One of the deepest roots of our modern tyrannies in South America is the Greco-Roman notion of patriotism and of Fatherland, which we owe to the half-classic education that our universities have copied from France.
The Fatherland, as the Romans and the Greek understood it, was essentially and radically opposite to what we understand today in our modern societies. It was an institution of holy and religious origin and character equivalent to what the Church is nowadays, not to say more important. It was the association of the souls, the people and the interests of its members. Its power was omnipotent and unlimited in respect to the individuals that integrated it. The Fatherland, thus understood, was and had to be the denial of individual freedom, in which all really free modern societies base their freedom. The individual was owed completely to the Fatherland; he owed his soul, his person, his will, his fortune, his life, his family and his honor. To preserve one of those things from the Fatherland was to betray it; it was like a sin.
According to those ideas, patriotism was not only reconcilable with, but the same and identical to the absolute and all-embracing despotism in the social order. The great revolution that Christianity produced in the concepts of man, God, family and the whole society radically and diametrically changed the basis of the Greco-Roman social system. Nevertheless, the renaissance of the old civilization from the ruins of the Roman Empire and the formation of the modern States revived the foundations of such past and dead civilization; not in the person of the States, still amorphous, but in the majesty of their governors in which the majesty, omnipotence and authority of the Fatherland was personified. That was the reason for the despotism of the absolute kings who arose from the feudality of the Europe regenerated by Christianity. The State or the Fatherland continued to be omnipotent in respect to its individual members; but now personified in its monarchs or sovereigns, not in its people. The omnipotence of the kings took the place of the omnipotence of the State or the Fatherland. Those that did not say "I am the State", thought it and shared the believes of that who said it.
Revolted against the kings, the people replaced them in the exercise of the Fatherland’s power, which at least was more legitimate regarding its origin. The sovereignty of the people took the place of the sovereignty of the monarchs. Still, the Fatherland was the only source of law, maintaining the original character of its absolute and all-embracing power over the person of each one of its members. The omnipotence of the
Fatherland continued to be the negation of the freedom of the individual, in the republic as it had been in the monarchy. The modern Christian society, in which man and his rights are theoretically the main issue, continued to be governed in fact by the rules of the old and pagan societies where the Fatherland was the most absolute denial of freedom. Divorced from freedom, patriotism was associated with glory, understood as the Greek and the Romans did.
That is the present condition, in both worlds, of the societies of Greco-Roman origin. Its individuals, rather than free are the serfs of the Fatherland. The Fatherland is free inasmuch as it does not depend on the foreigner, but the individual lacks freedom inasmuch as it is absolutely dependant on the State. The Fatherland is free because it absorbs and monopolizes the liberties of all its individuals; but its individuals are not really free because the Government gathers in its hands all their liberties. Such is the social regime that the French Revolution has produced, and such the political society that it originated in the Greco-Latin America by means of the example and repetition of the French Revolution which lasts until today.
The "social Contract" of Rousseau -turned into catechism of our revolution by its illustrious coryphaeus Dr. Moreno (a)- has governed our society and the citizen has continued to be a property of the State or the Fatherland incarnated and personified in its Governments, natural representatives of the majesty of the omnipotent State. The omnipotence of the State, exercised according to the rules of the old societies of Greece and Rome, has been the raison d’ être of its representatives, the Governments, called free only because they stopped to emanate from the foreigner.
Another was the destiny and condition of the society of North America. That society, radically different from ours, owed to the transatlantic origin of its Saxon inhabitants the direction and complexion of its political regime of Government, in which the freedom of the Fatherland had by limit the sacred freedom of the individual. The rights of men balanced there in their value the rights of the Fatherland, and if the State was free from the foreigner, individuals were not less free from the State. That was in Europe the Anglo-Saxon society and that was in North America the Anglo-American society. Both were characterized by the sovereign development of the individual freedom more than by the outer freedom or independence of the State, which was owed mainly to its insular geography in the case of England and to its transatlantic isolation in the case of the United States.
The freedom in both Saxon people did not consist of being independent of the foreigner, but of being each citizen independent of the Government of his country. Men were free because the State and the power of their Government was not omnipotent. Because its Government did not have as a model that of the Greek and Roman societies, the State had its power limited by the power of its individual members and their sphere of freedom. Montesquieu said that the English Constitution arose from the forests of Germany; perhaps he meant that the Germanic destroyers of the Roman empire were free because their Government was of neither Latin origin nor nature. It is to the freedom of the individual, the freedom par excellence, that the people of the North owe the opulence that distinguishes them.
___________
The people of the North do not owe their opulence and greatness to the power of their Governments, but rather to the power of their individuals. They are the product of selfishness more than patriotism. It is seeking its own particular greatness that each individual contributes to further that of its country.(1) This fact highly interests the salvation of the American Republics of Latin origin. Their future destinies will reach their salvation through individualism; they will never be saved if they expect somebody to save them by patriotism. The selfishness of the citizens, correctly understood, only is a vice for the selfishness of the Governments that personify the States. In fact, the eagerness of self- greatness is the virtuous eagerness of the individual, which is a fundamental factor for the social order, the family, the property, the household, the power and the well-being of each and every man. Societies that expect to receive their happiness from the hand of their Governments expect something that is contrary to nature.
