independence in northern South America approximately twenty constitutions were drawn up in the provinces and capitals of the old viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama). By the time Adams voiced his skepticism about the people of South America, Spanish America had already begun to experiment with
[print edition page xv]
the institutions of representative government, and highly competitive elections had taken place in New Spain in 1812. Recent historical studies on comparative elections in the early nineteenth century show that one of the peculiarities of Spanish America was the precocious adoption of modern forms of representation and universal suffrage when voting restrictions were predominant in Europe. Studies such as those of Richard Warren on popular participation in early elections in Mexico show that the selection of representatives by universal suffrage often had an impact on popular participation that challenges the usual depiction of elections as an exclusive and elite affair. Indeed, as both José María Luis Mora and Lucas Alamán argue in this book, one of their key political proposals in the 1830s was to limit broad popular participation in elections by restricting the vote to property holders. Moreover, even in countries where formal restrictions for voting applied, elections still had a significant effect on the process of democratization.17
The “liberal constitutional moment” denotes the moment, and the manner, in which liberal constitutionalism made its appearance in the Hispanic world at the dawn of the nineteenth century.18 In Spain it can be traced back to 1808. In Rio de la Plata, New Granada, and Venezuela the moment fell between 1810 and 1827; in Bolivia it was concentrated in the 1820s; and in Mexico and Guatemala its peak occurred between 1820 and 1830.19 As Frank Safford states, this “reformist burst” was followed almost everywhere by a period of pessimism and conservatism.
One of the main weaknesses of the intellectual history of the Iberian world has been its isolationism. Historians of Spanish America, Anthony Pagden asserts, “generally study Spanish America as if neither New France nor the Thirteen Colonies had ever existed.” After all, America began as Europe transplanted: “The intellectual history of its early development
[print edition page xvi]
is a history of transmission, and reinterpretation, a history of how traditional European arguments from classic texts were adapted to meet the challenges of new and unforeseen circumstances.”20
One of the peculiarities of the liberal constitutional moment in the Hispanic world is that the sway of liberal ideas was, for the most part, uncontested.21 Absolutism was more a practice than an ideology. Moreover, the Bourbon absolutism that preceded the liberal revolutions in Spain and its colonies was an enlightened despotism. There was a continuity between absolutist reform and liberal revolution: a confidence in the power of reason to order society. Moreover, liberalism found in Spain native support in the theoretical writings of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and of schoolman Francisco Suárez.22 For Spanish liberals, however, the “enlightened” character of the monarchy ceased when Charles IV
[print edition page xvii]
and his favorite minister, Godoy, showed clear signs of political incompetence.23
Several developments prepared the ground for the uncontested predominance of liberalism in the early nineteenth century. First, there was no classical republican tradition to dispute the field; Spain had no equivalent of James Harrington. As the fifteenth-century debate between Leonardo Bruni and Alonso de Cartagena over the merits of Bruni’s translation of the Ethics showed, the Italians saw Aristotle as an author whose texts had some literary and philosophical merit, while the Spaniards regarded him merely as “an exponent of natural virtue.”24 Although the impact of humanist Aristotelianism was felt in Spain at about the same time as it was in Italy, by the end of the sixteenth century Spain had reached the brink “of that desperate obscurantism so characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”25 When Florentine political thought was flourishing in Italy, the School of Salamanca was instead devoted to new scholasticism and speculative thought.
The other historical development that proved crucial for Spanish liberalism was the French Revolution. Hispanic revolutionaries would have to perform two different tasks at the same time: on the one hand, to make the revolution, on the other, to avoid following the steps of France.26 The terms “liberalism” and “liberal” were coined by the Spanish Cortes Generales27 in Cádiz while drafting the 1812 Constitution.28
[print edition page xviii]
To recast the Spanish American revolutions as constitutive elements of the liberal experience it is necessary to assess the effectiveness of the institutional strategies designed to limit the power of absolute sovereigns in large states that are found at the core of the modern liberal republic.29
Before the American Revolution there was no historical precedent to predict where the application of the ideas of the Enlightenment would lead. Abstract thinking was much more important in the American and French cases than in the Iberian world. Furthermore, the impact of the French Revolution on Spanish elites was mainly negative. Spanish American revolutionaries knew, from the French experience, where the revolutionary logic could lead.30 These fears were not without foundation: a large population of these countries consisted of oppressed Indians. The slave revolt of Santo Domingo reminded them of the dangers of a social revolution. Thus, the reactionary atmosphere of Europe “both reinforced these fears and also subjected Spanish American leaders to more conservative ideological influences than they had known before 1815.”31
The most singular trait of the Spanish American revolutions is the absence of both modern popular mobilization and Jacobinism.32 This assertion runs counter to a long-established tradition that considers the Spanish American revolutions as the ideological heirs of the 1789 revolution.33 The “decisive” influence of Rousseau over Spanish Americans
[print edition page xix]
is, for many historians, an uncontested fact. Yet, this interpretation misses one of the most distinctive features of the Spanish American revolutions. Paraphrasing J. G. A. Pocock, the Spanish American revolutions can be seen less as the last political act of Jacobin radicalism than as the first political act of modern liberalism. Not Rousseau but Benjamin Constant would prove to be the most relevant influence for Spaniards and Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century. The universal influence of Constant in the 1820s and 1830s, Safford states, “is only one indication of the hegemony of moderate European constitutional ideas among Spanish American intellectuals.”34 The influence of Constant is important because modern liberalism owes much to him.35 Many of Constant’s ideas, particularly those developed in response to the Terror and its Thermidorian aftermath (such as the limited nature of popular sovereignty, the freedom of the press, the inviolability of property, and the restrictions upon the military), became incorporated into the liberal theory that still informs many of the constitutions of democratic countries today.
Constant provided Spanish Americans with a practical guide to constitution
[print edition page xx]
making.36 The political elite was interested, above all, in works devoted to the practical arts of government rather than in “abstract theoretical treatises on the foundation of sovereignty”; thus, Spanish Americans turned to Constant’s Curso de política for its usefulness in constitution writing.37 Constant was also popular among Spanish readers, Hale asserts, because they found themselves in a similar circumstance: José María Luis Mora and other liberals faced revolution and arbitrary power, just as Constant did in 1815. Therefore they shared the latter’s urgency for establishing safeguards for individual liberty, an urgency that “was not felt in the Anglo-Saxon world.”38
Despite the decades of factional struggle and cyclical outbursts of dictatorship that followed independence in many Latin American countries, the search for a constitution and the reform of the old order were the main motivations behind the different groups in dispute. Later on, as most countries entered a phase of increasing political stability by the mid-nineteenth century,