To many outside observers the Hispanic world before and after independence was synonymous with tradition, reaction, and oppression. Paradoxically it was also a hot-bed of liberalism, and its leaders appeared to believe in reform by legislation. David Bushnell’s book is concerned not so much with the political ideas and historical conditions of Spanish American liberalism as with its policy content and legal expression. Although research of this kind is often regarded as “mere” institutional history, it also concerns political priorities, public opinion, and historical change. And when expertly done, as it is here, it becomes an indispensable guide to what a revolution, or a political movement, or an individual statesman said and decreed. Before modern critics launch their attacks on the so-called liberal heritage, they ought to know for what liberalism actually stood. Thanks to David Bushnell’s book, we now know this for Argentina and Uruguay in the first half of the nineteenth century.
He studies first the various waves of liberal reform, political, economic, and social, in the period 1810-27. The period appeared to be dominated by Rivadavia, though Bushnell points out that it was through him that the creole elite of business and professional men sought to change Buenos Aires. He also reminds us that some of the religious innovations were positively illiberal and, in any case, were not welcomed by the more traditional interior provinces.
In the course of describing liberal legislation, the author makes reference to the reaction against it by conservative governments. There are chapters on reaction, in Buenos Aires and in the provinces, in which the author assembles all known evidence (and some less known) into a marvelously concise account of policy statements and enactments in the period 1829-52. The letter of the law, divorced from its historical context, can be a misleading guide. There is the little matter of civil rights; this may be an anachronistic concept for the 1830s and 1840s, but an account of liberalism and counterliberalism without at least a mention of the Rosista terror seems a trifle unrealistic. Was Rosas conservative or liberal? Bushnell comments on the “essentially liberal” economic policy of Rosas, who would not of course be the last Argentine ruler to combine authoritarian politics with liberal economics. But he also calls Rosas “pragmatic,” and this may be nearer the truth.
In most cases the author has a sure instinct for what is liberal and what is not. He shows that liberalism cut across party labels and could well be promoted by conservatives: “liberalism in the sense used here—as a process of innovation—was never the exclusive possession of self-styled liberals” (p. 2). Another quality of the book is the comparison it makes between the chronology and content of liberalism in Argentina and that in the rest of Spanish America. The treatment of the distinctively Argentine law of universal male suffrage is a model of lucidity, and like the rest of the book sets the record straight.
