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| Professor José Carlos
Chiaramonte |
Rethinking Latin American
Independence: The Importance of Natural Law
Line Schjolden, Department
of History
Professor Emeritus at
the University of Buenos Aires and Director of the Instituto
de Historia Argentina y Americana "Dr. Emilio Ravignani," José Carlos
Chiaramonte is a prolific and important contributor to Argentine
and Latin American historiography. In his many publications,
a recurrent concern has been the improvement of our understanding
of the intellectual and political context of the movements
for independence in Latin America and the origins of the
new nation-states. This was also the topic and purpose of
his talk at the Center for Latin American Studies on February
14, 2002.
According to Chiaramonte,
when looking for the foundations of Latin American independence,
much of the existing historiography has erroneously projected
the current notion of "nation" and "nation-state" onto
the past. The existence of a kind of "proto-nationalism," a
collective national identity, has sometimes been presumed
as a driving force in the wars for independence and the civil
wars following in the immediate aftermath. Chiaramonte presented
the idea that the concept of "nation," as we know
it today, was the result of rather than a foundation for the
movements for independence. Using the example of Río
de la Plata, he pointed to the complete absence in 1810
of any kind of national identity corresponding to the nation
of Argentina. He asserted the importance of understanding
that at the time of the independence movements, the concept
of "nation" was not equivalent to the notion
of "nationality." Indeed, the notion of nationality
is something that takes shape much later, from the 1830s
onward, in close relation to the phenomenon of romanticism.
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| Professor José Carlos
Chiaramonte (right) addresses his audience. |
Chiaramonte then proceeded
to ask the question: If there did not exist a feeling of
national identity at the moment of Latin American independence,
were there other feelings of collective identity strong enough
to form the basis of political aspirations? Here his answer
was a resounding yes. At the time of independence, what existed
in Latin America was a notion of what Chiaramonte calls "reduced
sovereignty." When the terms "nation" or "state" were
used during this time, they were used synonymously and with
reference to a common geographic area, a common body of laws,
and a common government. Rather than referring to a nation-state,
however, this common geographic area, body of laws, and government
corresponded to smaller entities, such as cities or provinces.
It was in these smaller units of cities and provinces that
the collective identities and notions of sovereignty of the
time were rooted.
Having established this,
Chiaramonte's next concern was to trace the origins of the
notion of "reduced sovereignty." Here he pointed
to the long overlooked importance and influence of natural
law (derecho natural or Jusnaturalismo) in
Latin America in the period preceding independence. He claimed
that in order to understand the dimensions of its influence
we must keep in mind that natural law constituted the very
foundation of political science during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The tenets of natural law were what
regulated the relations between men and between states in
a period when the now autonomous disciplines of sociology,
political economy, and political science had not yet come
into being. Thus, it was in the theoretical framework of
natural law that the notions of "nation" and "sovereignty" of
the time were rooted. Chiaramonte proceeded to show the widespread
knowledge of natural law in Latin America in the late colonial
period, and particularly emphasized the importance of the
works of Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolf, and especially Vattel.
Vattel's treatise on natural law, published in 1758, was
used all over Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, in the Río
de la Plata, as well as Rio Grande de Sul. Not
only was he a recognized authority in the teaching of natural
law, but his work was also an obligatory source of reference
for the politicians of the period.
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| Professor Francine
Masiello (left), Professor Tulio Halperin
Donghi (center),
and Professor José Carlos Chiaramonte (right) |
To sum up, Chiaramonte's
talk profoundly revised some of the basic assumptions in
the existing interpretations of the movements for independence
in Latin America. For one, he showed how historians have
erroneously employed a modern notion of "nation" and "nationality" when
interpreting the events of Latin American independence. Second,
he showed that historians have often been too concerned with
the classical works of Enlightenment writers such as Rousseau,
Montesquieu, and Locke when tracing the intellectual roots
of the movements for independence, leading them to overlook
the importance of natural law.
