Vida, libertad, propiedad: Reflexiones sobre el liberalismo clásico y la historia

Abstract

In this book, Ezequiel Gallo brings together a series of essays, most of them originally written in the 1980s and 1990s, on different theoretical, historical, and historiographical aspects of classical liberalism. As he argues in the prologue, the essays are linked by his interest in distinguishing and understanding the core ideas of a tradition that, by the time of his writing, was neglected by Argentine scholarship while it was experiencing a revival in the North Atlantic world. In this sense, the book’s subject, as well as Gallo’s candid acknowledgment of his sympathy for the ideas of classical liberalism, assures that this book will be received with both interest and debate.The essays are presented in 15 chapters of uneven depth and length organized in three different sections. Approaching the subject strictly from the perspective of intellectual history, the book’s first and longest section explores key authors and ideas related to classical liberalism, essentially defined by limited government and predominance of civil society over the state. Gallo’s thorough analysis of the ideas of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson and his reflections on the relationship in liberal theory between knowledge, property, and social and institutional arrangements represent some of the best parts of the book. Written in didactic and clear prose and informed by a solid knowledge of primary and secondary authors, they provide an excellent introduction in Spanish to anyone interested in this particular ideological tradition. Similarly, historians and students alike will find useful Gallo’s reflections on historiographical work advanced in the third section’s five chapters, such as those on the debates on the adequate methodology and conditions for historical research and the promises and risks involved in comparative historical analysis as represented by the Australian and Argentine cases. Of particular interest in this section is the essay on the relatively unknown historiographical concerns and contributions of Friedrich von Hayek, mostly known for his liberal economic ideas.The second and shortest section includes three essays on Argentine liberalism. The particular nuances of nineteenth-century Argentine liberalism in terms of its mixture of classical liberal ideas with state-building and nationalist concerns and the debates they generated, explored in chapters 8 and 9, are now widely acknowledged and are related to similar processes in other Latin American countries as explored by Charles Hale and others. With the advantage of a retrospective reading, those familiar with Argentine history might see the seeds of ideas that Gallo eventually expanded in some of his later works, most notably in the volume he coedited with Natalio Botana on the history of ideas of the 1880 – 1910 period. In fact, the concepts that he analyzes in these essays contributed to the foundational narratives on the history of Argentina in general, and of Argentine liberalism in particular, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as advanced by the group of Argentine historians represented by Gallo as well as Botana, Tulio Halperín Donghi, José Luis Romero, and Roberto Cortés Conde. The chapter on whether the Peronist administration of Carlos Menem in the 1990s could be considered within the liberal revival, while short and general, nevertheless rightly highlights the risks of using clear-cut labels when considering very complex ideological and political realities.Some readers will certainly take issue with aspects of Gallo’s arguments. His strict intellectual focus might be criticized by scholars interested in more sociological approaches, who would point out the broader social, political, and economic context surrounding the emergence of classical liberalism and the implications of its actual implementation in the North Atlantic and elsewhere — arguments developed more recently by Uday Mehta and Jennifer Pitts, among others. Also, readers less sympathetic to classical liberalism and liberal economics will surely disagree with Gallo’s negative and sweeping evaluation of what he sees as a detrimental transference of power from individuals to governments and states throughout the twentieth century, and his positive view of a liberal society based on the free initiative of its members and the spontaneous nature of social exchanges among them (pp. 81, 113). Finally, other readers would find problematic the author’s implicit lack of acknowledgment of the existence of traditions other than the classical one within liberalism, such as those associated with the New Deal or the welfare state. While the book’s focus is classical liberalism, limiting the essential definition of liberalism to that specific tradition risks obscuring liberalism’s broader history.To summarize, while Gallo’s personal appreciation of classical liberalism might not be shared by others, the essays compiled in this book offer a good introduction to one of the most important ideological traditions in modern Western history, at the same time that they document a valuable reading of the classical liberal tradition at the time of its revival in the late twentieth century.