University of California, Los Angeles

Chapter Title: MEXICAN POLITICAL IDEAS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Chapter Author(s): Charles A. Hale

Book Title: Los intelectuales y el poder en México

Book Subtitle: memorias de la VI Conferencia de Historiadores Mexicanos y
Estadounidenses = Intellectuals and power in Mexico
Book Editor(s): Roderic A. Camp, Charles A. Hale and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez
Published by: Colegio de Mexico; University of California, Los Angeles

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 6. MEXICAN POLITICAL .IDEAS IN COMPARATIVE
PERSPECTIVE: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

CHARLES A. RALE
University of lowa

In 1895 Joaquim Nabuco published a long essay on José Balmaceda, the

Chilean president who was overthrown by a parliamentary and naval revolt
in 1891. Implicitly comparing the upheaval in Chile and contemporary events
in Brazil, Nabuco said that the political history of the continent as whole a
had yet to be written, an assertion that is still valid. 1 Nabuco's effort is un-
usual, because the interpretation of nineteenth-century politics in Latin Ameri-
ca has been govemed by the dictates of separate national experiences. The
traditional themes, presented in narrative detail, have been.personal leader-
ship and conflict, the play of factions and parties, and the clash of ideas
and programs among a narrow goveming and intellectual elite. Except for
a concem with foreign diplomatic or military intervention, political histori-
ans have turned inward," absorbed in phenomena they have construed to be
peculiarly Argentine, Brazilian, or Chilean. Nowhere has preoccupation with
the national political experience been greater than in Mexico, perhaps with
good reason. Mexico was the only Latin American nation to sustain inva-
sion and occupation by two foreign powers; its Church-State conflict was
uniquely intense, as was its mid-century civil war; social upheaval, in 1810
and again a century later, was more profound in Mexico than elsewhere, at
least until 1950. Thus, the question of comparability has been raised even
less by historians of Mexico than by those of other nations.
For the last hundred years there have, of course, been recurring efforts
to interpret Latin American political history more broadly, inspired ·mostly
by insights and theories from the· social sciences. These interpreters have
sought explanations for political behavior in race, psychology, mode of
production, class, or cultural tradition. With a few distinguished exceptions,
such as Les democraties latines de l'Amérique (1912) by Francisco García

1 Nabuco, Balmaceda (2d Spanish ed.; Santiago, 1914), p. 7. The work first appeared
as a series of newspaper articles (Jan.-Mar. 1895) designed as a critique of the laudatory ac-
count by Julio Bañados Espinosa, Balmaceda, su gobierno y la revolución de 1891 (Paris, 1891).

(89)

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90 INTELECTUALES. POLÍTICA E IDEOLOGÍA EN EL SIGLO x~x

Calderón and more recent works by Johh J. JohllSon, Stanléy and Barbara
Stein, Tulio Halperín Donghi, Richard M. Morse, apd Claudio Véliz, the
broader studies of Latín American politié!s have constituttd generalization
with examples rather than substantive cross-national CO(llp14rison. 2
A common characteristic of these works, including the exceptions men-
tioned above, is that their authors have by definition rejected the themes and
mode of presentation of nationally oriented political history. At the.heart
of this traditioilal genre are ideas, and it is the role of ideas, particularly in
the nineteenth century, which explicitly or implicitly has come under strong-
est attack. A basic premise of numerous turn-of-the-century sociological
essays and histories was that government, to cite Carlos Octavio Bun¡e, must
be construed asan "organic" outgrowth of a nation's racial or psychologi-
cal heritage and notas an "independent abstraQtion. "-~ The attempt to mold
government to abstractions, meaning rationally conceived constitutional for-
mulas (particularly the so-called "dogma of equality"), was regarded as a
peculiar Latin American malady and a source of politi<1al turmoil.
The significance of ideas in the political process has also been minimized
in more recent interpretations, whether guided by modernization theory of
the fifties and sixties, by the concept of economic dependency, or by cor-
poratist and related cóncepts that emphasize the cóntinuity of traditional
Iberian values. Modernization theory did accorc;l ideas, that is, liberal'ideas,
major importance, but' they were placed at the end of the causal chain (eco-
nomic development-middle sectors-democracy) rather than made an integral
link in that chain. 4 Dependency analysis, in the trad.ition of Marxism and
the sociblogy of'knowledge, has con~trued ideas as rá~ionale, as appearance
in political behavior rather than reality, which in turn must be sought at a
deeper level, in the ever-closer economic ti~s of ruling elites to world capital-
ism. The cultural determinists do not ignore politieal ideas, but they tend
to distinguish between those that are "lberian" and thóse that are "Western"
or "exotic," meaning derived from the North Atlantic world. It should be
reiterated that the political ideas of Latin America's "liberal century," the
nineteenth, have suffered most in the general interpretations. 5
Perhaps the tinie ·has come to reconsider, not so much whether ideas
should be given a determining or causal role in the political process of the
nineteenth century; but whether the study of ideas in proper historical con-

2 Johnson, Political Change in lalin America: The hnergence o/ the Middle Sectors (Stan-
ford, 1957); Stein and Stein, The Colonial Heritage o/ Lati11'America (Ncw York, 1970); Halperín
Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina (Madrid, 1969); Morse, "The Heritage
of Latin America," in: L Hartz ed., The Foundillg o/ New Societ~s (New York, 1964); Véliz,
The Centralist Tradition o/ Latin America (Princeton, 1980).
3 Bunge, Nuestr.a América (Barcelona, 1903), p. 158.
4 See Peter H. Smith, "Political History in the 1980s: A View from Latin America," in:
Journal o/ lnterdisciplinary History,,12 (Summer 1981), 11.
5 For funher discussion of sorne of these interprctativt; problems, see my "The Reconstruc-
tion of Nineteenth-Century Politics in Spanish America: A.Case for the Histpry of Ideas," in:
Latin American Research Review, 8, no. 2 (Sumdter 1973), 53-73.

