The Argentine lawyer and scholar Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884) was a staunch liberal and an opponent of the dictatorial rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas. When Rosas finally fell from power in 1852, Alberdi saw it as an ideal moment for Argentines to plot a new course forward. To do so, they would have to assess their current situation and then craft rational reforms based on that analysis. This is precisely the project Alberdi took on in his Foundations and Points of Departure for the Political Organization of the Republic of Argentina. In it, Alberdi argued that economic growth was the key to Latin American progress. Without economic growth, countries like Argentina would be stuck in an endless cycle of dictatorships falling to rebellions only to be replaced by new dictatorships. As you read this excerpt from Foundations, compare Alberdi’s ideas to those of Bilbao and Sarmiento. With which of those two authors would he be most likely to find common political and ideological ground?

Only those great means of an economic nature — namely, the nourishing and strength-giving action of material interests — will be able to extract South America from the utterly untenable situation in which it finds itself.

That situation comes from the fact that America has become a republic through governmental law, but the republic is not a reality in its territory.

The republic is not a reality in South America because the people are not prepared to rule themselves under this system, a system that exceeds their ability.

Would returning to the monarchy of another time be the way to give this America a government suitable to its capability? If the republic is not practicable, given the present condition of our people, does it then follow that monarchy would be more practicable?

Decidedly not.

The truth is that we are not sufficiently mature to implement any representative government, be it monarchical or republican. The partisans of monarchy in America are not mistaken when they say we are incapable of being republicans; but they are more mistaken than we republicans if they think we have greater means for being monarchists. The idea of a representative monarchy in Spanish America is most inadequate and foolish; it even lacks common sense, it seems to me, if we concentrate on the present moment and the state to which things have come. The monarchists of our first era could be pardoned for their dynastic plans — the monarchical tradition was only at one step’s remove, and there still existed an illusion about the possibility of reorganizing it. But doing so today would not occur to anyone with a sense of what is practical. After an endless war to convert into monarchies what we have changed into republics by a twenty-year war, we would be very happily returning to a monarchy more unsettled than the republic.

Brazil’s noble example should not delude us; let us congratulate that country for the good fortune that has come its way, let us respect its form, which knows how to protect civilization, let us learn to co-exist with it and proceed in harmony to the common goal of all forms of government — civilization. But let us refrain from imitating it in its monarchical way. That country has not experienced being a republic for even a single day; its monarchical life has not been interrupted for an hour. It passed from colonial monarchy to independent monarchy without interregnum. But those of us who have practiced republicanism for forty years, although terribly, would be worse monarchists than republicans because today we understand monarchy less than we do the republic.

Would the new elected monarchy take root? It would be something never before seen. By its essence monarchy has tradition as its origin. Would we elect our friends, who are our equals, as counts and marquesses? Would we consent freely to be inferior to our equals? I would like to see the face of the one who considers himself competent to be elected king in republican America. Would we accept kings and nobles of European extraction? Only after a war of re-conquest. And who would imagine, much less consent to that madness?

The problem of what government is possible in the former Spanish America has only one sensible resolution — it consists in elevating our peoples to the level of that governmental form necessity has imposed on us; in giving them the ability they lack for being republicans; in making them worthy of the republic we have proclaimed, which today we can neither make workable nor abandon; in improving the government by improving the governed; in improving society to secure the improvement of the government, which is its expression and direct outcome.

But the road is long, and there is a great deal to anticipate before we come to its end. Would there not be in such a case a suitable and adequate government to move us through this period of preparation and transition? Fortunately, we have one and do not need to leave the republic.

Happily the republic, so rich in forms, permits many stages and lends itself to all the needs of the age and the space. To know how to adapt it to our age is the entire art of constituting it among us.

That solution has a fortunate precedent in the South American republic, and we owe it to the good sense of the Chilean people who have found in the energy of presidential power the public guarantees for order and peace that monarchy offers without giving up the nature of republican government. To Bolívar is attribute this profound and spiritual saying: “The new states of the former Spanish America need kings with the name of presidents.” Chile has resolved the problem without dynasties and without military dictatorship through a constitution, monarchical at base and republican in form, law that entwines the tradition of the past with the life of the present. The republic can have no other form when it immediately follows upon monarchy; the new regime must contain something of the old; the last ages of a people do not leap ahead. The French Republic, offspring of the monarchy, might have saved itself in that way, but the excesses of radicalism will return it to a monarchical rule.

How to make, then, democracies in fact of our democracies in name? How to convert our written and nominal liberties into facts? By what means will we manage to elevate the current capacity of our peoples to the level of their written constitutions and proclaimed principles?

By the means I have indicated and everyone knows — by educating the people, working through the civilizing action of Europe, that is to say, by immigration; by a civil, commercial, and maritime legislation with adequate foundations; by constitutions in harmony with our time and our needs; by a system of government that favors those means.

Source: Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey, eds. and trans., Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Tradition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007), pp. 201–202. Copyright © 2007 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Questions to Consider