The political and economic vicissitudes which Venezuela experienced in the 1840s produced the first well-defined political debate among republican elites. General José Antonio Páez and his circle of friends had dominated the country since 1830. Labeled conservatives, they espoused an enlightened paternalism, centralism, and a modified laissez-faire and free trade economy. Political dissent, although grudgingly allowed, was regarded as perilous to public order. By 1840, when overextended planters saw prices of cash crops plummet while the government continued to ally itself with their commercial creditors, the agrarian crisis sparked the formation of the Liberal party as a serious alternative to conservative governments.
The political argument which was forged at this historical conjuncture is the subject of Elías Pino Iturrieta’s concise study. The author arbitrarily limits his discussion to the period of Páez’s influence, 1830-47, highlighting the thinking of such figures as the learned political economist Fermín Toro, the strident stylist Juan Vicente González, and an array of conservative and liberal polemicists who sparred daily in Caracas’s newspapers. Among the questions around which the ideologically eclectic debate revolved were those of political economy (especially Venezuela’s credit laws), political organization, freedom of the press, and immigration policy. But at bottom it was a contest between out-group and in-group over political access, with both sides perfecting the art of skewering the other in print. When the Liberals’ political agenda ignited the latent resentments of the masses, the result was a decade of political and social upheaval, culminating in the devastating Federal War, 1859-63.
The narrative, which flows in a clear, straightforward style, captures the essential elements of this tendentious discourse. Rather than analyzing the ideas themselves—their internal coherence, foreign and domestic influences, their impact on political culture—or weighing subsequent interpretations of them, the author’s aim is to weave the story of their internal evolution into the political history of the period.
A book of this size is not meant to be comprehensive or definitive, hut students of the period might wish to see other issues developed, e.g., the curious attachment of the rural poor to the Liberal platform and its translation into a call for dramatic social change; land and labor policy; or the theme of centralism vs. federalism which metamorphosed in the 1850s. Finally, since so much of the debate appeared as journalism, the book would have been enhanced by going beyond select anthologies to the rich lode of original newspapers in the archives of Caracas.
Elías Pino’s contribution lies in synthesizing Venezuela’s struggle for pluralist political legitimacy during the crucial decade of the 1840s. He reminds us that through the rhetorical smoke of these turbulent times the emerging character of Venezuela—passionate, freewheeling, noisily egalitarian—can be glimpsed.
