Question

What did Argentinian political philosopher Juan Bautista Alberdi argue about immigration?

Answer 1

Alberdi was one of the best-known of the “Generation of ’37,” an intellectual movement of university students who debated politics, social theories, and philosophy. An opponent of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, Alberdi went into exile in 1838, studying law in Uruguay and also living in Chile and in Europe. After the overthrow of Rosas in 1852, Alberdi wrote his major book, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (“Bases and Starting Points for the Political Organization of the Argentine Republic”), which was the decisive influence on the Argentine constitution of 1853. It emphasized the need for a federal government and argued for attracting foreign capital and immigrants; his approach was encapsulated by his dictum “Gobernar es poblar

The most desirable immigrant, he and his fellow revolutionaries argued, came from Protestant Europe, for they believed the people of these countries possessed the qualities necessary for constructing a prosperous, democratic nation guided by Enlightenment principles.

The idea of national character and the belief that members of different nations were stamped with distinctive characteristics gained force in later decades, as the following generation of Argentines grappled with, and attempted to explain, the failure of Enlightenment ideas to take hold. In 1829, universal suffrage brought to power the infamous caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, who established one of Latin America’s most enduring and brutal dictatorships. Seeking to understand Rosas’ continued popularity among the lower classes, progressive intellectuals—many of whom spent the Rosas years in exile—drew inspiration from German Romanticism with its emphasis on immutable national character and distinctive national destinies. As Domingo F. Sarmiento, one of the foremost members of this generation put it, "We ... began to learn something of national inclinations, customs, and races, and of historical antecedents."

The liberal project had sputtered, these thinkers argued, because revolutionary leaders had underestimated the continued strength of the Spanish colonial legacy. Criticizing their predecessors’ belief that they could create a new nation ex nihlo, members of the Generation of 1837 argued that the Argentine people, the raw material of the nation, had in a sense already existed before the war of independence, having been formed (or deformed) during the long years of colonial rule. Unfortunately for progressives, the character of this people was fundamentally Spanish: prone to violence, despotism, and religious fanaticism, and thus resistant to the Enlightenment ideals the founding fathers had so cherished. Argentine geography, Sarmiento believed, had only exacerbated these negative tendencies. The harsh conditions of the vast, empty pampas, combined with Spanish proclivities, had created a national type and a style of life whose principal characteristics were impulsiveness, violence, and sloth.

What might be called the discovery of an Argentine race or character rooted in history and shaped by geography, religion, and even language had several implications. First, according to the members of this generation, expunging the Hispanic legacy entailed much more than simply imposing liberal democratic institutions on a backward society. It required, instead, a hardheaded assessment of the Argentine character and a willingness to abandon abstract principles in favor of more realistic policies. Romantic notions about national character thus provided Argentine intellectuals with a way to justify a retreat from the goal of participatory democracy. The belief that the Argentine people were fundamentally unsuited to be participating citizens led intellectuals such as Juan Bautista Alberdi to argue for an evolutionary model of Argentine politics. According to Alberdi, whose famous Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina [Bases and Points of Departure for the Political Organization of the Argentine Republic] provided a blueprint for the Argentine Constitution of 1853, Argentina must first pass through what he called the "possible republic": a period characterized by limited suffrage and rule by a progressive but essentially authoritarian state. Only later, once Argentina developed social and economic structures comparable to those of Western Europe, would the possible republic give way to the "true republic," i.e., a fully functioning democracy