Shortly after Juan Manuel de Rosas, the Restorer of Laws, came to power, Florencio Varela found himself unwelcome in Buenos Aires, a fate shared by many of his articulate and liberal contemporaries. He emigrated in 1829 to Montevideo, where he opposed Rosas with pen and plata. This book, a collection of essays, focuses exclusively on Varela’s ideas and attitudes as expressed in the columns of the newspaper, the Comercio del Plata, that he founded in 1845 and edited until his assassination in 1848.
Chapters deal with the major issues confronted by Varela in those years, among them a philosophical basis and justification of liberalism; economic development; free trade and the free navigation of rivers; the politics of Justo José de Urquiza; the French-English intervention; continental policy. The best essay is by Félix Weinberg, who develops a clear summary of Varela’s ideas and a coherent structure in which to place them. The author correctly separates Varela’s thought and politics from those of Echeverría, Sarmiento and Alberdi. The latter developed a far more complex and systematic vision of the Argentina they wished to build than did Varela, who saw himself as more pragmatic than the others. In fact, Varela was primarily a polemicist, not a philosopher.
The book proves that Varela was concerned above all with the overthrow of Rosas’s regime, which he viewed not only as tyrannical, immoral and reactionary, but also (with a quixotic twist) illegal. European intervention to depose Rosas was sanctioned, therefore, on broad grounds, although the authors argue convincingly that Varela always insisted on recognition of the integrity of the patria. Following the overthrow of the tyranny, he hoped, Argentina would achieve political democracy and stable institutions, economic development through free trade, and a better deal for the interior provinces than they experienced under all previous schemes, federal or unitarist. In this program, Varela differs from his contemporaries only concerning details.
The importance of this book and of Varela himself derive from the understanding that among the exiles from the Rosas government there was broad consensus on what Argentina should become. If they failed to achieve political stability, the causes were not ideological, but profoundly economic and social. Herein is my chief criticism: except for Weinberg’s essay, there is insufficient attention to Varela’s ignorance of the social question, his willingness to accept England’s and France’s non-solutions for Argentina. The Generation of 1837, I am convinced, was committed deeply and selflessly to liberalism: neither greed nor self-interest can be blamed for its failure, but rather fundamental contradictions of a cultural, economic and social order. Finally, it must be said that the book, while thorough and at momentes penetrating, is too often repetitive on a rather narrow subject.