Following the nature of things, each man has the providential duty to pursue his own well-being and progress; no man can love the greatness of another as much as he loves his own greatness. There is no more powerful and effective means to achieve the greatness of the social body than to leave to each of its individual members the absolute power to take care of himself and work out his personal greatness.
Such is the order of nature and for that reason it is the best and most fecund. The history of the Saxon societies of both worlds of the North is a testimony of that. States are wealthy because of the labor of their individuals and such labor is fecund because individuals are free, that is to say, owners and masters of their persons, goods, life, home. Whenever those societies need some work or improvement of public interest their men look at each other, meet, discuss, reach an agreement and act by themselves in the execution of the work that their common interests require. In communities of Latin origin, individuals needing a work of general improvement raise their eyes to the Government, beg, expect everything from its intervention and remain without water, light, trade, bridges, wharves, if the Government does not give everything already done.
__________
Nonetheless, we must not forget that the origin of the omnipotence of the State and its Government among the South American people was not all Greek nor Roman. In any case, this would not be but the mediate origin, because the immediate origin of the omnipotence in which our individual liberties were suffocated was the structure that Spain gave to its colonial States in the New World, which was not different in that respect from the one Spain gave to itself in the Old World. Thus, the root and origin of our modern tyrannies in South America is due not only to our remote Greco-Roman origin, but also to our immediate and modern origin of Spanish character. In fact, Spain gave to itself the complexion owed to its past as a Roman colony before becoming a Roman province and the Fatherland, in its territorial sense, always absorbed the individual and was personified in its governments of divine and sacred right, which completely eclipsed the rights of men.
The omnipotence of the State, meaning the absolute and unlimited power of the Fatherland with respect to its individual members, has as a necessary consequence the omnipotence of the Government in which the State is personified, that is to say, pure and simple despotism. And, there is no more means of preventing Government from becoming omnipotent over the individuals of which the State is made, but by causing that the State stop to be unlimited in its power with respect to the individual, which is the elementary factor of its community. An example of this: when the governor of Buenos Aires received in 1835 the sum of the public powers from the representatives of the State, he did not obtain them by means of the law, which appeared to have discerned them. The law, far from being the cause and origin of that power, had as raison d’être the same power that already existed in the hands of the head of the omnipotent State by reason of the Decree of Intendancies. In fact, pursuant to the Spanish constitution of the Vice kingdom of Buenos Aires, the Viceroy Governor and General Captain was to continue with the all-embracing power and the extraordinary capacities that such constitution and the corresponding Laws of Indies appointed to him.
The structure that the Hispanic-Argentine Government received from that legislation is the same that the subsequent laws of the revolution have not reconstructed until today in that respect. The Republic, like the colonial Vice-kingdom, continued to understand the power of the Fatherland over its members as the old societies of Greece and Rome understood it. In spite of our modern constitutions, taken from those governing the free countries of Saxon origin, no liberal among us would doubt that the right of the individual should bow and yield before the right of the State in certain cases. The Republic, therefore, continued to be governed for the benefit of the public powers that have replaced the power of Spain following the same structure and complexion that being its colony was granted for its royal and imperial benefit. The crown of Spain did not found its colonies in America to increase the wealth and power of its colons, but rather to strengthen its own businesses and power. But, in order for this view not degenerate in a system able of giving wealth and power to the colons, the colony received the social and political Constitution that was to make its people a mere instrument of the royal patrimony, a simple fiscal producer on account of its Government and for its royal benefit. It is true that the Constitutions that later regulated the conduct of the Government of the Republic described as “legislative crime” the act of granting extraordinary and absolute powers to their governors. However, that magnificent disposition did not impede that the sum of all the powers and economic forces of the country be as a matter of fact at the discretion of the Government, which can use of them by thousand indirect means.
How is that? If you leave in the hands of the Fatherland, that is to say, of the State, the sum of the public powers, you leave in the hands of the Government, which represents and acts through the State, the whole amount of public power. If you do it by a Constitution, then that Constitution will be a producing machine of tyrannical despotism. That despotism will not be stopped from arising in its time for the mere reason of the existence of such a machine, which will serve as cause and sufficient occasion to it. By Constitution, I understand here, not the written law to which we give this name, but the structure or real complexion of the machinery of the State.
If that machine is a result of the history of the country, in vain the written Constitution will try to limit the powers of the State with respect to the rights of the individuals; in practice those powers will continue to be omnipotent. A confirming testimony of that observation are the republican Governments that have replaced, in the direction of the modern State, the absolute and all-embracing Government that founded it, organized it and run it by centuries as a colony. As long as the machine that makes the power of the State omnipotent exists alive and beating as a matter of fact, such people could well be called free and representative Republics by its written Constitution; however, their historical and real Constitution, the one existing in their guts, will always make them a colony or patrimony of the republican Government, successor of its past and royal Government.
