El pensamiento politico de Jaime Guzman: Autoridad y libertad (review)

Gunned down by an assassin's bullet on 1 April 1991, Jaime Guzmán never could develop a legacy as a democratic politician. Dead at the age of 44, Guzmán is remembered as the civilian ideologue for military rule, the father of the military's constitution, and the founder of the right-wing Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI). Guzmán's entry into Chilean politics was via various fringe-right groupings. After heading the gremialist opposition to university reform in the mid-1960s, Guzmán emerged as a vociferous opponent of Allende and immediately following the 1973 coup entered the hermetic confines of the military junta and its advisory bodies. Within days of the coup, along with a handful of civilian professors of constitutional law drawn from the Right and Center, Guzmán was appointed to the commission that produced the first draft of the 1980 constitution. Simultaneously, Guzmán became the most influential civilian advisor to Pinochet on constitutional and political matters, writing—as the many drafts in his archive corroborate—Pinochet's most important speeches during the late 1970s, while publicly defending the regime's actions in the media. Once the constitution went into force in 1981, Guzmán left the government and set about organizing the UDI as a civilian successor to the dictatorship. In December 1989, boosted by Chile's peculiar electoral law, Guzmán, with almost 200,000 votes fewer than now President Ricardo Lagos, was elected to the Senate, where he served briefly until his assassination.

Renato Cristi has written a careful study of Guzman's political thought, which complements an earlier work, coauthored with Carlos Ruiz, on Chilean conservative thought (1993). In this study, Cristi traces Guzmán's evolution from a Catholic corporativist to an advocate of a minimalist conception of democracy; connects Guzmán's early claim that the dictatorship held constituent powers with the thought of Carl Schmitt and assigns him major responsibility for the destruction of the 1925 constitution; stresses how, contrary to claims of his followers, Guzmán justified human rights violations after the coup; and explores aspects of his economic liberalism and intellectual relationship with Friedrich Hayek.

This book provides an important chapter in the study of the Chilean Right's difficult relationship with democracy. However, it suffers from Cristi's decision to emphasize "philosophy" over "history" (p. 18), Guzmán's ideas over Guzmán's political action. This option is especially problematic since Guzmán was, above all, a pragmatic politician whose published writings and confidential counsel (documentation of which survives in the Fundación Jaime Guzmán) were always political interventions in determinate situations. Guzmán is not known for any particular genre; "his work" consists of essays, hundreds of newspaper columns, interventions in the Constituent Commission, speeches drafted for Pinochet, media appearances, and the UDI. As a result, the significance and meaning of Guzman's political thought needs to be teased out of both this corpus and the situations that he sought to shape. Not an easy task, but Cristi invariably makes such connections, though not always with sufficient backing or care. Thus, to bolster his claim for Guzman's importance, Cristi repeatedly claims (pp. 34, 37, 91) that at its first session the Junta appointed Guzmán to direct a group to study a new constitution. However, the very documentation that Cristi reproduces (pp. 122, 128) demonstrates otherwise: the Junta decided to form the Constituent Commission six sessions later and no one was designated to head it. By no means do I wish to diminish the centrality of Guzmán for the military regime and the remaking of the Chilean right, but I insist that Guzmán's political thought has to be reconstructed in careful tension with this larger context. For this reason, readers will do well...