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 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 91

text might aid in better understanding that process. Such an effort must be-
gin with an act of "historical empathy," not only for traditional political
historiography, but also for the much-maligned goveming and intellectual
elites for whom political ideas were important. 6 Yet it must be an empathy
that is tempered by critical scholarship and that is freed from partisanship,
nationalism, and hero worship. Comparison may provide one method for
achieving these ends. From the comparative perspective, then, let us examine
two themes of nineteenth-century Mexico, the first general, the transition
in political ideas after 1867, and the second more specific, the constitutional
crisis of 1892-1893.

A principal problem for the student of Mexican political ideas during the
decade following 1867 is to discern the ambiguous relation between "scien-
tific politics,'' a concept of government derived from the positivism of Hen-
ri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, and constitutional liberalism. Scien-
tific politics was formally introduced in tbe newspaper La Libertad between
1878 and 1880 by a self-styled "new generation" of intellectuals, principally
Francisco G. Cosmes, Telésforo García, and Justo Sierra. They saw politics
as an "experimental science" based on facts. Statesmen should no longer
be guided by abstract theories and legal formulas, characteristic of the
"metaphysical" stage of history. The metaphysical mentality was responsi-
ble for Mexico's endemic revolutions and anarchy, most recently the three-
way struggle for the presidency in 1876, which brought Porfirio Díaz to pow-
er. Under Díaz, they argued, Mexico was entering the "positive" stage. Policy
must be based on observation, patient investigation, and experience. New
value must be placed on the economic, the concrete, and the practical; ad-
ministration by experts must gradually replace traditional politics.
The most dramatic feature of scientific politics was La Libertad's frank
support for authoritarian governments, particularly the notorious call for
"honest tyranny" by Cosmes. 7 La Libertad also advocated the strengthen-
ing of government by reform of the Constitution of 1857, notably by ex-
tending the presidential term, adding a suspensive veto, and separating the
vice-presidency from the Supreme Court. The objective was a "practical"
constitution, not one that was "utopian" and thus conducive to extra-legal
dictatorship. The proposed reforms were the subject of a vigorous debate
in late 1878 between Justo Sierra and José María Vigil, who defended the
pure Constitution as the bulwark of Mexico's liberal and democratic
heritage. 8 Sierra called Vigilan "old" liberal, comparable to the "men of

6 1 owe the phrase "historical empathy" to Alan B. Spitzer. For a particularly jaundiced
view of these elites see E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: latin Amer.jca in the
Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1980).
7 La libertad, Sept. 4, 1878.
8 Vigil's arguments appeared from August to December, 1878, in El Monitor Republicano.

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92 INTELECTUALES, POLÍTICA E IDEOLOGÍA EN EL SIGLO XIX

'93" in France wbo believed tbat society could and sbould be molded to con-
form witb tbe rigbts of man, by violence and revolution if necessary. Tbe
"old" liberalism of Vigil must be replaced by a "new'' or "conservative"
liberalism, wbicb for Sierra became a correlate of scientific politics.
The confusion of terminology and tbe reconciliation of tbeoretically con-
flicting concepts was a ballmark of late nineteentb-century political discourse.
Tbe advocates of scientific politics were self-consciously liberals, beirs to tbe
Reforma, tbe national struggle against native conservatives, an Austrian em-
peror, and tbe Frencb army. Yet tbey were attacking tbe precepts of tbe Con-
stitution of 1857, one symbol oftbat beroic age. "Liberal" became an offi-
cial term after 1867, adbered to by ali governments and ali tbose witb political
ambitions. Sierra and bis colleagues spoke of a "new" liberalism, wbile enun-
ciating positivist ideas tbat were tbeoretically bostile to tbe term itself. In
advocating autboritarianism, tbey· claimed nonetbeless to be constitution-
alists, not subverters of constitutional government.
Tbe experience of Justo Sierra and bis colleagues bejore 1878 lends cre-
dence to tbeir constitutionalist claims. They had opposed President Lerdo
de Tejada's autboritarian tendencies and in 1876 became fervent adherents
of José María Iglesias, who as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court declared
Lerdo's reelection constitutionally illegal. 9 When the extreme legalism of Igle-
sias reached a political dead end in the .fast-moving events of 1876, they
forniulated scientific politics and embraced Porfirio Díaz. Moreover, their
call in 1878 for constitutional reform in the interest of strong administration
had precedents in the wartime dictatorship of Benito Juárez and in the Con-
vocatoria of 1867, botb of whicb they upheld. The Convocatoria included
proposals to restore "constitutional balance," that is, to fortify the central
authority which had been critically weakened in the 1857 document. 10 A key
proposal, finally implemented in 1874 and preserved by Díaz over the oppo-
sition of sorne followers, was the reinstitution of a Senate, abolished in 1857
in favor of what Lerdo called "convention government." The influence of
the historical scbool of law, through the French theorist Edouard Laboulaye,
was apparent in the campaign for the Senate which, as advocated by Labou-
laye, was designed both as a buttress against excessive democracy and as an
.agent of centralization.1 1 Thus the program of Justo Sierra and bis col-