The first duty of any great revolution performed with the pretension of changing the social regime of the Government is to change the social structure that made the colonial people a fiscal machine, producer by force and for the benefit of its owner and metropolitan founder. Otherwise, the rents and products of the soil and the annual work of the people will continue to go under the nominal republic where they went under the effective monarchy. Where, for example? To all parts save to the hands of the people. The old coffers, recipients of the royal treasure, will be lost like the water of a river that spills over and seeps in the fields or dissipates in drains that go to water the orchard of the class or portion of the people having the privilege to occupy the place of the old metropolitan power. In the hands of that privileged class of the official country, the people will continue to be excluded and deprived of their power and freedom, now under the nominal successors of the old sovereigns. It will not be the State but its representative (who is the Government of the State) the one that will continue exerting and enjoying the omnipotence of means and powers given to the Fatherland by the persistent machinery of the old primitive and colonial architecture.
Nevertheless, to leave in the hands of the Government of the Fatherland all the public power attributed to the Fatherland is to leave all citizens who compose the people of the Fatherland without the individual power of which individual freedom consists of. This power is the entire and actual freedom of the countries that are self governed, that are educated, that enrich themselves and become greater by the hand of their individuals not of their Governments. “The old”, says de Coulanges, “had given such power to the State, that the day in which a tyrant took in his hand this omnipotence, men did not have any guarantee against him and he was as a matter of fact the master of their life and fortune.”(2) From the preceding considerations we deduce that the despotism and tyranny so frequent in the countries of South America does not reside in the despot or in the tyrant, but in the machine or mechanical structure of the State by which all the power of its individuals are melted and condensed in the hands of the Government for its own benefit. The despot and the tyrant are the effect and the result, not the cause of the omnipotence of the economic means and forces of the country, which are placed through the same machinery under the power of the established Government and the circle personifying the State.
Submerged and drowned the freedom of the individuals in such a torrent of unlimited and omnipotent public power, it results that the tyranny of the Fatherland, omnipotent and all-embracing, is performed in the name of a patriotism under which the freedom of the individual remains eclipsed; this is the patriotic freedom par excellence. Thus, it is explained that in the old societies of Greece and Italy where that order of things was the fundamental law, the individual liberties of life, of conduct, of thought and of opinion were completely unknown. Patriotism had in those societies the place that liberalism has in the present societies of Saxon origin. Patriotism was the excuse under which despotism of the omnipotent Government, in which the Fatherland was personified, was executed. The reason of that omnipotence of the Fatherland among the old ones should be always kept in mind by the modern peoples, which take by models those dead organisms of kind, principles and intentions radically and essentially opposed.
__________
What was exactly the Fatherland and the patriotism in the social and political system of the old societies of Greece and Rome? Let us insist on explaining it. The word Fatherland [Patria] among the ancient, according to de Coulanges, meant the territory of the parents, the land of the father. The Fatherland of every man was the part of the land that his domestic or national religion had sanctified, the ground where the remains of their predecessors were buried and that was inhabited by their souls. “Sacred ground of the Fatherland”, said the Greeks. That ground was literally sacred for the man of that time because it was inhabited by his Gods. State, Fatherland, City, these words were not a mere abstraction as they are for the modern ones; they really represented a complete assembly of local divinities, with a daily worship and powerful beliefs about the soul. Only in such a way can the patriotism of the ancient be explained; vigorous sentiment that, for them, was the supreme virtue to which all other virtues boiled down.
The Fatherland was not a mere domicile for men; it was attached to men by a sacred bond. He had to love it as a religion is loved, obey it as a God is obeyed, give himself completely to it, base everything on it, consecrate his entire being to it. The Greek and the Romans did not die for a man or because of issue of honor; but to their Fatherland, they owed their life. Because, if the Fatherland was under attack, it was their religion that was attacked, they said. They fought truly for their altars, their homes pro aris et focis (b); because if the enemy conquered the city, their altars were demolished, their fireplaces extinguished, their tombs profaned, their Gods destroyed, their worship devastated. The love to the Fatherland was a pious devotion for the old ones. For them, God was not everywhere. The Gods of each man were those that inhabited their house, their city, their county.(3) The exiled, leaving his Fatherland behind, also left his Gods and, since religion was the source of emanation of his civil rights, the exiled lost them as well. Losing the religion of his country due to his exile, he did not have rights of property any longer and his goods were all confiscated for the benefit of the Gods and the State. Lacking any worship, he did not have a family any more; he stopped being a husband and a father. The exile of the Fatherland did not seem a scourge more tolerable than death. The Roman jurists called it capital penalty. (4)
How were these concepts of Fatherland and patriotism born? The city had been founded on a religion and constituted like a church. Hence, the force, the omnipotence and the absolute domain that the Fatherland exerted on its members. In a society established on such principles, individual freedom could not exist. There was nothing in men that was independent. Not even his private life escaped to this omnipotence of the State. The ancient knew, then, neither the freedom of the private life, nor the freedom of education or religion. The human person was of very little consideration before that sacred and almost divine authority which was called Fatherland or State.
