The appearance of the first of a projected ten-volume Historia de las ideas políticas en la Argentina could obviously be an important event in Argentine historiography. The author is a member of the renowned Academia Nacional de la Historia and of the Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas and the author of innumerable monographs and articles on Argentine history. Since he has identified himself with a novísima escuela histórica argentina dedicated to intensive research and to the critical analysis of documents, one’s expectations of a definitive work would not appear unjustified. This initial volume does provide a wealth of useful information on political and intellectual leaders and ideas in the colonial background. It ranges from the Emperor Carlos V through Erasmus, Juan de Mariana, Solórzano Pereira, Juan Baltazar Maziel, Condorcet, Rousseau, and Victorián de Villava, to the influence of Tom Paine, the Federalist Papers, and Jovellanos. It is not, therefore, due to any lack of data that Dr. Gandía’s study does not come up to this reviewer’s expectations. The fault lies elsewhere, in the author’s tendency to present a “lawyer’s brief,” and to include material that sheds little, if any, light on his subject.
Dr. Gandía’s hostility towards the Protestant Reformation and his preoccupation with emphasizing the liberal tradition in Spain lead him into some vulnerable positions and obvious contradictions. German despotism, absolutism, and nazism, for instance, conceivably had other roots than Luther’s influence on the German princes. One might also question whether the disruption of “Europe’s spiritual unity” and German anti-Semitism really were Luther’s fault. And even a reader who is not a Rosista might ask whether Gandía’s attack on Don Manuel is pertinent.
There is so much emphasis on Spanish liberalism during the colonial period—“Charles V was the Emperor of liberty,” “the New Laws assured to perfection the liberty and rights of the American indigenes,” “Father Francisco de Vitoria was the savior of America,” etc., etc.,—that one is almost tempted to believe that there never was a Spanish Inquisition and that the indigenous population enjoyed an idyllic existence under Spanish rule. Nor does Dr. Gandía seem to see any inconsistency between portraying sixteenth-century Spain as a land of perfect liberty and asserting that the Spanish Conquest was inspired by men searching for liberty, not fortune or adventure.
Gandía provides a useful reminder that there was a Spanish liberal tradition and that it did exert an influence on Argentine political ideas. It was not, however, the main current of the Spanish heritage. It was at best a thin stream, and its remarkable feature is not that it had so relatively little importance, but that in its environment it survived at all.