9 Justo Sierra and bis brother Santiago, Cosmes, Eduardo Garay, and Jorge Hammeken
y Mexía, all future La Libertad editors, founded El Bien Público on Aug. 1, 1876, in support ·
of the Iglesias cause. Ali except Hammeken held posts in the short-lived Iglesias government.
IO See Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada's skillfully argued "Circular" which accompanied the
"Convocatoria para -la elección de los supremos poderes,'' Manuel Dublán and José María
Lozano, Legislación Mexicana, JO (México, 1878), 44-57.
11 Laboulaye's Histoire des Etats Unís was published by the government in a Spanish trans-
lation by Manuel Dublán in 1870. The work originated in lectures given at the College de France
beginning in 1849, a key feature of which was a defense of a two-chamber legislature and an
attack on the unicameral system adopted by the 1848 Republic. Laboulaye's discussion of the
U.S. Senate was also inserted in the "Dictamen de la comisión de puntos constitutionales" of
Dec. 24, 1869,. in Jorge L. Tamayo ed., Benito Juárez, 14 (México, 1%9), 411-39.

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 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 93

leagues in 1878 revealed the confluence of historical constitutionalism and

scientific politics, a confluence of ideas that was similar among the leaders of
the incipient Third Republic of France, an important model for the Mexicans.
In more general terms; Mexican liberalism was transformed after 1867
from aJi ideology in combat with inherited colonial institutions and social
patterns into a unifying myth, and political debate was carried on within the
confines of that myth. The era was.one of increasing consensus in which
political and military contenders like those of 1876 or intellectual contenders
like Sierra and Vigil could in time become reconciled and form part of what
might be called by 1890 the Liberal Establishment. .
Broad political consensus within an elite Liberal Establishment also
prevailed in Argentina and Chile after 1870, but the pattern of change in
political ideas was different from that of Mexico, both in its timing and in
its specific intellectual elements. To understand this difference, we must turn
back half a century. In Argentina and Chile, the shift away from classic liber-
alism carne earlier and was more gradual than in Mexico, where the elements
of liberal ideology became fixed by the early l 830s and persisted through-
out the Reforma. These elements included the assumption that society was
made up of autonomous individuals who should be made equal under the
law and free to exercise their rights and pursue their interests. The goal of
individualism could be achieved by imposing legal or constitutional guaran-
tees against "despotic" central power, or it could·be achieved by removing
the corporate restrictions to individual liberty and legal equality. The two
programs were contradictory, since the first, constitutionalism, entailed a
weakening of central government authority, while the second, the attack on
corporations and secularization, necessitated the strengthening of that same
authority. 12 However, the programs could often be pursued simultaneously
since both were rhetorically directed against the "colonial past."
In Mexico, we associate classic liberal ideas with José María Luis Mora,
in Argentina with the triad of the Asociación de Mayo, Esteban Echeverría,
Juan Bautista Alberdi, and Domingo F. Sarmiento, and in Chile with the
Generation of 1842, José Victorino Lastarria and Francisco Bilbao. For ex-
ample, these were the principal figures compared by Leopoldo Zea in Part
One of bis influential pioneer work, Dos etapas del pensamiento en
Hispanoamérica (1949), translated as The Latín American Mind. Mora and
the classic Argentine and Chilean pensadores were similar in that they ali
overtly attacked the spiritual and social legacy of Spain in America and ex.:
tolled utilitarian values that were consonant with individualism. This com-
mon theme was characterized by Zea as "mental emancipation." Mora iden-
tified a persisting "corporate spirit" that hindered the formation of a
"national spirit." Lastarria called for "spiritual liberation," Bilbao for the
"de-hispanicizing," even the "de-catholicizing" of Chile. Sarmiento con-
trasted the colonial mentality of Córdoba with the modern and liberal men-
tality of Buenos Aires.
12 See my Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853 (New Haven, 1968).

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94 INTELECTUALES, POLÍTICA E IDEOLOGÍA EN EL SIGLO XIX

However, the South Americans, despite their anti-Spanish and anti-

colonial rhetoric, had by the late l 830s moved away from classic liberal posi-
tions. This was not the case with Mora. The former derived their principal
intellectual orientation from the broad European attack on the validity of
the doctrines of natural rights and utility, those two variants of Enlighten-
ment political philosophy which guided the early faith in constitutions. French
literary romantics, Burkean conservatives, German legal scholars, and early
socialists all judged these doctrines to be abstract, legalistic, and of ques-
tionable universal application. Sarmiento acknowledged the new direction
taken by the "social sciences" in France after 1830. "We then began," he
wrote in Facundo in 1845, ''to learn something of national inclinations, cus-
toms, and races and of historical antecedents," and to abandon Bentham,
Rousseau, and Constant for the historians Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot,
for Sismondi and ultimately for Tocqueville. I 3 . Though Mora never em-
braced Rousseau or popular sovereignty, Constant's constitutional legalism
and Bentham's rationalism were bis guiding doctrines.
Echeverría was drawn to other "new" ideas not mentioned by Sarmien-
to. His Dogma socialista (1939) revealed the influence of Mazzini's "Young
Europe" movement and the socialist "religion of humanity" of Leroux. Al-
berdi, in his seminal essay "Fragmento preliminar al estudio del derecho"
(1837), cited Lerminier, the early French popularizer of Savigny, whose com-
parative and historical approach to law was not decisive in Mexico until after
1867. 14 Law should be considered, said Alberdi, notas a "collection of writ-
ten documents, '' but as ''a living and continually progressing element of so-
ciety." 15 In Chile Lastarria also mentioned Lerminier, but drew particular-
ly from Quinet's introduction to bis translation of Herder's philosophy of
history. The laws of human progress and decadence can be found only in
history, wrote Lastarria, not in nature. 16 Sociabilidad, as in Bilbao's Socia-
bilidad chilena (1844), was the key word of the day. Liberal reformers and
constitution makers must be guided by the peculiarities of a country's histor-
ically conditioned social relations, not by abstract principies.
The Mexican whose ideas best approximate this shift in liberal assump-
tions was Mariano Otero. Like Lastarria, Otero emphasized historical in-
evitability, the progress of civilization, and the interrelated nature of ali so-
ciety. His optimism led him to criticize the anticlerical reformers of 1833,
for whom Mora was the major theorist, just as Sarmiento criticized the doc-
trinaire spirit of the Rivadavian regime of the 1820s. Otero maintained that
the economic power of the Church was being undermined by social changes
and the spread of enlightenment, and that the extreme measures of the reform-

l3 Sarmiento, Facundo (Buenos Aires, 1961), p. 265.

14 Laboulaye (see above) was also an adherent of Frederich Carl von Savigny, the found-
er of the German historical school of jUTisprudence, and he published a study on Savigny in 1842.
15 Alberdi, "Fragmento," Obras completas, (Buenos Aires, 1886), / 105.
16 Lastarria, "Investigaciones sobre la influencia social de la conquista i del sistema de
los españoles en Chile" (1844), Obras completas, 7 (Santiago, 1909), 25.

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 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 95

ers only caused an unnecessary political schism in the country. Otero was
also attachedto federalism. Drawing from both the "associative federalism"
of the Fourier school and the more historical orientation of Sismondi, he
regarded the federalist principie as "the system of nature," the basis of
"diverse associations' 1 from families to nations. 17 Otero's apology for fed-
eralism was analogous to the appeal by Echeverría and Alberdi that the sterile
conflict between unitarios and federalists be surmounted and that the legiti-
mate interests of the provinces be recognized. Lastarria was a lifelong advo-
cate of muriicipal autonomy, the heart of Chilean federalism.
The parallel between Otero and the writers of the Asociación de Mayo
and the Generation of 1842 seems natural when we realize that they were
roughly contemporaries. Both Lastarria and Otero were boro in 1817. The
Argentines were six to twelve years older, Bilbao five years younger. On the
other hand, Mora was born in 1794, a full twenty-three years earlier than
Otero and Lastarria. Given this disparity in age and intellectual orientation
between Mora and the majot SouthAmérican liberal pensadores, the subti-
tle of Zea's work, del romanticismo al positivismo, is confusing. The desig-
nation "romantic" is certainly·appropriate for the ideas of the South Ameri-
cans. lt would also be appropriate for those of Otero, whom Zea did not
mention, perhaps understandably sim:"e Otero was in reality a minor figure.
But the designation does not fit Mora, whose ideas were clearly pre-romantic.
The source of the ~onfusion is that Zea probably borrowed his categories
from the Argentine Alejándro Korn's ln/luencias filosóficas en la evolución
nacional ( 1936), a work he cited frequently. 18
The "romantic generation" of Mexican liberals, of which Mariano Otero
was a precocious and short-lived.men1ber, was also the generation of the
Reforma, to wit, Mi~uel Lerdo de Tejada (b. 1812), Melchor Ocampo
(b. 1814), Ignacio Rarn.írez (b; 1818)..-and Guillermo Prieto (b. 1818). A study
of the intellectual orientation of tbese men would probably revea! that they
were exposed to many of the same ideas as Otero and the South American
liberals, but that Mexico's political polarization after 1846 inhibited their
application. Thus the dichbtomy within earlier liberalism between doctrinaire
constitutionalism añd a strong refonnist state was perpetuated in the incon-
gruous juxtaposition of the Constitotion of 18S7 and the Laws of Reform.
The Mexican Constitution, with its emphasis on natural ri~hts, popular
sovereignty, anda weak executive, was quite different from the Argentine
Constitution of 1853, imbued with the practica! and conciliatory spirit of
the historical school of law, as espoused by Alberdi. 19 Ideological concilia-
17 Otero, Ensayo sohre el verdadero estado de la rnestión social y política que se agita
en la Repúbica Mexicana (México, 1842), pp. 61-62, ll7-20. See also "Estudio preliminar"
by Jesús Reyes Herq)es to his edition of Otero's Obras (2 vols.; México, 1967).
IS Chap. 111: "El Romanticismo"; chap. IV: "El Positivismo."
19 It should be noted that the strong democratic impulse in the Constitution.of 1857,
reflected in the explicit pronouncement of popular sovereignty (art. 39), was a departure from
earlier constitutionalism, either as in the 1824 document or in the ideas of Mora. Nor was such
a pronouncement present in the Argentina Constitution of 1853.

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96 INTELECTUALES, POJ_.ÍTICA E IDEOLOGÍA EN EL SIGLO XIX

tion was congenia! to the situation of mid-century Argentina and Chile, where
the Church issue was dormant, but not to Mexico, a difference dramatized
by the travail of the moderados during the Reforma era. Otero would un-
doubtedly have been one of those tormented political moderates, had he not
died prematurely in 1850.
To retum to our principal theme, the transition in political ideas after
1867, we again confront the critica! effect of Mexico's engrossing mid-century
conflict. Whereas scientific politics in Mexico was the dramatic statement
of a post-civil-war generation, in Chile its first exponent was none other than
Lastarria himself, thirty years Sierra's elder-.Since many of the assumptions
of the European romantic liberals, ·for example the organic view of society
and the historical approach to social analysis, were shared by their contem-
porary Auguste Comte, it is not surprising that Lastarria should embrace
Comtean positivism in 1868 and then apply it to politics in Lecciones de po-
lítica positiva (1875). ,
Lastarria's intellectual career reveals an openness to changing currents
of European thought which was always more apparent in Chile and Argen-
tina than in Mexico. The grafting of new ideas onto old ones carne more
gradually and imperceptibly. Lastarria's Lecciones advanced the Comtean
judgnient that the Latin American nations were in a "painful and anarchi-
cal transition" between the metaphysical and the positive mentality. Yet it
also perpetuated Lastarria's faith (always less explicit among the La Liber-
tad group in Mexico) that individual liberty was destined to increase with
the progress of society. 20 Though Lastarria's adoption of scientific politics
reinforced bis sympathy for strong reformist government (he was an anticler-
ical spokesman and minister in the mid-1870s), the Lecciones did not con-
tain the frank apology for authoritarianism present in La Libertad. On a
theoretical level, he was more explicit about the limits of state power than
either the Mexicans in 1878 or Valentín .Letelier, bis younger colleague who
became the major intellectual and educational figure of the following ge-
neration. 2I
In sum, the transition in political ideas from the early to the late Lasta-
rria or from Lastarria to Letelier was less abrupt than the comparable transi-
tion in Mexico, and the threads of scientific politics and liberalism in Chile
are even more tangled and difficult to unravel. In Argentina, it might be
added, the two are so tangled that Argentines are even fond of construing
positivism (or scientific politics) as autochthonous, that is, predating the en-
try of Comtean concepts. 22 The theoretical conflict between scientific pol-
itics and constitutional liberalism did persist, however, despite apparent po-

20 Lastarria, "Lecciones," Obras, 3, 54-59.

2I It might seem natural to compare Lastarria's "discovery" of positivism in 1868 with
Gabino Barreda's Comtean interpretation of Mexican history, presented in the final paragraphs
of his Oración cfvica of 1867. The two men were only one year apart in age. Barreda, however,
was not politically oriented, either before or after 1867.
22 See, e.g., Korn, "Filosofía argentina" (1927), Obras, 3 (Buenos Aires, 1940), 261.

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 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 97

litical consensus within the Latin American elites, and was bound to come .
to the surface. Thus we reach our second theme, the crisis ofthe early 1890s.

In 1893, Mexico experienced a major debate in the Chamber of Deputies

and the Mexico City press. It was touched off by an apparently technical
constitutional issue and then broadened into a complex, three-sided exchange
on the nature of the Constitution of 1857, the liberal heritage, and the value
and implications of applying scientific principies to politics. The debate was
preceded by the formation of the National Liberal Union in 1892, ostensibly
to promote the third reelection of Porfirio Díaz. It seemed a routine election-
year organization created to arouse an apathetic populace to greet with en-
thusiasm yet another term for a now perpetual president. However, the Liber-
al Union Manifesto, issued on April 23, 1892, also included a thinly disguised
challenge to presidential power. 23 Led by Justo Sierra, the challenge carne
from a small group close to the government, dubbed the científicos in the
course of the ensuing debate.
If we examine Mexico's crisis of the nineties comparatively, we discover
that it formed part of a significant breach in the Liberal Establishment of
Latin America's four major nations. The formation of the National Liberal
Union and the debate in Mexico was paralleled by open political conflict in
Argentina, Brazil, and Chile between 1889 and 1893. The turbulent events
in South America were closely related to economic and financial dislocations,
and indeed these dislocations now provide a standard point of departure for
interpreting them. The turbulence may also be seen as a significant moment
in Latin American thought.
As recognized by Joaquim Nabuco in his essay referred to at the outset,
both Brazil and Chile experienced through the course of 1890 and 1891 a
mounting conflict between executive and congress. Following the establish-
ment of the Republic on November 15, 1889, two military presidents, Manoel
Deodoro da Fonseca and Floriano Peixoto, clashed with the Constitutional
Congress of 1890-1891 and with its successor. Deodoro's resignation in favor
of Floriano carne three weeks after he had dissolved Congress on Novem-
ber 3, 1891. The leader ofthe Senate, Prudente José de Morais e Barros, was
elected first civilian president in 1894, after having lost narrowly to Deo-
doro in the presidential election of February 1891. In Chile, the parliament
condemned Balmaceda for "electoral intervention," particularly the threat
that he would impose a favorite as his successor, and for decreeing a budget
without its approval. The President closed the parliament twice during 1890
and reshuffled his cabinet several times, to no avail. Civil conflict began early

23 The "Manifiesto a la nación" of the Primera Convención Nacional Liberal appeared

in El Siglo XIX, Apr. 26, 1892. Justo Sierra was elected President of the mesa directiva of the
Convention (ibid., Apr. 8).

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98 INTELECTUALES, POLÍTICA E IDEOLOGÍA EN EL SIGLO XIX

in 1891, ending with Balmaceda's resignation and then bis suicide on Sep-
tember 19.
Argentina's dramatic events of 1890, known as "El Noventa," also in-
volved a challenge to presidenti~l power, but one that emanated from be-
yond the legislature. On July 26 a "revolution" broke out in downtown Bue-
nos Aires anda momentary ''provisional government'' was established under
Leandro Alem, who had been a founder the year before of the Unión Cívica
de la Juventud, a political club "to cooperate in the reestablishment of con-
stitutional practices in the country and to combat the existing order of things.''
The existing order of things was the presidency of Miguel Juárez Celman,
who managed to suppress the revolt of July 26 but who, in turn, was forced
by Congress to resign on August 6 in favor of bis vice-president, Carlos
Pellegrini.
In ali four countries the conflict entailed resistance to authoritarian power
in the name of constitutional principies. Moreover, with the partial excep-
tion of Argentina, the resistance carne from within the governing elite, even
from sorne who were ministers. In Chile, Letelier, who was the leading ad-
vocate of scientific politics in the 1880s andan admirer of Bismarck, moved
from ambivalence toward Balmaceda in 1889 to hostility in 1890. After a
brief period of imprisonment, he championed the triumphant "Revolution."
Its object, he said, was not to implanta parliamentary oligarchy, but rather
to restore constitutional liberties and administration, the latter of which had
become mixed with "politics" under the personal tyranny of Balmaceda. 24
In Brazil, the positivist ideas that permeated the founding of the Republic
tended to sharpen the conflict between authoritarianism and constitutional-
ism. Orthodox positivists, like Miguel Lemos and Raimundo Teixeira Mendes,
expressing Comte's disdain for constitutional liberties, called for a "repub-
lican dictatorship," just as Comte had welcomed Louis Napoleon's coup in
1851. 25 However, the heterodox Benjamin Constant, the republican leader
among the younger army officers, rejected this position and clashed with
Deodoro before he died in 1891. Another opponent of the provisional Presi-
dent was bis civilian Minister of Finance, Rui Barbosa, author of the draft
Constitution. Barbosa's attack increased against Floriano, both at home and
asan exile, in Cartas de Inglaterra (1896). 26 The conflict in Brazil was com-
plicated by the fact that it carne in the wake of Pedro Il's overthrow. Con-
stitutionalist enthusiasm was exaggerated, as was a vain effort at political
reconciliation, judging from the diverse makeup of the first republican minis-
tries. Moreover, as Deodoro and Floriano became more "dictatorial," nostal-
gia set in for the supposed constitutional balance achieved under the Em-

24 Letelier, La tiranía y la revolución, o sea relaciones de la administración con la políti-

ca estudiadas a la luz de los últimos acontecimientos (Santiago, 1891). This was the initial lec-
ture of Letelier's course in administrative law for 1891.
25 See Joiio Cruz Costa, History of Ideas in Brazi/ (Berkeley, 1%4), 160-73.
26 Barbosa, like Sierra, called for an independent judiciary, which he maintained had be-
come subservient to the military presidents. See Cartas (Spanish ed.; Mexico, 1953), pp. 23, 29.

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 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 99

