The Jesuits and their missions in the Platine region have been an attractive and controversial subject since the eighteenth century. Post-independence liberals condemned the Jesuits as theocratic dictators; neo-Thomists praised them as great spiritual leaders; and Robert Cunninghame Graham found the mirror of his own Fabianism in an idealized Jesuit Utopia on the Paraná. The present book, which was first published in Bahía Blanca in 1952, is the work of Oreste Popescu, a graduate economist of the University of Innsbruck now teaching in southern South America. He views the missions from the perspective of his considerable knowledge of economic systems and in the contemporary milieu of nations undergoing socio-economic reform while debating rival economic systems.
Using as a tool of analysis the economic systems described by Werner Sombart, Popescu has examined descriptions of missions supplied by the standard Jesuit chroniclers. He suggests that the secret of the successful mission system in the La Plata lay in Jesuit empiricism and adaptability to Guaraní traditionalism. Some lands were owned communally, others privately; goods were sold by villages and individuals; tools were privately owned, but livestock was common property; the Indian divided his labor about equally between communal and private lands. The Jesuits, he concludes, were not concerned with the purity of any rationalized economic system, but with creating the conditions in which their charges, under a minimum of social protection, might eventually achieve individual self-consciousness in a socially humane Christian community. They subordinated economic production to Christian and humane purposes.
The chief value of this work lies in its clear conception and careful execution. Popescu has asked only questions relevant to economic theory and has supplied only evidence relevant to the questions. The resulting impression of practice compared with theory is so clear that any future writer on this subject would seem bound to take a Popescuan position on the Jesuit economic system in the Paraguayan missions. More documentation is unlikely to disprove that theirs was an empirical economy of mixed systems. The narrow spectrum of the work, however, caused the author to accept uncritically Jesuit claims about the ultimate goals of their system. Other questions asked of the works consulted would show that the mission Indians were the shock troops and the civil guard in the Río de la Plata, and that the Indians in the 1750s were not nearly so obedient to the Jesuits as Popescu suggests. These facts cannot easily be reconciled with the Utopian picture of social and spiritual solidarity in an emerging humane Christian community.