It was not strange, according to those historical precedents, that, distorted in its sense, they induced the French revolutionaries of the last century -unconscious imitators of the old society of Greece and Rome- to copy with exaltation those dead models. The unfortunate revolutionary maxim pursuant to which “the wellbeing of the State is the supreme law of the society” was formulated by the Greek and Roman antiquity. It was thought then that law, justice, morality, everything had to yield before the interest of the Fatherland. There has not been, then, greatest mistake than to think that in the old cities men enjoyed freedom; not even the idea of it did they have. They did not think that a personal right could exist in opposition to the city and its Gods.
___________
It is true that later revolutions changed that form of Government, but the nature of the State remained almost the same. The Government was successively called monarchy, aristocracy, democracy; but none of those revolutions gave men the true liberty, that is, the individual liberty. To have political rights, to vote, to appoint or to choose magistrates, to be able to become one of them, are all what we call freedom; but men did not stop being less dominated by the State than before.
Take note that in writing of an antiquity so remote and unknown with such self-assurance I have relied on the authorities that have made a specialty of their almost technical study. The one that I just explained, for example, belongs to one of the greatest minds of the Normal School of France. It is not that the German erudition is less competent to interpret antiquity in regards to social institutions, but rather that the interpretation of a Latin country, like France, is more comprehensible for the America of the same origin. In fact, Latin America has imitated in its revolution the same mistakes and fallen under the same troubles that the modern science of the French begins to uncover in the recent times through the pen of thinkers like A. de Tocqueville, de Coulanges and Taine.
__________
Nevertheless, things of the rising order of the civilized societies of Christian Europe did not stay there. Even before the great and definitive religion produced as its masterpiece the modern society, the same old society had begun to change with the maturity and natural progress of their ideas, institutions and rules of Government. Present peoples, nevertheless, seem not to realize enough of that fact and have taken as a basis for the organization of their modern society the restoration or renaissance of the civilized antiquity.
The State was closely bound to religion; it stemmed from it and was confused with it. For that reason, in the primitive city all political institutions were religious institutions.(5) Celebrations were ceremonies of worship; laws were sacred statements; kings and magistrates were priests. It is for the same reason that individual freedom had not been known and that men had not been able to remove from their conscience the omnipotence of the city. It is for that reason, in short, that the State had been limited to the proportions of a village, being unable to preserve the place that their national Gods had drawn in their origin. Each city was not only independent, but also had its own worship and code. Religion, law, Government, everything was under the jurisdiction of the city. The city was the only living force, nothing above it, nothing else below it; that is to say, neither national unit, nor individual freedom.
However, that regime tended to disappear with the development of the human spirit and the principle of association of men. Once changed, the Government as much as religion and the law lost the municipal character that they had in the antiquity. A new principle, the philosophy of the stoics, widening the notions of human association, emancipated the individual. It was not desired then that the human person be sacrificed to the State. This great principle, unknown to the old city, was to become one day the most sacred political rules of all times. It was thus understood that there were other duties towards the Fatherland or the State, other virtues different from the civic virtues. The soul was bound together to other objects than those of the Fatherland. The old city was so powerful and so tyrannical, that men made of it the aim of all their work and all their virtues; the Fatherland was the measure of what is beautiful, of everything that is human, and there was no heroism but for the Fatherland.
__________
Among the changes that took place in the institutions, in the customs, in the beliefs and in the law, patriotism itself changed its nature; and this is one of the facts that contributed the more to the great progress of Rome. The feeling of patriotism in the first age of the Greek and Roman cities must not be forgotten. It was a part of the religion of those times; the Fatherland was loved because its protective Gods were loved, because their altar was there, their divine fire, celebrations, prayers, hymns, and because outside the Fatherland there were neither Gods nor worship. Such patriotic-system was a faith, a pious feeling. But, when the sacerdotal chaste lost its domination, that class of patriotism disappeared from the city with it.
The love of the city did not perish, but took a new form. One did not love the Fatherland now because of the religion and its Gods: it was only loved because of its laws, its institutions, its rights and the security that it provided to its members. That new patriotism did not have the effect of the old times. As the heart was not attached now to the altar, to the protective Gods and to the sacred ground, but solely to the institutions and the laws, patriotism became a variable and irregular feeling, which depended on the circumstances and was subject to the same fluctuations as the Government itself. No longer was the Fatherland loved, rather the love was to the political regime that prevailed at that time. Those who found its laws bad did not have any longer any attachment to it. The municipal patriotism was weakened in that way and perished in the souls. The opinion of each individual was more sacred to him than the Fatherland, and the triumph of its political party was to him more important than the greatness or glory of its city. Each one came to prefer any other city to its native one if he did not find there the institutions that he loved.
