A noted Argentine scholar of constitutional law presents here a very selective interpretation of the precedents and antecedents to the Argentine Constitution of 1853. The author projects, in the first chapter, a panoramic perspective of the several cycles of Argentine constitutional history, and then proceeds to spend two-thirds of the book on the prelude to the Santa Fé constitutional congress of 1852 which took place less than nine months after the exile of Rosas. Thus the essay is mostly an historical discussion of the Argentine constitution with almost no attention paid to the implications of the constitution on later phases of Argentine history. Bidart Campos outlines eight stages in the Argentine constitutional process: independence (1810), constitutional experimentation (1811-1831), the tyranny (1835-1852), pre-constitutional (1852-1853), constitutional unity (1853-1860), constitutional organization (1860-1880), constitutional stability (1880-1930), and constitutional instability (1930-1969). He does not, however, deal with the latter four stages of constitutional development.
The book is essentially a moral essay in which “good” and “evil” phenomena struggle to assert themselves over the direction of Argentine constitutional history. This theme is continually reiterated and the author is able to see a moral progression embodied in the 1853 constitution. At times the book comes close to being an apologia for the inevitable resolution of the Argentine constitutional crises of 1810-1852 through the promulgation of the 1853 constitution which preserves the democratic and Christian values of the Argentine national culture.
Thus, in retrospect, Bidart Campos sees in the independence struggle, the period of interprovincial pacts, and the Rosas tyranny, the seeds of the subsequent constitutional document of 1853. On the post-1853 period the author spends but seven pages in which he sees the decades between 1853 and 1930 as a time of stability, unity, material and spiritual progress, and educational improvement. The major constitutional villain is Perón, though Bidart Campos recognizes the deepening consciousness for social change during the dictatorship.
A unilinear historical approach is evident in his handling of the events between 1810-1853. After an extremely well done review of contending views in the primary and secondary sources, the author supports the theory that the criollos followed a revolutionary process in their separation from Spain. They not only severed relations with the Spanish “government,” but also questioned their ties to the deposed Fernando VII. Consciously or not, this porteño rupture with occupied Spain led to the momentous South American emancipation movement. This initial prevailing of the forces of good (independence, federalism, and republicanism) over evil laid the foundation for future national events which were equally propitious for the emergence of the conciliatory constitutional vehicle of 1853: the federalist resistance to the absolute dominance of Buenos Aires province, the natural geo-political leadership asserted by Buenos Aires, and the eventual recuperation of an equilibrium between the capital and the interior. This neat Hegelian dialectic culminated in the constitutional synthesis.
Though informative throughout, particularly in the intensive documentary coverage of the 1810-1816 (Congress of Tucumán) period, this deterministic interpretation of Argentine constitutional history should be supplemented by social, economic, and diplomatic studies.
