The "1837 Generation"

Argentina's Founding Fathers dare to envision the birth of a nation...

(Meeting of the members of the "1837 generation" by Alberto Rossi (1858-1936) Source: Public Domain)

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

~ Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French political philosopher

With all the kerfuffle... the alleged “mis-”, “dis-” and “mal-information”... all the hoopla surrounding the “speech that broke the Internet,” our dear readers must have felt as though they’d missed the bus. The Omnibus, that is...

This time last week, we were delving into the two most important pieces of legislation proposed by Sr. Javier Milei’s administration, designed to roll the great Leviathan off its flabby side and push it back into the ocean. They’re part of what we’ve been calling, with modest understatement, the “Greatest Political Experiment of Our Time.”

Ordinarily, we wouldn’t be so interested in what goes into making the political sausage. (Septums and sternums and various legislative offal, we assume.) But this being the blueprint for a new and decisive experiment in liberty, we found our interest piqued. 

Part I – the so-called “mega deregulation decree” (also known as the Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia (DNU) or Decree of Necessity and Urgency) – we addressed in last Tuesday’s issue. Part II, the giant Omnibus Law, we promised to follow up on in Thursday’s communiqué. 

But then...

Then Milei flew to Davos – on his own dime, mind you – and gave it, good and hard, to those cackling vulpine creatures gathered around the cauldron. Said Señor: 

We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world… rather, they are the root cause.

Addressing Darth Schwab’s coven of blood-sucking vampires, the man with the chainsaw stood and delivered. The problem, he told them straight to their sickly, wan faces, is you!

The Idea of Freedom

As ardent critics of the World Economic Forum and everything it stands for, we were happy to see Sr. Milei escape with his life... especially after having introduced millions more people to the dangerous ideas of liberty, capitalism and voluntary enterprise. 

(How many people, we wonder, Googled the name “Israel Kirzner” after Milei’s speech, and subsequently discovered for themselves his theory of entrepreneurship, or the concepts of bounded rationality and market discovery process? Hmm...) 

We’ll have more to say about all that in future musings... but for today, let us return to the massive Omnibus Law, the so-called “Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines.” In fact, let us peer behind its most recent iteration, to the man who inspired it all.

And here we wind back the clock... scouring the dusty pages of history for another starting point, an era when well-attired men of letters gathered in the smoky salons and coffeehouses of Buenos Aires to flesh out the ideas and concepts of the day, and to decide on the kind of future they envisioned for their vast land, rich and fertile, then as now, in resources and possibility. 

Shortly into the 19th century, we find our place...

The Struggle for Independence

Three-decades and change had passed since the American Revolutionary War when, in 1810, the Argentines likewise sought to cast off the yoke of colonialism, a direct response to Napoleon's invasion of Spain and King Ferdinand VII’s subsequent abdication. 

Known as the May Revolution, the revolt of that fateful year precipitated Argentina’s own War of Independence (1810-1818), although no official declaration as such was published until 1816. The following decades, known as the Argentine Civil Wars, were plagued with violence and political uncertainty down here at the End of the World. Two separate constitutions came and went (those of 1819 and 1826) as irreconcilable differences between the warring Federalist and the Unitarian factions rent the nascent country asunder. 

It was against this tumultuous backdrop that a group of young renegades came up, with visions of liberty and self-determination dancing before their eyes and the words of men like Frédéric Bastiat, John Locke and Thomas Jefferson echoing around their huddled meetings. They gathered in cafes and salons around the city, notably in the Salón Literario, which they established in 1837, and after which the intellectual group drew its name: Generación del '37 (The 1837 Generation.)

One man among the crowd, a young lawyer from the province of Tucumán, was Juan Bautista Alberdi. Like Jefferson before him, Alberdi had studied closely the constitutions of other nations, as well as the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-Baptiste Say and Benjamin Constant. He was also well-versed in America’s Federalist Papers and familiar with the writings of Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith and Roger Bacon, among others. 

(Alberdi in his youth, artist unknown. Public Domain)

At the heart of their movement, Alberdi and his fellow radicals sought to install a full democratic Republic in Argentina and to secure civil rights for its citizens by means of a constitution limiting the power of an overreaching government. Wrote Alberdi:

“The omnipotence of the State is the denial of individual freedom.” 

Exile, Treaty and Liberation

Along with his fellow romantics – among them the poet and novelist, Esteban Echeverría, and the political philosopher, writer and second president of the young nation, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – Alberdi believed strongly in man’s right to self-determination and argued for economic freedom (classical liberalism) as the best means by which to increase the general wealth of the people.

Heavily influenced by the United States Constitution, Alberdi’s Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (Bases and starting points for the political organization of the Argentine republic) served as a draft for the Argentine constitution. This he complemented with the Elementos de derecho público provincial Argentino (Elements of Argentine provincial civic law), also strongly influenced by the founding documents of the United States of America. 

Like many of his fellow revolutionaries, whom we might fairly think of as Argentina’s Founding Fathers, Juan Bautista Alberdi was forced into exile for his treacherous ideas. He moved first to Montevideo, Uruguay, just across the Rio de la Plata, where he continued his avid pamphleteering, lambasting the military government of Juan Manuel de Rosas back in Buenos Aires in a series of articles and plays. When former Uruguayan president and dedicated Rosas supporter, Manuel Oribe, laid siege to Montevideo, Alberdi fled once again, this time to the Paris of the North (known then simply as “Paris.”)

It was there in that Alberdi met José de San Martín, the “Liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru,” who had led those countries to victory in the War of Independence. After a spell in Europe, Alberdi returned to the Americas, this time on the other side of the Andes, in Chile, where he founded the newspaper, El Comercio. The eventual defeat of Rosas, in 1852, in the Battle of Caseros, paved the way for the Treaty of San Nicolás and the adoption of the Argentine Constitution, in 1853. 

Finally, after decades of struggle, against powers both foreign and domestic, Argentina became a nation in its own right. But its story was only just beginning.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman