SOURCE: Katra, William H. “Determinism, Idealism and the Web of History.” In Domingo F. Sarmiento: Public Writer (Between 1839 and 1852), pp. 143-66. Tempe: Center for Latin American Studies, 1985.

[In the following essay, Katra examines Sarmiento's historical works, arguing that he embraces both philosophical idealism and materialism.]

Sarmiento's treatment of historical issues, as seen in the previous chapter, with contradictions and overlapping philosophical tendencies is the critic's bugaboo. One approach would be to suppose that chaos reigns in his work because of the lack of methodological consistency. However, it is known that this writer was not above feigning madness, if that would bring him one step closer to the realization of his goals.

Sarmiento's verbal play about madness seems, at first glance, to be an insignificant passage in relation to the totality of his writing. However, further inspection reveals its role in relation to his complex psychology which ultimately—and inevitably—will cast its shadow over the productive process of his discourse. The setting was Santiago de Chile, in 1852. Sarmiento had been under constant attack by the Rosas government, and now was threatened with extradition to Argentina's capital in order to stand trial for sedition and conspiracy against the homeland. His Chilean contacts had already perceived in him a special talent, and he was the object of both immense respect and derision. “Loco Sarmiento,” as his opponents labeled him, selected a most unusual defense against the attempts to discredit his name: the writing of an autobiography which would convince potential readers of his own moral uprightness and the nobility of his character.

In Recuerdos de provinicia, as this long autobiographical and costumbrista essay is titled, “Loco Sarmiento” quotes as an epigraph a famous line from Macbeth, but he attributes it erroneously to Hamlet, as if he wished to substantiate textually the nickname popularly bestowed upon him.¹ Hamlet, for him, was an obsessed personage for whom madness was a means to an end. His quote: “Es este un cuento que con aspavientos y gritos, refiere un loco y que no significa nada” (III, 25). For both Hamlet and Sarmiento, then, madness was a rhetorical stance; it was part of the sound and the fury for getting their own way and making their own obsessions prevail.² Can this passage from Recuerdos de provincia serve in the task of understanding better some of the unarticulated goals of Sarmiento's historical writing in general? At the very least, it lends legitimacy to the perspective presented here, which sees in his thought the evidence of a bricolage knowledge production. It leads the reader to search beyond the contradictory surface content of that writing and seek out a method for that madness.

An appropriate beginning for this enterprise is to briefly consider Sarmiento's understanding of what precisely constituted a methodology for writing history. Historiography, as well as any other area of humanistic investigation, becomes a discipline when its practitioners articulate a methodology and then abide as closely as possible to that methodology in the construction of their discourse. One basis for evaluating a given historical writing practice is to compare the resulting text to its original methodological premises. It is expected that historical writing, more than other types of writing, will be guided by a consistent and coherent methodology. That is to say, the writer will systematically order and select the stuff of his discourse according to what he accepts as rational and coherent criteria.

The philosophical orientation of the writer is one of the fundamental determiners in the selection of a method for historical analysis. Hegel, for example, was an idealist, and nearly the whole tradition of enlightenment historical writing that preceded him was also idealistic, if we understand the word idealism in the very general sense of ascribing a primacy to subjective reality in its role of not only furnishing the impetus for institutional change, but also of providing the measure for being or individual and social achievement. On the other hand, the positivistic tradition was largely materialist in that it's practitioners ascribed primacy to the role of social and productive relations in the formation of the individual's ideas and also in the precipitation of social change. In general, every historical text may be classified in relation to the idealism-materialism continuum. Since this philosophical issue influences the writer in both his selection and arrangement of content units, it is one of the more fundamental constituents of a given historical methodology.

In the previous chapter it was demonstrated how Sarmiento tapped several philosophical systems in order to describe and evaluate the different ideologies, population groups, and social institutions of the time. The many contradictions and inconsistencies in his arguments, and the unwieldy combination of ideas from enlightenment, pre-positivistic, and romantic schools, are indicative of Sarmiento's semi-controlled inventiveness and somewhat creative spontaneity in writing. The task at hand is to hypothesize a “grammar” for his historical writing, that is, to suggest a set of underlying rules which govern the organization of his apparently contradictory ideas.

Such a structural investigation rejects the hypothesis that the totality of Sarmiento's historical ideas merely constitutes an unsystematic collage. An initial argument against this collage interpretation is based on the idea that the human mind shies from disorder and gravitates unconsciously toward psychic harmony. This is precisely the function of the archetype and the myth, which provide stable categories for man's cognitive and perceptive functions. The idea of the bricoleur, as explained in Chapter Three, is relevant here. The bricoleur, who differs only in emphasis but not in kind from the “scientific” thinker, presents an apparently disordered array of elements in his discourse. But again, the data constituting his discourse receive their structure from a pre-existing emotion, intuition, or bias. The structural investigation proceeds, then, by seeking an explanation for why the discourse is organized the way it is.

The confusion between philosophical idealism and materialism in Sarmiento's historical writing does indeed have an explanation. The following pages document how the writer, instead of situating himself philosophically in either the idealist or the materialist camp, chose instead, to play both games, but at different times. This results in more than a contradiction in the content of his ideas, for what is at issue is the definition and limitation of the theoretical space that makes historical study possible in the first place. Sarmiento's historical ideas, in short, were philosophically idealist when that stance seemed convenient, and materialist—and even determinist—when the opposite point of view seemed to be tactically relevant. The text is like a rejected child seeking acceptance into one or another of the authoritative historical traditions prevailing even to the present day.³

PHILOSOPHICAL MATERIALISM

First of all, Sarmiento was a materialist. This general perspective enters the thought of the time through a distorted reading of the works of Vico and Herder—and then their disciples—who had proposed that the study of geographic, climatic, and historical influences could yield information about the contemporary existence of a people. However, as was frequently the case—and especially in the nineteenth-century intellectual environment of Latin America—, these ideas, by the time Sarmiento came into contact with them, had already developed their own mythology the lengthy process of diffusion, reinterpretation, and intertextual insertions, and did not necessarily retain the spirit of their original formulation.

The methodology of studying the environmental conditions and past history of a people is central to Facundo. In this, Sarmiento utilized the general idea of the Volksgeist, which proposes that events were largely influenced by the physical environment and that the leaders of social struggles were to a great degree the personifications of the forces of nature.

The Volksgeist belongs to a well-defined and prestigious historical tradition. The concept has its roots in the ideas of Vico, whose thought came to Sarmiento via the writings of Herder and the nineteenth-century French historical school, and in particular, through the translations into French by Michelet.⁴ Vico was one of the first of the modern European historians to postulate that the study of environment and past history could yield information about man's contemporary existence. Herder, who followed in the tradition of Vico, was in his turn avidly read by the younger generation of European historians. Herder added to these ideas concerning the influence of the environment upon the formation of man. He suggests in a chapter title the power of biology in this regard: “The Genetic Power is the Mother of All Forms upon Earth, Climate Acting Merely as an Auxiliary or Antagonist.”⁵

Herder established a methodology of inquiry that Sarmiento would later utilize. Herder states: “We should never overlook the climate from which a people came, the mode of life it brought with it, the country that lay before it, the nations with which it intermingled, and the revolutions it has undergone in its new seat.”⁶ Herder believed that the historical life of a people could not be understood as existing apart from the environment in which they were formed. Like his mentor Vico, the German historian had perceived the underlying relations between the physical, natural, and human worlds, all of which were governed by God's will, and which the historian could decipher through rational analysis.

Another probable source for Sarmiento's Volksgeist orientation was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America took into account “the prodigious influence that the social condition appears to exercise upon the laws and the manners of men. …”⁷ Similar to Vico and Herder, the French aristocrat believed that one must study an individual's racial origins and the past history of his family in order to understand “the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which rule his life” in the present.⁸

The idea of the Volksgeist is fundamental for comprehending how Sarmiento sought to analyze the antecedents of caudillo rule in Argentina. In the spirit of Herder, he dedicates several pages to such diverse matters as the interior provinces' geography, customs, popular traditions, and character types. The reader not versed in historiographical methodology might mistakenly view these as relatively peripheral concerns, given the writer's primary objective of combating Rosas through his brand of journalistic propaganda. Sarmiento's intentions, however, were more ambitious: he wished to wage a total war against not only the caudillo leaders of the country, but also the social and productive systems that made their political ascendancy possible in the first place. He opportunistically seized upon the Volksgeist historical orientation as an arm for his own ideological struggle.

The content and focus of Facundo's first chapters, in addition to their precise ordering, obey the tight logic of Sarmiento's Volksgeist orientation. Chapter one treats the physical aspects of the country, in addition to the derivative “caracteres, hábitos e ideas que [la geografía] engendra,” according to its subtitle (VII, 19). Chapter two follows these physical factors to a further point in the line of causal development and focuses more specifically on character types prevalent in this environment. It further develops the thesis that the predominant ideas, values, and dispositions of the inhabitants in Argentina's rural society exist in relation to the peculiar geographical setting. Chapter three then carries the causal chain from psychology to sociology when it considers the group associating institutions which exist of the men living in that environment previously considered. Chapter four completes the scheme by abstracting from the geographic, psychological, and sociological data in order to formulate some hypotheses concerning the past history of the area. Here, Sarmiento specifically deals with the promise, and then the eventual failure, of the post-independence movement to modernize the country as a whole. One reason for the failure in the author's opinion, was the fact that the country's leaders had not taken adequate account of the organic unity existing between the people and the land.

These four chapters establish a thread of causality beginning with the physical environment and ending with social history. Taken together, they comprise the background for what then follows: the presentation of the life of Juan Facundo Quiroga. The work's first and second parts, then, constitute a tight conceptual unity. In the work's second part this caudillo is afforded detailed attention, not so much because of his outstanding acts or personality—although it is true that Quiroga in history and legend held an enormous sway over the public consciousness at the time—but because he seemed to be a representative figure for the lawless and violent character of rural life. As such, Facundo's rise to prominence in Argentina's interior prefigured Rosas' ascendancy over the country as a whole:

en Facundo Quiroga no veo un caudillo simplemente, sino una manifestación de la vida argentina tal como la han hecho la colonización [española] y las peculiaridades del terreno. … Pero Facundo en relación con la fisonomía de la naturaleza grandiosamente salvaje que prevalece en la inmensa extensión de la República Argentina; Facundo, expresión fiel de una manera de ser de un pueblo, de sus preocupaciones e instintos; Facundo, en fin, siendo lo que fué, no por un accidente de su carácter, sino por antecedentes inevitables y ajenos de su voluntad, es el personaje histórico más singular, más notable, que puede presentarse a la contemplación de los hombres que comprenden que un caudillo que encabeza un gran movimiento social, no es más que el espejo en que se reflejan en dimensiones colosales, las creencias, las necesidades, preocupaciones, y habitos de una nación en una época dada de su historia.

([Obras Completas, 52 vols., Buenos Aires: Editorial Lux del Día, 1948-1956; subsequent in-text references are to this work] VII, 12-13)

Sarmiento's excursion into philosophical materialism continues in what Anderson Imbert had aptly labeled as his “modo antropomórfico de explicar el mundo.”⁹ Sarmiento's tendency throughout Facundo is to present specific individuals as personifying abstract social forces and ideological principles. Indeed, in several passages he articulates the belief that by analyzing the ideas and acts of individuals, one comes to understand the predominant social conflicts of a period. What results is an especially dramatic presentation of a struggle between those forces which he took to represent his abstract and quasi-metaphysical categories of civilization and barbarism.