Then, people begun to emigrate more voluntarily, being less afraid of the exile. People no longer thought about the protective Gods and they easily got used to separating themselves from the Fatherland. The alliance of an enemy city was sought by its citizens in order to make their party prevail in their own city. Few Greeks existed that were not ready to sacrifice municipal independence in order to have the constitution that they preferred. As for the honest and scrupulous men, the perpetual dissensions they often witnessed caused their distaste towards the local or municipal regime. They could not be, in effect, pleased with a form of society in which it was necessary to fight every day, in which the poor and the rich were always at war. The need to leave the municipal regime and to reach another form of Government different from the local one started to arise. Many men thought, at least, in establishing a sort of sovereign power above the cities for the maintenance of order and to force those small turbulent cities to live peacefully. In Italy matters were no different from Rome. That centralist disposition of the spirits made the fortune of Rome, says de Coulanges. The morality of the history of that time is that Rome would not have reached the greatness that placed it at the top of the world if it had not left the local or municipal spirit and if the national patriotism had not replaced the local or provincial patriotism.(6)
In such manner, two changes were designed in the prospect of humanity that led to the conception of a national and supreme authority higher than the one of the municipal State and the freedom of men, erected in the front of the Fatherland and the State like a buttress of its edifice.
__________
Neither the great nor the small patriotism were earmarked as the last progress of human society. The appearance and reign of “individualism” was missing, that is to say, of the freedom of men, raised and established upon the Fatherland and the patriotism in harmonic existence. It was the distinguishing character that the free and modern societies took from the spirit and the influence of Christianity, source and origin of the modern human freedom, what has transformed the world. It can be truthfully said that the society of our days owes to individualism, thus understood, the progress of civilization. In this sense, it is not reckless to assert that the civilized and free world is the product of individual selfishness, Christianly understood: Love God above everything, he taught, and to your neighbor as your self, sanctifying in this way the love of himself equal to the love of the men.
It was not the liberties of the Fatherland those that made great the modern nations, but the individual liberties whereupon men have created and worked their own personal greatness, which is the elementary factor of the greatness of the really great and free nations that are those of the North of both worlds. “Private initiative has done much and well” says Herbert Spencer. “Private initiative has disassembled, drained, fertilized our countryside and built our cities; it has discovered and exploited the mines, it laid out roads, opened channels, constructed iron roads with its works of art; it has invented and taken to her perfection the plow, the art of weaving, the steam engine, the press, innumerable machines; it has constructed our vessels, our immense manufactures, the containers of our ports; it has formed the Banks, the Insurance agencies, the newspapers, it has covered the sea with a network of lines of steam, and the earth of an electricity network. Private initiative has led agriculture, industry and commerce to the present prosperity, and now it impels it in the same way with increasing speed. For that reason you distrust private initiative?”(7)
All that has been done by selfishness, that is to say, by the individualism, as much in England as in America, everything can at least be done in our countries by those selfish of Europe who entered our land like émigrés, on the condition that we give them here individual freedom, that is, the security that they have there by means of the laws (because freedom means security there, if Montesquieu has not misunderstood the English institutions).
Has, in any case, something different happened in our country? To whom if not to private initiative is due the opulence of our rural industry, which is the source of the fortune of the State and of the individuals? Have our best Governments contributed more than the energy, perseverance and good behavior of our, in just title, famous agriculturists? If there are any statues missing in our parks, those are the statues of those modest workers of our rural greatness, without which the glory of our national independence would have been sterile.
The contrary has happened frequently. All the cooperation that the State could give to the progress of our wealth had to consist of the security and the defense of the lives, people, properties, industry and peace of its inhabitants, but that is exactly what the frequent wars and revolutions -which have not been the work of the individuals- have interrupted. In fact, most of the times in South America the revolutions and riots are official; in other words, product of the initiative of the State.
__________
After reading the disciple, let us now read the teacher of Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, the author of the “Wealth of the Nations”, who sees such wealth entirely born from the natural formation of the intelligent and free initiative of the individuals: “It is sometimes the lavishness and the bad public conduct, never that of the individuals, that impoverishes a nation. Everything or almost all the public rent is used in many countries for the support of non-producing people. Such are those that compose a numerous and gleaming court, a great ecclesiastical establishment, great fleets and great armies, that in times of peace do not produce anything, and that in times of war do not acquire anything that can compensate for the costs while it lasts. There, all the people who do not produce anything at all by themselves are maintained by the product of the work of the others”.