pire. It was this nostalgia that inspired Nabuco's massive biography of bis
father, a Liberal Party leader, and his essay on Chile. Both Brazil and Chile,
he wrote, "had [before 1889) the same continuity of order, parliamentary
government, civil liberty, [and] administrative purity." Now only a "Liber-
al League" of enlightened men could save Latin America from further
chaos. 27
Letelier's ambivalence toward statism in Chile can be compared with that
of Sierra in Mexico. In the main, Sierra's program of 1892 seemed to
epitomize the socially conservative, technocratic, and economically oriented
principies of scientific politics. However, he ended the Manifiesto by assert-
ing that if "effective peace has been acquired [since 1867] by the strengthen-
ing of authority, definitive peace will be acquired by its assimilation with
liberty." He then proposed several constitutional reforms, particularly one
to malée judges irremovable, that is, appointed by the President for life, rather
than democratically elected and thus subject to popular whim or presiden~
tial manipulation. In the 1893 debate on the measure, Sierra supported it
with the arguments from "science" he had used to support strong govern-
ment in 1878. In the face of the dictatorial power acquired by Díaz in the
intervening years, Sierra had turned constitutionalist in hopes of limiting that
power.
Sierra and the other advocates of irremovable or life-tenure magistrates
presented the elements of traditional constitutionalism in the language of
the new sociology. Sierra saw "an increasingly more elevated and compre-
hensive formula of justice" as the product of social evolution. For Francis-
co Bulnes, liberty, the object of an independent judiciary, was "a moral need
of human beings, as powerful and demonstrative as the need for nourish-
ment and reproduction. " 28 The advocates also evoked the historical record,
and cited the epic struggle for a free judiciary in the face of tyranny from
above, for example Philip 11, and from below, for example the Jacobin
revolutionaries of France. Sierra was less elitist than sorne of bis colleagues,
but he saw a free judiciary as necessary to provide democracy its "element
of stability" against anarchy, defined as the disintegration of the ''social or-
ganism. " 29
The second position in the debate emerged when El Monitor Republicano
announced that ''there is a group conspiring in the name of scientific poli-
tics against the Constitution and democratic principles." 3 El Monitor's º
defense of the pure Constitution followed the lines set down by Vigil in 1878,
but was undercut by the fact that the editors were not hostile to irremovable
judges per se, only to their appointment by the President. Moreover, they
27 Nabuco, Balmaceda, pp. 14, 219. On Nabuco's Um Estadista do imperio: Nabuco de
Araújo (1898-1899) see Richard Graham, "Joaquim Nabuco, Conservative Historian," Luso-
Brazilian Review, 17 (Summer 1980), 1-16.
28 Sierra, speech of Oct. 30, 1893, in Diario de los debates, XVI legislatura, 3 (1893), 220;
Bulnes9 speech of Dec. 12, 1893, in ibid., p. 495.
2 Sierra, speech of Dec. 11, 1893, in ibid., p. 471.
30 Dr. Luis Alva in El Monitor, Nov. 4, 1893.

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100 INTELECTUALES, POLÍTICA E IDEOLOGÍA EN EL SIGLO XIX

could hardly disagree with Sierra's questioning of the excessive power of Díaz.
The main opposition to Sierra's proposal did not come from the "Jaco-
bins," or doctrinaire liberals, but rather from El Siglo XIX, a leading advo-
cate of the National Liberal Union in 1892. The staff of El Siglo split over
the irremovability issue, a split essentially among traditional advocates of
scientific politics. It was El Siglo in the course of the debate which labeled
Sierra and bis constitutional reformers científicos, a label the latter took
up with pride. 31 El Siglo's position, expressed most forcefully by Francisco
Cosmes, Sierra's former colleague of 1878, was in effect an apology for the
authoritarian regime of Porfirio Díaz, but on novel grounds. Given Mexi-
co's centuries-long social exploitation, said Cosmes, it is useless to look to
an irremovable judiciary as the protector of rights. The State is the "only
barrier protecting the pueblo bajo from the tyranny of the upper classes";
"only the State is concerned with the interests of the community." He went
even further, asserting that irremovable magistrates would inevitably be tied
to "the interests of an oligarchy determined to keep the country in back-
wardness and the people in slavery." Cosmes's attack on the elitism of the
científicos reached its climax with a strong affirmation of "popular suffrage"
as the basis for strong executive authority. This, of course, had been the ra-
tionale for the wartime dictatorship of Benito Juárez, and Díaz was now por-
trayed as perpetuating the work of the great reformer and democrat. 32
The irremovability measure passed the Chamber of Deputies, but it never
emerged from committee iD the Senate. lt is clear that the bill had aroused
the opposition of Díaz himself, and thus the constitutional reform move-
ment that began with the founding ofthe National Liberal Union collapsed.
The conflict in Argentina was similar to that in the other countries, but
it also had unique national features. Scientific politics was not formally ar-
ticulated, as in Chile and in Mc::ico, though many of its assumptions, stem-
ming back to Alberdi and Sarmiento, became articles of faith among the
Liberal Establishment. The practice, if not the theory, of authoritarian
government took hold with the presidencies of Julio A. Roca and Juárez
Celman, enhanced by secularization policies of the 1880s, by the new eco-
nomic and political centrality of the city of Buenos Aires, and by the merg-
ing of the old parties into the single Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN).
The president became jefe único del partido único, branded the unicato by
opponents.
The focus of resistance in 1889-1890 was not Congress, as in Brazil or
Chile, nora definable inner circle like the Mexican científicos. The Unión
Cívica included Alem, Aristóbulo del Valle, and Bernardo de Yrigoyen, old
Buenos Aires Autonomistas ·who resented the new centralism of the former
provincials Roca and Juárez Celman. Thus, they implicitly kept alive the ques-
tion of regional organization, Argentina's peculiar constitutional question.
31 The designation los científicos first appeared in El Siglo on Nov. 25.
32 Cosmes, "Un poeta extraviado entre los positivistas. El Sr. Sierra y su discurso sobre
inamobilidad del poder judicial," El Siglo, Dec. 14, 15, 19, 27, 30, 1893.

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 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 101

The Unión Cívica also drew in former president Bartolomé Mitre, a princi-
pled old liberal who disliked the regime's corruption. The vague rhetoric of
the Civic Union movement was constitutionalist, but it also had democratic
overtones not present elsewhere.
The sealing of the breach was the work of Carlos Pellegrini, whose ca-
reer and ideas epitomized the merging in practice of constitutionalism and
scientific politics. A respected jurist and legislator, he was also a partisan
of professionalism and administration; he became an expert in finance and,
as President, established the Banco de la Nación in 1891. Pellegrini had been
an uneasy participant in the unicato, an old porteñ.o friend of Alem and
del Valle who stayed in touch with them even during El Noventa. Yet he
was a part of Buenos Aires high society and had been a founder of the J ock-
ey Club in 1881. His prime concern was governmental continuity, which led
him in 1892 to short-circuit the Civic Union by successfully proposing Luis
Saenz Peñ.a, the father of its candidate, Roque, as PAN candidate for Presi-
dent. Roque Saenz Peña withdrew from the race.
Political peace was quickly restored in all four countries, facilitated by
a fundamental agreement on economic and social values. The PAN continued
in power in Argentina until 1916, Díaz in Mexico until 1911. The Chilean
parliament remained supreme until 1920. The constitutional "balance" un-
der civilian rule established in Brazil after 1894 prevailed until 1930. A mood
of reconciliation took hold in the aftermath of conflict. In Chile, the puni-
tive measures enacted against adherents of Balmaceda were never put into
effect. A general amnesty was declared in August 1894, and by 1895
Balmacedistas were returning to office. 33 The Mexican científicos were co-
opted by the Díaz regime. Justo Sierra was elevated to the Supreme Court
in 1894, an ap.pointment that must have seemed almost insulting to the
defender of judicial independence. José Yves Limantour, the most famous
científico, remained as finance minister until 1911. In Argentina, the Mitre
branch of the Civil Union movement became thoroughly reconciled with the
governing PAN; in fact, its would-be candidate of 1892, Roque Saenz Peña,
was elected President in 1910.
Seen comparatively, the significance of i'1exico's crisis of the nineties
is brought into clearer focus. Not only was the political consensus of the
late nineteenth century severely challenged, but old ideas were reformulated
and new ones made their appearance. The unifying blandishments of the liber-
al myth could not restrain permanently the inherent conflict that existed be-
tween the statist, centralizing, technocratic implications of scientific politics
and the traditional principies of constitutional liberalism, no matter how so-
cially conservative and tied to oligarchic interests these principies had be-
come. The conflict in Mexico was merely a debate, and not open political
contention as in the other countries. In Mexico, the challenge to presidential

33 Harold Blakemore, British Nitrates and Chilean Politics, 1886-1896: Balmaceda and
North (London, 1974), p. 242.

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102 INTELECTUALES, POLÍTICA E IDEOLOGÍA EN EL SIGLO XIX

power failed, whereas it succeeded elsewhere. Except in Mexico, a resurgent

constitutionalist oligarchy temporarily thwarted the authoritarian impulse
in scientific politics. Nonetheless, the issues and their significance were simi-
lar. The conflict viewed comparatively also reveals a Latin American cohort
of politically responsible, engaged intellectuals -Justo Sierra-, Valentín
Letelier, Joaquim Nabuco, Rui Barbosa- and at least one statesman, Carlos
Pellegrini, whose search for effective constitutional government should elicit
our empathy, if not our outright admiration. 34
The crisis also brought democratic ideas to the surface. The second party
to the Mexican debate, the Jacobins or doctrinaire liberals, reiterated a defense
of the pure Constitution, which proved ineffective in 1893 but provided a
precedent for the Liberal Clubs of 1900-1906. The term Jacobin also appeared
in Brazil, though its democratic import was questionable. 35 The most sig-
nificant appearance of liberal democracy was in Argentina, where the Unión
Cívica split in 1892, producing a Radical wing and the origins of a mass
suffrage political party. But democracy also emerged as proto-populism, in
the Cosmes argument that Díaz was dedicated to attacking social inequities.
If the argument seems implausible for 1893, it did revive the concept of the
State as agent of reform, headed by an authoritarian president. In Chile,
an interpretation of Balmaceda as a strong and popular nationalist reform-
er, if not present in 1891, developed soon thereafter and had great impact
on twentieth-century politics. Although the breach in Latin America's Liberal
Establishment was sealed and political unity restored, the new ideas suggest-
ed that consensus could not endure.

34 Pellegrini was bom in 1846, Sierra in 1848, Nabuco and Barbosa in 1849, and Letelier
in 1852.
35 The Jacobin Club of Rio and a Jacobin press supported Floriano in 1893, espousing
an extreme republican (anti-monarchist) and xenophobic (anti-Portuguese) position. See June
E. Hahner, "Jacobins versus Galegos: Urban Radicals vs. Portuguese lmmigrants in Rio de
Janeiro in the 1890's," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 18 (May 1976),
125-54.

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