Facundo's second part concretely illustrates how Sarmiento's materialist conception of events influenced the construction of discourse. The text's thesis is that barbarism, which is personified by the figures of Facundo and Rosas, threatened the survival of institutions working toward order and progress. As the protagonist, Facundo is portrayed as a child of Argentina's untamed rural interior. An epigraph from Alix's Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman heads the chapter treating Quiroga's infancy and youth: “L'homme de la nature et qui n'a pas encore appris a contenir o deguiser ses passions, les montre dans leur energie, et se livre a toute leur impetuosité” (VII, 67). The writer therefore begins with a pre-established conclusion—or call it a methodological bias—which must be substantiated by the available evidence: Facundo, of primitive spirit due to his origins in a savage natural environment, will be largely governed by the emotions and hardly affected by the higher dictates of reason.

Literary critics have little but praise for the artful style in the episode treating the mountain lion which initiates Facundo's biography. From the point of view of historical accuracy, however, that style made for a most biased appraisal. It is obvious that the underlying objective of the writer was the demonstration of how untamed nature had left its indelible imprint on the personality of the protagonist:

También a él le llamaron tigre de los Llanos, y no le sentaba mal esta denominación, a fe. La frenología y la anatomía comparada, han demostrado, en efecto, las relaciones que existen entre las formas exteriores y las disposiciones morales, entre la fisonomía del hombre y de algunos animales a quienes se asemeja en su carácter.

(VII, 69)

After this beginning, the direction of the narration is obvious. The logic is that Facundo's character development, after having received its initial stamp, followed an unalterable path. Facundo's adolescence is then explained in terms of the Volksgeist of the wild pampas which had already possessed that young existence: “Cuando llega a la pubertad, su carácter toma un tinte más pronunciado. Cada vez más sombrío, más imperioso, más selvático, la pasión del juego, la pasión de las almas rudas que necesitan fuertes sacudimientos para salir del sopor que las adormeciera, domínalo irresistiblemente a la edad de quince años” (VII, 71). Even as a child his adult traits were highly visible, according to Sarmiento: “¿No es ya el caudillo que va a desafiar más tarde a la sociedad entera?” (VII, 71). Artistic sensitivity is superimposed over sociopolitical thesis; the writer anticipates the protagonist's entrance into a deterministic web. For the reader, there will be no surprises. Or, better yet, Facundo's childhood is viewed retrospectively: his biography begins post festum with already established givens and with the results of his future development already assumed.

To treat in detail how Sarmiento continued in the textual reconstruction of Facundo Quiroga's adult life would only court redundancy. The textual premise is that the protagonist's barbarian character was a direct result of his residence in the primitive countryside. As the narration follows this cardboard cut-out figure, now a mature being, as he erupts onto the national scene, evidence is accumulated of Facundo's undeviating progress toward barbarism. The narrator emphasizes almost exclusively the data which falls within the parameters of philosophical materialism, and progressively tightens the rhetorical noose around the neck of the protagonist in this deterministic textual world. Facundo's assassination at Barranco Yaco is presented as a fitting end for one who in life had so completely internalized the primitive forces of his medium.

Sarmiento was aware of the extremely one-sided nature of his portrait, which he justified out of the objective of presenting a type in the form of an individual:

Aquí termina la vida privada de Quiroga, de la que he omitido una larga serie de hechos que sólo pintan el mal carácter, la mala educación, y los instintos feroces y sanguinarios de que estaba dotado. Sólo he hecho uso de aquellos que explican el carácter de la lucha, de aquellos que entran en proporciones distintas, pero formados de elementos análogos, en el tipo de los caudillos de las campañas que han logrado al fin sofocar la civilización de las ciudades. …

(VII, 75-76)

He admits to having suppressed certain material that would have contradicted his political thesis and unbalanced the aesthetic harmony of his tautological presentation. He demonstrates in this quote his awareness of the “productive” nature of his writing: he utilized an economy of data in order to engender a particular type of discourse which would achieve a calculated effect upon his idealized public. It is interesting to note the hollow pretense of impartiality: he admits to having left aside certain data, but only that data which would have reinforced the very same conclusions had they been included in the presentation. It is obvious throughout the pages treating Facundo Quiroga that literary and political objectives overshadowed Sarmiento's commitment to historical realism.

PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISM AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY

In the interest of a fidelity to methodological principles—and even out of a desire for artistic balance—it is not surprising that we find in Facundo an elaboration of the Volksgeist of civilization, and its consequent anthropomorphization, which parallels that which is accomplished in relation to Facundo Quiroga and Sarmiento's conception of barbarism. In fact, this application of civilization's Volksgeist is not altogether anathema to the text's political objective of attacking Rosas and promoting the liberal ideas which would guide the country's transformation in the future. Considered from a rhetorical perspective, a Volksgeist of the city implies a determinism of final consequences, that is, the inevitable victory of urban and anti-Rosas forces. Whereas the outstanding geographical feature associated with the interior was the endless, nearly unpopulated pampas, that of the coastal areas was the urban settlement, with easy access to European commerce and culture. Buenos Aires, like Montevideo to a lesser degree, enjoyed a highly favorable position: “está en contacto con las naciones europeas; ella sola explota las ventajas del comercio extranjero …” (VII, 22). He suggests the causal link between maritime contact and the coastal city's relatively high level of material comforts and progressive social life. However, not only the coastal areas would benefit from the geographical features that make maritime trade possible, since Argentina was also blessed with several rivers which made different interior regions accessible to the sea. Crossing the heart of the interior were several navigable rivers which promised for the surrounding areas a commercial development equal to that enjoyed by the coastal areas. It was Sarmiento's belief that in these areas the commercial way of life was destined to predominate as it already did in the Province of Buenos Aires. He harshly criticized Rosas for keeping the interior rivers of the country closed to international commerce and for opposing liberal institutions in general. According to Sarmiento, Rosas' opposition to the city-Volksgeist was tantamount to resisting the inevitable march of History. In Argentina, the city was bound to triumph eventually, since “hay una organización del suelo, tan central y unitaria en aquel país, que aunque Rosas hubiera gritado de buena fe ¡federación o muerte! habría concluído por el sistema unitario que hoy ha establecido” (VII, 22).

Sarmiento's interest in the historical past was never abstract and impassive: on the contrary, his historical readings and writings always had the object of fortifying or justifying his programs of social and political action. As a result, his politics began where historical theorization ended. He believed that Rosas and what he called the latter's “gaucho government” obstructed the inevitable progress of the city-Volksgeist. The caudillo dictator, like the Spanish colonial administration generations before, continually failed to realize that it was in the country's long-range interests to open its rivers to international commerce. Historical writing was one means of denouncing the Rosas government, whose program was “absurdo e insostenible” (VII, 232) since it went against what Sarmiento took to be the destiny of the region. He condemned the Rosas government not only for what he believed was it's attempt to resurrect the institutions of the colonial and feudal past, but also for its blind resistance to the providence-mandated development of the region.

Sarmiento's arguments against the Rosas government therefore took two principal directions: first, there was his belief in the necessity for republican government to replace a retrograde feudalism; and second, he advanced the argument that providence ordained the eventual victory of the city-Volksgeist over that of the countryside. He envisioned his own generation of political activists to be the midwives of history; it was they who would help to give birth to a new age in which progressive institutions and a commercial orientation would predominate.

According to the Volksgeist thesis, an individual could hardly hope to alter substantially the socio-historical reality in the light of the preponderant influence of geographical determinism. The implication is that a powerful man or a determined government would attempt to resist the forces of providence, but that resistance would be brief and it would eventually fail. According to this interpretation, the social revolutionary was not entirely free to choose the direction for society's future development; his ideas, in order to eventually succeed, would have to conform to a predetermined pattern. Sarmiento accordingly stressed that the impetus for successful institutional change must originate in response to the possibilities offered by one's socio-historical and geographical context. This is the intended meaning of his dramatized rhetorical question in Facundo's introduction: “¿Somos dueños de hacer otra cosa de lo que hacemos, ni más ni menos como Rosas no puede dejar de ser lo que es? ¿No hay nada providencial en estas luchas de los pueblos?” (VII, 9-10) The voluntaristic and energetic young writer's declaration of a fatal force guiding his actions is decidedly incongruous. More convincing is the explanation that he seized upon the Volksgeist thesis as a motor for his discourse out of polemical and artistic passion, and not out of reasoned conviction.

With this idea of a providential design for historical development, Sarmiento's historical ideas enter into contradiction. When he described the mission of his generation as that of reinserting the nation into the providential Volksgeist of progress, he depicted their role as the passive actors of history's script, and not as masters of their own destiny.¹⁰ But the liberal program of social transformation which he defended in other pages called for the technological mastery of nature, the construction of cities, the harnessing of rivers, and the formation of governments promoting the free exchange of ideas. In the pages of Facundo, the Volksgeist actor, guided by providence's fatal laws, coexisted alongside of the voluntaristic liberal. Philosophical determinism shared textual space with philosophical idealism, and why not? Both were rhetorical procedures that served the same god of progress.

Sarmiento's application of the Volksgeist therefore reinforced many of the same goals deduced from his enlightenment-oriented analysis of the country's present crisis. From the former he extracted the argument that providence ordained the eventual victory of the city-Volksgeist over that of the countryside; associated with the latter was his commitment in theory to republican institutions and his opposition to the establishment of a retrograde feudalism. But his bricolage orientation meant that theories took second place to action. It was of little consequence to him whether the justifications provided were of an enlightenment or romantic orientation, or both; but it was convenient that his writing did, in fact, provide some justification (or several justifications) for the actions that he urged upon his cohorts. Sarmiento, however, realized that his long-range goal needed no textual justification whatsoever: he believed that civilization's fatal and eventual victory over barbarism was dictated by providence, not by men.

LIBERALISM AND THE MYTHICAL POWER OF THE IDEA

In addition to the image of a Volksgeist for the water-accessible coasts and inlands, Facundo provides a second image of Argentina's urban population of white Europeans and their descendants. This image, harmonizing with the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, is of an adaptable and progress-oriented elite for whom all change is possible because they possess the idea. If we accept his discussion of the inevitability of the victory over Rosas, as referred to above, Sarmiento is quite consistent in minimizing the relationship between environment and culture when discussing this group. For example, in the introduction to Viajes en Europa, Africa y Estados Unidos, written some six years after Facundo, Sarmiento articulates how the idea, in certain groups of people—and here he included himself—assumed an active role in elevating human existence above the formative powers of the land:

la idea de la verdad viene menos de su propia esencia, que de la predisposición de ánimo, y de la aptitud del que aprecia los hechos. … El hecho es que bellas artes, instituciones, ideas, acontecimientos, y hasta el aspecto físico de la naturaleza en mi dilatado itinerario, han despertado siempre en mi espíritu el recuerdo de las cosas análogas de América, haciéndome, por decirlo así, el representante de estas tierras lejanas, y dando por medida de su ser, mi ser mismo, mis ideas, hábitos e instintos. Cuánta influencia haya ejercido en mímismo aquel espectáculo, y hasta dónde se haga sentir la inevitable modificación que sobre el espíritu ejercen los viajes, juzgaranlo aquellos que se tomen el trabajo de comparar la tendencia de mis escritos pasados con el giro actual de mis ideas.