“The constant, uniform and uninterrupted effort of each individual to improve its condition, principle from where public and national opulence as much as individual opulence originally emanate, is often quite strong to make matters improve and to maintain its natural progress in spite of the extravagance of the Government and the greatest errors of the administration”. “Like the unknown origin of animal life, it often recovers the health and the vigor of its constitution, in despise not only of the disease but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor. The annual product of its land and work [England’s] is without any contradiction much greater at present than in the time of the restoration or the revolution. The capital used in cultivating those lands and improving that work must then be also much greater. In spite of all the taxes of the Government, that capital has gradually and silently been accumulated due to the economy and the particular good conduct of the individuals and because of the universal, continuous and uninterrupted effort that they have made to improve their condition”. “This effort, protected by the laws and the freedom to use the individual energy in the most advantageous way, is what has maintained the progress of England towards opulence and improvement in almost all the preceding times and, as it is expected, in all the times yet to come”.(8)
__________
It results from the observations contained in this essay that what we understand by Fatherland and patriotism usually is a very dangerous basis for the organization of a free country. In fact, far from leading us to freedom, it can easily take us to the opposite, that is, to despotism, regardless of how little the path is mistaken. The way by which the extreme love to the Fatherland can move away from the freedom of men and lead to the patriotic despotism of the State is very simple. Those who love the Fatherland above all things are not far from giving away to it all their powers and making it omnipotent. However, the omnipotence of the Fatherland or the State is the exclusion and denial of the individual freedom, that is, of the freedom of men, which is not in itself but a moderating power of the power of the State. The individual freedom is the sacred limit where the authority of the Fatherland ends. The omnipotence of the Fatherland or the State is the cause and reason of being of the omnipotence of the Government of the Fatherland, which serves as personification or representation in the exercise of its sovereign power.
Thus, we have seen the invocation of patriotism and the Fatherland by the French Convention of 1793 and the Dictatorship of Buenos Aires of 1840, with all the violence to which the individual liberties of men were subject for the use and possession of their life, their home, their opinion, their vote and their conduct. All the public crimes against the freedom of men could have been committed, not only without punishment but also legally, in the name of the omnipotence of the Fatherland invoked by its absolute Government. The freedom of men may not only be incompatible with the freedom of the Fatherland, but also the former can be unknown and devoured by the latter. Those two different liberties often are in contest and divorce. The freedom of the Fatherland is the independence with respect to all other foreign countries. The freedom of men is the independence of the individual with respect to the Government of its own country. The freedom of the Fatherland is compatible with the greatest tyranny, and can coexist in the same country. The freedom of the individual stops to exist by the same fact that the Fatherland has assumed the omnipotence of the country.
The individual freedom means literally absence of all omnipotent and absolute power in the State and the Government of the State. Those two liberties are not equally fecund in their prolific power for the advancement of civilization and the progress of the nations. The omnipotence or despotism of the Fatherland, to be fecund in public goods, needs two things: First, to be illustrated; second, to be honest and just. In new States, that have just executed the constitution of their free governments, the omnipotence of the Fatherland is sterile, and the one of its Government destructive. The freedom of the individual in such cases is the mother and root of all the progress of the country; its people are abundant in immigrant foreigners who have brought to the country aptitude and the will to improve their individual condition by means of the individual freedom that the laws promise and assure to them. In countries that have been colonies, newly born governments are weak and unintelligent to work out the progress of their civilization.
The omnipotence of the Fatherland is exclusive not only of all freedom, but of all public progress, because the favorite worker of that progress is the particular individual, who knows how to use his natural energy and power in order to sustain and improve his person, his wealth and his condition of civilized man. However, as the assembly of those particular individuals is what in its vulgar sense is known as the people, it follows that it is the people and not the Government to whom the gradual work of progress and civilization is given by the conditions of the South American society. The favorite machine of the people to carry out that process is the civil or social freedom, distributed equally among its native and foreign individuals, who form the association or people of South America. If this natural and fatal law of own individual greatness is denominated selfishness, it is unavoidable to admit that selfishness is called to precede patriotism in the hierarchy of the workers and servers of national progress.
The progress of the country must march necessarily in intelligent, laborious and direct proportion to the number of its selfish and energetic people and to the facilities and guarantees that its fecund and civilizator selfishness is applied and developed. The South American society would be saved and assured in its future freedom and progress, provided that it is the intelligent selfishness and not the selfish patriotism the one called to construct and build the edifice of the Republics of South America. And, as it is not natural that the healthy selfishness neglects the work of its own individual greatness under the peril of damaging its own cardinal interest, it can be confidently proclaimed that the future progress of South America shall be guaranteed and assured under the vigilant protectorate of individual selfishness that never sleeps.
The omnipotence of the Fatherland, turned fatally into omnipotence of the Government in which it personalizes, is not only the denial of freedom, but also the negation of social progress, because it suppresses the private initiative in the work of that progress. The State absorbs all the activity of the individuals when it has absorbed all its means and works of improvement. In order to carry out that absorption, the State hooks in the rows of its employees those individuals that would be more worthy if given to themselves. In everything the State takes part and everything is made by its initiative in the management of the public interests. The State becomes manufacturer, constructor, industrialist, banker, retailer, publisher and is thus distracted from its essential and unique mandate, that is, to protect the individuals of which it is made up against all internal and external aggression.
In all the functions that are not of the essence of the Government, it conducts itself like an ignorant and a harmful contender of individuals, worsening the service of the country, far from serving it better. The service of public administration becomes industry and office for half of the individuals of the society and the exercise of that administrative and political industry, which is mere way of earning a living, takes the name of patriotism. The service each individual renders to the Government in order to make a living takes then the air of a service to the Fatherland. The love to the feeding hand on which those people live naturally takes then the appearance of love to the Fatherland, which is great disinterested feeling by essence. How not love the Fatherland like the life of one’s own when it is the Fatherland the one that makes it live?
Thus, patriotism is not now a religion like in the old Greek and Roman times, neither is it, at least, superstition or fanaticism. It is, many times, mere hypocrisy in its pretensions to the virtue and, as a matter of fact, a simple industry of which to earn a living. Like the best industrialists, the most intelligent and active ones are the immigrants coming from the civilized countries of Europe, and they cannot take part of the Government industry because of their foreigner nature, the performance of the official industrialism damages them badly containing its immigration and harming the domestic people who do not work in the privileged factories of the political administration. If more young people, instead of disputing the honor of receiving a public wage as an employee, agent or servant of the State, preferred to become owner of himself in the Government of his farm or rural property the Fatherland would already be in the track of its greatness, of its freedom and of its true progress.
__________
Another great disadvantage of the Roman notions of Fatherland and patriotism for the development of freedom is that being the Fatherland a religious worship in its origin, it generated a great deal of enthusiasm and fanaticism, that is, the heat and the passion that blind. Thus, our songs to the Fatherland, understood in a mystical way, which surpass the religious songs of the old and pagan patriotism. Enthusiasm, said the free England by means of the pen of Adam Smith, is the greatest enemy of science, which is the source of all civilization and progress. Enthusiasm is a poison that, like opium, makes the eyes close and blinds the understanding; against it there is no more antidote than science, says the king of the economists.(9)
Freedom is cold and patient, of rational and reflective temper, non-enthusiastic, as the example of the really free Saxon people shows. The Americans of the North, like the English and the Dutch, treat their political businesses not with the heat that inspire the religious matters, but rather like the most prosaic of life, which are the interests that sustain it. Never does its modern heat reach fanaticism. Enthusiasm engenders rhetoric, the luxury of the language, the poetic tone, which are so bad for business, as well as all the violence of the word, which is precursor of the violence and tyrannies of the conduct. In those sonorous pomps of the written and spoken word, so peculiar to enthusiasm, ideas -that only live within reflection and cold science- tend to fade. Accordingly, the Americans of the North, the English and the Dutch, do not know that patriotic poetry, that political Literature, which exhales in military songs, intimidating and scaring freedom instead of attracting it. The Americans of the North do not chant freedom, but they practice it in silence. Freedom for them is not a deity; it is an ordinary tool like the bar and the hammer.
All that South America needs to be as free as the United States is to attain their cold, pacific, tame and patient temperament to solve the most complicated businesses of politics, which is also that of the English and the Dutch, and does not exclude the heat sometimes, but never reaches the fanaticism that blinds and misleads. France reaches freedom as it gains the temperament which is really virile, that is to say, cold-blooded.
__________
The patriotic enthusiasm is a peculiar feeling of war, not of freedom, which is fed on peace. War itself has become more fecund since it has changed enthusiasm for science, but it is still more a daughter of enthusiasm than of science. By which mysterious links have the notions of Fatherland, freedom, enthusiasm, glory, war and poetry been bound in the Americas of the South that public questions are dealt today with such passion that they remain unresolved indeed because they lack the serenity and moderation that would make them expedite and easy? This is not difficult to understand. Conceived the Fatherland as a religious and sacred institution, as was seen by the Greek and Roman societies, the Fatherland and its worship filled the hearts with the inexplicable enthusiasm of the holy things. From enthusiasm to fanaticism the distance was not long. The Fatherland was adored as a sort of divinity and its worship produced the fervent enthusiasm of religion. All that freedom consisted of was of the natural and essential independence of the Fatherland with respect to the foreigner and its omnipotence meant the negation of all individual freedom capable of limiting its divine authority. Thus, the soldier was the champion of the freedom against the foreigner, considered as the natural enemy of the independence of the Fatherland; human glory consisted of the triumphs in the fight maintained for the defense of the freedom of the Fatherland against all outside domination.
War took, therefore, its sanctity from the sanctity of its favorite object, which was the freedom of the Fatherland, that is, the defense of its sacred ground and the sanctity of its blessed symbols and altars, like the Greek and Romans understood it, in its religious sense. From that point of view, the Fatherland was inseparable of the enthusiasm that was attached to the holy and sacred things. The omnipotent and absolute Fatherland absorbed the personality of the individual and the freedom of the people; eclipsing the freedom of men, it did not leave another legitimate and sacred object to war than the defense of independence or freedom of the Fatherland from the foreigner and its omnipotence with respect to the individual who was member of it.
