in the relevant customs duty.
During the 1930s, liberal ideas were overshadowed by opposite schools of thought. This was the case with the totalitarian ideas that emerged in the Hispanic world (Spain and Portugal) and later, more forcefully and aggressively, in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. Likewise, the Russian Revolution spawned a clearly more antiliberal left than the one that found expression in the social democratic parties of the Second International. In the democratic world, the economic crisis of 1929 contributed to the emergence of solutions that, like the New Deal, relied to a great extent on state intervention. Argentina’s experience in those years was similar, and the liberal response to all these challenges was weak. One exception was Emilio Coni, a prestigious and influential economic historian and professor in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Buenos Aires, who published a letter explaining to the “Martians” what was happening on our planet. In this early contribution from
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1933, Coni warned of the uncontrollable advance of interventionist ideas in the field of economics.
Possibly the most original contribution, however, is José Nicolás Matienzo’s lecture titled “La civilización es obra del pueblo y no de los gobernantes” (Civilization is the work of the people, not of the rulers). In this work Matienzo adhered explicitly to the evolutionary ideas of Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer (First Principles, 1862, and The Factors of Organic Evolution, 1887), and made public his debt to the ideas of Alberdi. Matienzo’s thesis was suggested to him “by unfair criticisms that, during the dictatorship that has just elapsed, have frequently been made regarding the ability of the people to manage their own life.” Alluding to the de facto government of General Uriburu (1930–1932), Matienzo warned of the rise of right-wing totalitarian ideas at that time associated with the regimes of Primo de Rivera and Benito Mussolini. Matienzo rounded off his analysis in classic liberal style by asserting that “civilization is the work of private initiative among the members of the people, not of the official action of government agents.”
The 1930s were thus not as generous in the production of liberal ideas as previous decades had been, with one notable exception at the end of the period. In July 1940, Marcelo T. de Alvear, a former president of the Republic and head of the main opposition party, the Unión Cívica Radical, delivered a lecture at the British Chamber of Commerce. German troops were at the time winning victory after victory in Europe, and the USA was still neutral. Under such difficult circumstances, Alvear expressed