(V, xii-xiii)

In this passage he avoids any reference to a formative Volksgeist, but instead talks about a certain predisposition which made a person susceptible to a positive and inevitable modification of the spirit.

These ideas concerning the innate capacity of men for self-improvement situate Sarmiento's thought within the idealist tradition. He, as well as enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, Condorcet, and others, emphasized the ascendancy of man over the organic and animal worlds on account of the transformational power of the idea. But it must be pointed out that he, like his enlightenment mentors, glossed over the difference between one's conceptualization of the idea and one's desire or ability to act according to it in order to transform a concrete situation. In essence, Sarmiento bestowed upon his illusory class of progressive beings a nearly mythical capacity for praxis: “Tenemos una cualidad y hacemos alarde de ella, porque suple a la fortuna y al talento, al saber y a los demás dotes; sabemos querer; y cuando queremos algo, bien y deliberadamente, ponemos los medios de conseguirlo.”

(XIII, 363)¹¹

If his explanation of the individual's passage from ideation to action stretches the reader's credibility, then all the more so will his transition from an individual's moral improvement to a society's historical progress. His belief in the possibility of society's governed development was well within the idealist tradition. For him, human history had succeeded in elevating itself above the natural order as a result of its propensity for change and its impetus for self-improvement. Perhaps it was the gap in his logic, or his abruptness in passing from the individual to society, which caused him to abandon an analytic language in favor of the metaphor. In the longer passage quoted above, Sarmiento's ambiguous use of the word “natural” reveals his contradictory view of humanity. On the one hand, nature—as seen in the previous section—gives rise to barbarism through its telluric force; but on the other hand, nature, as portrayed here, governs the transformational power of the idea:

Las ideas, ha dicho M. Lamartine, bajan siempre de lo alto. No es el pueblo, sino la nobleza, el clero, y la parte pensadora de la nación, quien ha hecho la revolución. Las preocupaciones tienen a veces su origen en el pueblo; pero las filosofías no brotan sino en la cabeza de las sociedades; y la revolución francesa era una filosofía. Y asísucede siempre, las luchas sociales están de largo tiempo antes escritas en libros, o formuladas en oraciones; y el que quiera estudiar un hecho consumado, ha de ir a buscar sus causas generadoras en los deseos de antemano manifestados, en la conciencia que del bien o del mal tenían formada los hombres que descollaron en un tiempo a la cabeza de las naciones, representándolas por la ciencia, la religión, las preocupaciones y las luces.

(III, 266-67)

He explains that historical action originates when the intellectual introduces the idea to society, an event which is usually followed by a long period of gestation. The relatively inert physical forces and material interests weigh down even the most pregnant of ideas, but in doing so they necessarily become altered to some degree. Then, when the time is ripe, innovative ideas break to the surface of social discussion and cause violent struggle among the groups vying for social predominance. In another text he continues this mystification of the idea to its logical extreme. Anthropomorphized ideas, upon separating themselves from the human source of articulation, become the protagonists of historical action. If man or hostile governments take action to repress these insurgent ideas, then it will be to no avail:

Las ideas entonces, lejos de debilitarse por la paralización que intenta obrar en ellas la política, se robustecen por el contrario, se depuran y se presentan cuando llega el caso de manifestarse incorporadas en forma de credo político, con principios fijos, claros y bien precisados.

(VI, 11)

This metaphorical description of social agitation emphasizes the insurrectional force with which Sarmiento perceived new ideas to act upon society.

This last quote suggests the destiny which he predicted for those ideas whose force was already spent, for example the reforms of the French Revolution or of the May insurrection in Argentina. These progressive movements had held the cards of victory for a few years, but then they lost ground to the ideas of the past which had continued their march “underground,” only to surge forth at a later moment (VI, 12). Nonetheless, the laws of providence decreed that the periods of reaction would eventually come to an end, leaving those progressive movements victorious and unchallenged on the fields of battle.

This vision of struggling ideas as the impetus of social change is fundamental for understanding many of Sarmiento's most engaging activities. For example, his devotion to journalism is explained in part by the belief in the revolutionary power of new ideas: in their printed and popularized form, they would sow the social terrain with polemic and thereby cultivate reforms. One reading of the opening lines of Mi defensa suggests an impetuous and at times irresponsible frenzy to his early activities in Chile: “he templado las armas con que me he echado de improviso en la prensa, combatiendo con arrojo a dos partidos, defendiendo a otro; sentando principios nuevos para algunos; sublevando antipatías por una parte, atrayéndome por otra afecciones; complaciendo a veces, chocando otras, y no pocas reuniéndolos a todos en un solo coro de aprobación o vituperios …” (III, 2). However, another reading suggests that his commitment to foster discussion without undue regard for immediate consequences was guided by this extremely idealistic interpretation for the mechanism of progress. In a similar fashion he frequently expressed the idea that his adamant opposition to tyranny was due in part to the restriction which the tyrants had placed upon the circulation of ideas, that sine qua non of civilization.

The emphasis placed on the free exchange of ideas elucidates one aspect of the opposition demonstrated by Sarmiento and others of his generation to the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Critics have called attention to the “idealistic” and “dream-like” quality of their projects, and therefore the relative ineffectiveness of their complaints against the dictator.¹² Rosas had already achieved Rivadavia's dream of uniting the country under one political authority (although Rivadavia would have disapproved of Rosas' heavy-handed control for the economic benefit of the cattle oligarchy.) Rosas, in essence, had all but deprived the neo-Unitarian exiles of their political raison d'être. Similarly, Rosas, who had developed the saladero and had led the cattle industry of the coastal areas into a capital-efficient centralization, was the man of the hour in the economic sphere, though Sarmiento and the other members of his generation of gentile thinkers chose to ignore it. In consequence, the points of contention drawn up by the Asociación de Mayo against Rosas were largely of form, and not of substance. According to Alberto Palcos, when all was over and done, “el único reproche esgrimible contra Rosas sería él de haber apelado a la violencia.”¹³ Eventually, after the country's torturous journey past Caseros in 1852 and then to Pavón in 1861, the newly ascendant bourgeoisie, and among them Sarmiento, would legitimize many aspects of Rosas' system through the letter of the law.¹⁴ Rosas in great part had provided the political and economic base upon which they would proceed to establish their superstructural reforms. The national unification he had forcibly achieved made possible the eventual political ascendancy of Argentina's commercial bourgeoisie with its dependent liberal ideology.

Returning to questions of historiographical methodology, Sarmiento postulated that the ability to learn new concepts and utilize them for creating a new and better pattern of living was precisely what differentiated the primitive tribe from the civilized society. He believed that the education of its children was indispensable for any developed society. He did not hold that man was born good, in the sense of the Rousseauian noble savage, nor that man was born with Locke's tabula rasa of innate learning capacity. Man, for Sarmiento, had as many bad instincts as good. He therefore believed that a progressive society would encourage and stimulate the positive qualities of the citizenry through instruction, institutional reform, and political participation, and therefore prepare them for a life governed by reason.

The matter of reason versus the emotions is one of the keys to Sarmiento's thought regarding the class composition of society. His historical doctrine was predicated on the idea that mankind was developing along the path of equality and that a society would eventually emerge in which every able-bodied person would participate in a democratic political process and would enjoy prosperity under a liberal economic system. This classless society was his dream for the future. In the present, however, there was still a need for social difference.

Argentine society, from his perspective, suffered from an enormous cultural gap separating an elite minority from the uncultured masses. The former, who had traveled farther along the civilizing path, were already indoctrinated into the life of reason. The masses, however, whose reasoning faculty still lay largely dormant, were still governed for the most part by the baser faculties of the intelligence. This being so, the wise social planner had the need of providing an acceptable institutional framework in which the masses could exercise their still unseasoned and semi-tamed nature. Even in the most progressive societies of his day he found a justification for such public amusements as bullfights, the romantic theatre, and public festivals:

Por todas partes se siente la misma falta y la misma necesidad de esas fiestas populares que conmueven profundamente los corazones, que unen los ánimos y representen las creencias, las tradiciones y los votos de la sociedad. Se echan hoy menos aquellos tiempos felices en que el cristianismo era la expresión por sí solo de todas las necesidades de la sociedad. … Nuestra época es desgraciadamente una época de lucha, de transición y de escepticismo. Ideas, intereses, tendencias, todo está en contradicción, y lo que sería bueno para la muchedumbre ignorante, sería ridículo y despreciable para la parte ilustrada: lo que convendría a unos espíritus, sublevaría a los otros. Un día llegará en que las nuevas ideas de que hoy vive la humanidad, tomen sus formas y se ostenten éstas apoyadas en la veneración de las masas y de la sociedad entera.

(II, 146)

Even popular amusements had their place in his civilizing scheme, at least for a society in transition that still aspired entrance into civilization's fold.¹⁵

In some passages Sarmiento's enchantment with man's reasoning faculty, and his corresponding disdain for the emotions and the instincts, has an extremist ring to it, and must be accounted for by, among other factors, his pragmatic reading of enlightenment texts.¹⁶ Rousseau, the radical educator of the previous generation, had urged man to turn from books and the purely rational considerations of facts in order to find human perfection within his heart or in the “impulse from a vernal wood.”¹⁷ Guizot, highly admired by Sarmiento, was of a similar disposition, as evidenced by the very positive function he accredited to the sub-rational faculties of the human intelligence. Guizot wrote about Voltaire, who also had given primacy to the reasoning faculty: Voltaire, famous primarily as a philosopher, nevertheless “was also a poet, and when he gave himself up to his imagination, to his poetic instincts, he found impressions greatly differing from his judgment.”¹⁸ For Guizot, poetry was not erreur, as Voltaire had called it, but truth, in the sense that it “answered very legitimate needs of human nature.”

Sarmiento's insistence on the superiority of reason contrasts with the views of Rousseau and Guizot. He was clearly a precursor of late nineteenth-century positivism, whose advocates sought to utilize scientific analysis for the purpose of transforming man's values and institutions. Linking Sarmiento to them was his highly pragmatic perspective concerning the role of man's rational intelligence. He believed that in the preceding century, civilization's most advanced thinkers had analyzed society and that their criticisms had brought about the destruction of retrograde social forms. Now, the responsibility of his own generation was to examine institutions and values with the objective of creating a new social order (II, 136). Man's most worthy intellectual pursuit, he writes, was the amelioration of all aspects of social life. After his voyage to Western Europe and North America between 1845 and 1847, Sarmiento returned even more convinced that his own continent was progressing in unhealthy directions. The first step in the bitter struggle to right the immense wrongs was to study “las causas profundas y tradicionales” of his continent's turmoil. These he says,

es preciso romper, si no queremos dejarnos arrastrar a la descomposición, a la nada, y me atrevo a decir a la barbarie, fango inevitable en que se sumen los restos de pueblos y de razas que no pueden vivir, como aquellas primitivas cuanto informes creaciones que se han sucedido sobre la tierra, cuando la atmósfera se ha cambiado, y modificádose o alterado los elementos que mantienen la existencia.

