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Usos políticos de la historia: Lenguaje de clases y revisionismo histórico

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3088656

1527-1900

Nils Jacobsen,

History of Education in Spain

This volume contains seven major research articles and six shorter pieces for a broader public, most of which have been published before. But they conveniently bring together a focused scholarly production by José Carlos Chiaramonte over the past 15 years on the history of concepts, political language, and ideas, as well as central historiographical debates. The volume is a joy to read due to the author's remarkable erudition, depth of understanding of key problems in Latin American history and in the social sciences, and innovative, independent ideas, even if at times one might wish for somewhat simpler prose.The volume's first, smaller part deals with the history of the concept of class and why it suffered under intrinsic tensions from the very outset in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The second, longer, and weightier part tackles the history and meaning of revisionism in Argentine historiography and, in order to debunk much of the now official revisionism fostered by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's government, delves into the history of constitutions, notions of sovereignty, and federalism in Argentina and beyond between the late colonial era and the early twentieth century.Chiaramonte stresses that Argentine revisionism became overtly linked to politics only since the 1930s; there was an earlier juridical and historiographic revisionism beginning no later than the 1890s that was more scholarly and nonpolitical. It countered the nineteenth-century hegemony of Buenos Aires–centric and liberal historians such as Bartolomé Mitre and Vicente Fidel López, who had seen the “national spirit” emanating from a selfless Buenos Aires elite fighting against the selfish promoters of the “spirit of localism” in the provinces (p. 100). Beginning with constitutionalists at the Universidad de La Plata, scholars debated whether there had been a sense of Argentine nation already by 1810, and thus the provinces could never claim separate sovereignty, or whether sovereignty originally resided in the provinces, which only began to cede it to the Argentine Confederation after 1852. Constitutional law scholars at La Plata during the 1910s and 1920s, from A. González Litardo to Emilio Ravignani, argued that the provincial caudillos of the early independence era were not separatists; instead, by concluding interprovincial pacts and mobilizing the gauchos, they spread the sense of Argentine nationhood throughout the country's interior. This was also a defense of Argentine federalism, which had been maligned by most Buenos Aires intellectuals and which became central to politics after the crisis of 1880. Still, Argentine constitutional law throughout the twentieth century never challenged the initial Buenos Aires position of the “historic prelación [precedence] of the nation over the provinces” (p. 128).It was the generation of the positivist Nueva Escuela Histórica, spearheaded by Ricardo Levene and Emilio Ravignani, that broke with the essayistic tradition of earlier Argentine history writing and adopted rigorous evidentiary and methodological standards. Chiaramonte demonstrates how these historians already display most of the traits and interpretive lines later claimed for political purposes by the revisionists after 1930: the indictment of the Buenos Aires historians for their “antinational liberalism” and unfair condemnation of Juan Manuel de Rosas and other early independence caudillos, the result of either family feuds or intentional twisting of the historical record for political purposes (p. 146). In this argument, the positivist school was aided by some of the early provincial historians, who stressed that before 1850 the provinces, not the nation, defined citizenship and sovereignty.But while the Nueva Escuela Histórica's revisionism exalted the constitutional process started in 1853 for recognizing the merits of all the antagonistic forces during the preceding decades, the new post-1930 political revisionism demonized that process as nefarious for the Argentine nation. This new revisionism, supported first by the thought of Charles Maurras and Italian fascism and later by left-wing populism, instead deified the erstwhile outcast Rosas as the advocate of a different, more socially just Argentine nation before 1852.Chiaramonte follows this history of Argentine revisionism with an important essay about constitutional thought in the transition from colony to independence. As the author has expressed previously, he believes that recent historiography has overemphasized the concepts of liberalism and republicanism as the bases of early Latin American constitutionalism. Instead, Chiaramonte stresses that, as in Anglo-America, many revolutionaries in Latin America — although not all — clamored for the return of their “ancient constitution,” a loose concept of rights and processes that they wished to combine with some new ideas — such as representation — to establish their republican constitutional order. As a result, what has mostly been portrayed as a period of postindependence chaos characterized by caudillismo and the frequent failure of liberal constitutionalism represents for Chiaramonte a “coherent political and intellectual universe, founded upon a group of doctrines many of which derived from natural and international law” (p. 183). This ancient, unwritten constitution was based on the pact between the Spanish crown and the early colonists and indigenous groups. For this type of ancient constitutionalism, notions of pacts and sovereignty would remain more important, even after independence, than notions of rights. Chiaramonte demonstrates the profound impact of natural law well beyond independence by pointing to the continued reliance on Spanish law, the training of political and ecclesiastic elites in the Río de la Plata region in the natural law tradition well into the 1850s, and the fact that the “extraordinary powers” granted to Rosas and other caudillos did not represent their extraconstitutional rule but rather the application of the ancient, natural law concept of legal dictatorship in situations of emergency for the commonwealth (pp. 221–31). Chiaramonte summarizes his approach as seeking to deepen constitutional history into a history of collective beliefs “attentive to the old norms or models that conditioned the social and political life of an epoch” (p. 231).While this is an admirable approach, these essays cannot fully deliver on their enormously ambitious promise. Beyond the exegesis of texts and their conceptual lineages, we would need to learn more about the ideas and practices of broader and diverse social groups to accept that they constituted “collective beliefs.” Moreover, while Chiaramonte acknowledges that not every political figure during the early postindependence decades in the Río de la Plata or elsewhere in Latin America shared that insistence on an ancient constitution, his language at times seems to essentialize this position. Still more helpful to grasping the complexity of postindependence Latin American political cultures remains the notion that they constituted extraordinary laboratories of constitutions, imaginaries, notions of citizenship and sovereignty, and rights and obligations in which an unusually broad range of ideas, practices, and legal and political concepts could be discussed.It is Chiaramonte's merit, together with a growing number of historians, to have rejected the idea that liberalism and perhaps even republicanism were automatically victorious in Latin America's postindependence political cultures, a stance closely connected to his convincing portrayal of revisionism in Argentine history.