In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Liberalismo y poder: Latinoamérica en el siglo XIX
  • Carlos Illades
Liberalismo y poder: Latinoamérica en el siglo XIX. Edited by Iván Jaksić and Eduardo Posada Carbó. Santiago, Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011. Pp. 342. Index.

Studies of liberalism predominate within the field of the history of political ideas in Latin America, notwithstanding the reservations of some scholars about the extent to which liberalism itself took root in the subcontinent. Nonetheless, there are few comparative studies. With the 1996 volume Liberals, Politics and Power, edited by Vincent Peloso and Barbara Tenenbaum, as one of the few antecedents, we now have the current volume. The collection includes essays on Venezuela (Tomás Straka), Mexico (José Antonio Aguilar Rivera), Colombia (Posada Carbó), Chile (Jaksić and Sol Serrano), Peru (Carmen McEvoy), Brazil (Jeffrey Needell), and Argentina (Paula Alonso and Marcela Ternavasio); reflections on European liberalism (H.S. Jones) and the influence of early Spanish liberalism on Spanish America (Roberto Breña); as well as comprehensive syntheses by Natalio R. Botana and Frank R. Safford.

While it is important to recognize the specificity of liberalism as adopted in each country, which makes it impossible to speak of a single model for all of Latin America or indeed for Europe (as Jones demonstrates), the authors agree on the centrality of liberalism in the formation of nineteenth-century political order. At the very least, they concur on a three-part periodization—early liberalism, that of the mid-century, and a synthesis with positivitism in the "conservative" liberalism of the late century—and also on the most significant intellectual influences in each of these stages in the discursive formulation of liberalism, which, as Jaksić and Posada Carbó note, must be distinguished from actual political history. In general, the authors address exchanges and conceptual borrowings between liberalism and conservatism, though they rarely take into account influences rooted in socialism or Catholic thought.

The essays avoid merely doctrinal definitions to highlight instead the precarious balancing of ideas of distinct, and sometimes contradictory, tendencies. Breña notes this with respect to political thought in the Independence era, as does Straka in detailing the discrepancies between Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander. Aguilar Rivera highlights the frequently anachronistic treatment of the ideas of José María Luis Mora and Lucas Alamán, still intellectually close in 1836. These examples, as well as Posada Carbó's treatment of Colombia, underline the importance of the Romantic revolution in the reformulation of mid-century liberalism, although only the last of these calibrates the long-term impact of federalism and the social theses of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, picked up in Mexico by Melchor Ocampo, for example.

As Alonso and Ternavasio note, in Argentina liberalism did not have to confront the weight of colonial institutions as much as it did elsewhere, but more than anything the movement was undermined from the interior. In Chile, according to Jaksić and Serrano, the strength of its adversaries spurred consolidation, facilitated by three phenomena: consensus on the republican form of government, equilibrium among the three branches of the state, and the gradual and consistent transformation of the poltical [End Page 294] system through a series of reforms. Nonetheless, fear of the popular masses and recognition of Catholicism as the official religion—while at the same time public life was becoming increasingly secularized—imprinted a conservative tint. In contrast, as Carmen McEvoy reminds us, the power of a militarized state, based on caudillo-pueblo relations, conferred a particular slant to Peruvian liberalism, the primary outcome of which was the suppression of a party system. The case of the Brazilian monarchy, as Needell writes, is also distinct, as here political competition among liberal parties occurred within the framework of a centralized, authoritarian state capable of maintaining social order and national unity, but which by the end of the nineteenth century could no longer contend with the conflict among existing interests. To a greater or lesser extent, these trends survived the turn of the twentieth century.

Carlos Illades
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Mexico City, Mexico
...

pdf

Share