(V, xiii)

His mission, which sometimes reached the level of a cosmic imperative in his eyes, was tantamount to saving South America from a fate comparable to the extinction of inferior animal species because of their failure to adapt to changing natural conditions.

Sarmiento anticipated late nineteenth-century philosophical naturalism in his emphasis upon the ills besetting his continent and the surgical remedies prescribed for their cure. Like that of the literary naturalists, his discourse reveals an artistic sensitivity at play in a social-scientific world. The organic analogy united his view of society to that of the individual. If the principal sickness of Argentina's social organism was “barbarism,” then the social planner must perform an operation to remove such a malignant tumor. When the infection was minor, the operation would involve no more than a substitution of defective or sick parts for those which were healthy: “arrancarse una a una las ideas recibidas, y sustituírseles otras que están muy lejos de halagar ninguna de aquellas afecciones del ánimo, instintivas y naturales en el hombre” (V, xiii). If the required surgery on the social organism was more complex, then one could only hope that a knowledge of the causes would assist him in remedying those ills, or at least in blocking their effects (VI, 11). Since the introduction of the desired institution into the social organism was bound to encounter resistance, the social planner could utilize his knowledge in order to determine “su momento oportuno para introducirse” and “encontrarse el medio de regularizar la lucha …” (VI, 12,13). But if the evils besetting society went beyond the recently acquired and fairly untested state of the science, then it was advisable to make only an exploratory investigation, “y sus huellas guiarán los pasos de los que quieran en lo sucesivo ilustrar la opinión pública, es decir, formar la razón general haciendo conocer los escollos de que estamos rodeados, para indicar el sendero que nos toca seguir en la azarosa marcha de nuestras repúblicas” (VI, 12-13).

Sarmiento, the literary surgeon, suggests one other possibility for treating the sick social organism: preventive medicine. Upon reaching an agreement with respect to diagnosis and cure, society's elite could coordinate efforts in order to apply the prescribed preventive treatment:

¿Por qué la república, en que los intereses populares tienen tanto predominio, no ha de apetecerse, no ha de solicitarse, aunque no sea más que un paso dado hacia el fin, una preparación del medio ambiente de la sociedad para hacerla pasar del estado de civilización al de garantismo y de ahí al de armonía perfecta?

(V, 91)

In predicting the blissful results which his metaphorical operations would yield for society, his diction leaves the realm of naturalism and enters into that of utopian socialism.

It is evident that his belief in the insurrectional power of the idea and the scientific guidance of society contradicted the determinism which he depicted as characteristic of the “barbaric” sector of Argentina's national population. Idealism, in his view, had to do exclusively with civilized individuals or those whose behavior was governed by reason and who consequently willed for themselves a constant evolution along the path of progress. The people living in intimate contact with nature, however, were not considered capable of self-improvement since they lived both as individuals and as a community under the sign of an unchanging Volksgeist. Consequently, Sarmiento's civilization/barbarism dichotomy not only divided the national population into two distinct camps, but also defined two separate methodologies for historical analysis. While discussing those people whom he considered belonging to the civilized sphere, he utilized the philosophical underpinnings of idealism, and while considering those he deemed barbaric, he employed the theories of historical determinism.¹⁹

Sarmiento, who was an ideologue before he was a scholar, utilized his historical writing to promote partisan politics. He did not hesitate to muster philosophy or historical methodology in the pursuit of power. Seen from this perspective, he differed little from the científicos in the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, those brilliant lawyers and economists who also worshiped at the glittering shrines of Science and Progress. They, like Sarmiento, guided their country to previously unattained heights in the areas of material progress and elitist cultural production. They also made the distinction between civilization for the white, European-stock population of the urban capital, and barbarism for the Indians and people of mixed ancestry who constituted the sub-classes of the city and the countryside. The científicos, like Sarmiento, held out to the former group the dream of infinite progress; for the latter group, whom they perceived to be marked with the curse of Cain, they imposed a choice between servitude and annihilation.

IDEALISM, MATERIALISM AND THE EDUCATION OF MAN

The preceding section presents examples of how, through the calculated arrangement of ideas, Sarmiento's language constantly projects itself outside of the textual space and obeys the Machiavellian quest for sociopolitical power. The textual shifts from philosophical idealism to materialism—as demonstrated above—also obey the political necessity of promoting Argentina's white bourgeois population and attacking the non-white, non-bourgeois population of the countryside. In his writings this philosophical polarity influences the treatment of ethnic, racial, and social differences. Consequently, one can detect two parallel, but contradictory, views regarding man's potentiality for learning and the role of formal instruction in relation to social progress.

No aspect of Sarmiento's life and thought exemplifies better his ambiguous relationship to the Argentine liberal tradition as his lifelong commitment to public education. His confidence in the moral advancement of the individual as the motor for social progress reveals his profound roots in the enlightenment tradition and—as treated in the last chapter—utopian liberalism. Like Echeverría and the early Alberdi, he believed in the necessity for slow and not revolutionary change through the educated minority's political conduction and moral instruction of society's submissive masses. Sarmiento did not question the premises of that educational model nor the basic precepts of the culture upon which that model was based. His educational theory was aimed primarily at purifying and simplifying that culture of minorities in order that the masses could absorb it more rapidly. His illuminating visit to the United States came at about the same time as the frustrated revolutionary outbreaks across Europe in 1848. Both of these events would crystallize his belief that public education and a diffusion of wealth (which would be gained primarily through the state's land distribution policies) were the preconditions for the worthy goals of social equality and broad-based political participation.²⁰