It is in such manner, that in the birth of the new States of South America, San Martín, Bolivar, Sucre, O’Higgins, Carrera, Belgrano, Alvear, Pueyrredón, who were all educated in Spain and brought from there their notion of Fatherland, understanding American freedom in the Spanish way, they made it consist wholly of the independence of the new State with respect to Spain, like Spain understood it in respect to France during the war with Napoleón I. Those great men were without a doubt champions of the freedom of America, but of the freedom in the sense of the independence of the Fatherland in respect of Spain; and if they did not also defend the omnipotence of the Fatherland with respect to its individual members, neither did they defend the individual freedom conceived as a limit to the power of the Fatherland or the State. Indeed, they did not understand nor knew freedom in that sense, which is its more precious sense. From whom could they have learned it? From Spain, which never knew it in the time in which they were educated there?
Washington and their contemporaries were not in the same situation; they were rather in the opposite one. They knew better the individual freedom than the independence of their country, because they had been born and brought up since they were in a cradle enjoying the freedom of men under the same dependency of the free England. So it was that, after conquering the independence of their Fatherland, the individuals who were members of it found themselves as free as they had been since the foundation of those communities. Its constitution as an independent nation did not change but confirmed its old previous liberties that they already knew and handled like veterans of freedom.
The glory of our great men was more dazzling because it was a consequence of the enthusiasm produced by the war and the victories of the independence of the Fatherland, which was born omnipotent in respect to its individuals, since it had been under the absolute regime of its kings, in which the Fatherland was personified. The omnipotent magnificence of our great soldiers of the independence was born from the enthusiasm for the Fatherland, which was its entire object, understood in the almost divine sense it had in the old Rome and in the old Spain. As a result, the glory of our great historical personalities of the war of independence continued to eclipse the true freedom, that is, the freedom of the individual, reaching such enthusiasm for those symbolic men to the point of replacing freedom in the same altars.
__________
That it is the ground in which the direction of our organic policy and our political and social literature have stayed; where the liberties of the Fatherland have eclipsed and eliminated the liberties of the individual, which are the factor and unit of which the Fatherland is formed.
Why is individual freedom so important? Because of its effect on the progress of nations. It is a multiple or multiform freedom, which is disturbed and exercised under the following diverse forms:
- Freedom to resolve, to decide and to choose.
- Freedom to think, to speak, to write, to issue opinions and to publish.
- Freedom to act and to proceed.
- Freedom to work, to acquire and to dispose of one’s property.
- Freedom to stay or to go away, to leave and to enter the country; of locomotion and circulation.
- Freedom of conscience and worship.
- Freedom to emigrate and not to move from the country.
- Freedom to make a will, to contract, to alienate, to produce and to acquire.
As it encloses the whole circle of the human activity, individual freedom -the capital freedom of men- is the immediate and main worker of all progress, of all the improvements, of all the conquests of civilization in each and every one of the nations. The most terrible rival of that fairy of the civilized people is the omnipotent and absolute Fatherland that lives fatally personified in absolute and omnipotent Governments, who do not want it because it represents the sacred limit of their omnipotence.
It is convenient, nevertheless, to bear in mind that as much as the individual freedom is the root of the Fatherland, the freedom from the Fatherland is the palladium of the liberties of men, who are the essential members of that Fatherland. Which Fatherland can be more interested in securing our personal rights than that of which our person is a part and elementary unit? To say it everything in a final word, the freedom from the Fatherland is an essential face of the freedom of the civilized man, which is the foundation and term of all the social structure of human race.
NOTES
(a) Note of the writer of the Foreword. Reference to Mariano Moreno, Minister of Government and Defense of the Revolutionary Government of 1810, who was an ardent promoter of the ideas of Rousseau.
(1) Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”, 1776.
(2) Foustel de Coulanges, “Cité Antique”.
(b) Note of the writer of the Foreword. Latin, “For the Fatherland and the home”.
(3) Foustel de Coulanges, “Cité Antique”.
(4) Ibid., op. cit.
(5) Foustel de Coulanges, “Cité Antique”, pp. 415
(6) Foustel de Coulanges, “Cité Antique”, book V. Ch. II
(7) Herbert Spencer, “Essays on Morals, Science and Aesthetics”.
(8) Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”, book II, Ch. V., fragments.
(9) Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”, book V, Ch. I.
Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884) was one of the great 19th-century classical liberals and is recognized as the "father" of the Argentine constitution. This speech was delivered at the School of Law and Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires on the 24th of May of 1880. In that ceremony he was appointed an honorary member of the school. The speech was reproduced in volume IX of his "Selected Works", of the 1920 edition, published in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Translated by Juan Francisco Ramos Mejia, Buenos Aires, February 2003.
|
Send to a friend
Printer Friendly PDF Format
Subscribe to FFF Email Update
Subscribe to Freedom Daily
|
|
|
|