This lifelong utopian focus to his thought and actions acquires its full meaning in the light of the sociopolitical system that came to predominate in Argentina after 1852. Echeverría already anticipated that new system in the writings of his later years (he died in 1851) and Alberdi mapped out its structure in Bases (1852): a system characterized by civil and commercial (not political) liberty which would be guaranteed through the order imposed upon society by an authoritarian government in which the cattle-exporting interests, those which had become consolidated during the Rosas period, would predominate. Alberdi quickly conformed to the theoretical fundamentals of these aspects of the dependent-liberal system, but Sarmiento judged them to be intolerable. Both advocated the accelerated introduction of foreign capital and immigration, but with differing visions of progress. For Alberdi, Argentina's development into a regime of liberty lay in the remote future; Sarmiento impetuously called for urgent movement then and there, toward the same goals. The conservative Alberdi advocated a role for public education that did not venture beyond the instruction of manual or vocational skills; Sarmiento incessantly advocated and practiced a pedagogy aimed at cultivating in the lower classes a life governed by reason in the exercise of liberty. Given the new oligarchical dictatorship in which the two men's respective orientations came to be tested, one would have to conclude that Alberdi's was by far the most realistic. But Sarmiento's post-1852 career was the most ambiguous: sometimes through accommodation, sometimes through ideological combat, he continually sought the implementation of his liberal educational and agrarian goals within the limits of what was politically and socially possible.

In this light I can agree with his liberal hagiographers, that Sarmiento's was the most progressive voice of his continent in the area of educational reform and in his lifelong commitment to the dream of social equality through a system of public instruction. His writings on educational issues are unsurpassed for their breadth and profundity, and he correctly perceived them as that part of his total work which would be the most enduring. However, those same pages display a similar philosophical rift as do those treating his ideas on historical change. In educational theory, Sarmiento reveals himself sometimes as a materialist and sometimes as an idealist, depending upon the subject at hand and the convenience for advocating one political philosophy over the other. In the passages treating education within the context of the white bourgeois municipality, his message is one of idealism, optimism, and hope. But in other passages, he discusses the uselessness of education for altering or improving the inferior station of the non-white population inhabiting his continent.

Sarmiento's ideas on education were flavored by the pre-positivistic idea of social amelioration whereby the social planner would transform institutions on the basis of information provided by historicist and empirical analysis. The school teacher, in addition to the military leader and the reform-minded newspaper reporter, was one such individual who could harness knowledge in order to advance society:

Sólo el maestro de escuela, entre estos funcionarios que obran sobre la sociedad, está puesto en lugar adecuado para curar radicalmente los males sociales. … El tiene una sola moral para todos, una sola regla para todos, un solo ejemplo para todos. El los domina, amolda y nivela entre sí, imprimiéndoles el mismo espíritu, las mismas ideas, enseñándoles las mismas cosas, mostrándoles los mismos ejemplos; y el día en que todos los niños de un país pasen por esta preparación para entrar en la vida social, y que todos los maestros llenen con ciencia y con conciencia su destino, ese día venturoso una nación será una familia, con el mismo espíritu, con la misma moralidad, con la misma instrucción, con la misma aptitud para el trabajo un individuo que otro, sin más gradaciones que el genio, el talento, la actividad o la paciencia.

(IV, 421-22)

It is obvious that when Sarmiento penned the above passage the utopian bent of his consciousness dominated over his sense of realism: one could say that his eyes were so focused upon the final objective of instruction that he lost sight of the student. In this passage, he communicates a Skinnerian pedagogy with the objective of creating a uniform and homogeneous society of individuals possessing the same aptitudes and the same morality as a result of having received similar instruction.

The education of the non-white non-European cultures was not a principal concern for Sarmiento's European mentors, whose works he utilized in the production of his own patchwork discourse. There are exceptions to this however. A brief consideration of the thought of Herder and Tocqueville regarding this subject will help to situate Sarmiento's views within a larger context, since the opinions of these two European writers suggest the breadth of the ideological context out of which Sarmiento's discourse emerged.

Tocqueville's firsthand observations concerning the plight of the indigenous population on the North American continent were recorded in Democracy in America, a work which we have already documented as having been closely read and infinitely respected by Sarmiento. Discernible is the French visitor's nominal respect for the enlightenment value of universal equality, but what predominates in his discourse is the diction of class and racial differences. The Indian's inferiority, he states, was not natural but acquired. Having become accustomed to submitting to everything except reason in the course of his life, “he is too unacquainted with her dictates to obey them. … Far from desiring to conform his habits to ours, he loves his savage life as the distinguishing mark of his race and repels every advance to civilization, less, perhaps, from hatred of it than from a dread of resembling the Europeans.”²¹

This extremely pessimistic view of the Indian's ability to adapt in the face of changing conditions found its parallel—but in not nearly so damning a form—in the thought of Herder. The German theorist more generously accredited the Indian, and in fact all races, with the power to adapt to new circumstances. But, he cautioned, change would be slow at best, such as that observed in the modifications of customs on account of centuries-long climatic shifts. “The various national forms of people testify that even this, the most difficult change of the human species, is possible.”²² A philosopher might regard these words as a somewhat optimistic view regarding a minority group's assimilation to society's dominant norms. However, a social planner such as Sarmiento, when confronted by the daily challenges of social conflict, might interpret them as a warrant for excluding those groups in order to achieve a projected reform.

As with the topic of social progress, Sarmiento's ideas concerning the education of non-white population groups in his country are almost always expressed in the terms of telluric determinism. He anticipated the “nationalists” of a few decades hence who would consider human behavior for the most part as deriving from biological causes:

Yo creo firmemente en la trasmisión de la aptitud moral por los órganos, creo en la inyección del espíritu de un hombre en el espíritu de otro por la palabra y el ejemplo. Jóvenes hay que no conocieron a sus padres, y ríen, accionan y gesticulan como ellos; los hombres perversos que dominan a los pueblos, infestan la atmósfera con los hálitos de su alma, sus vicios y sus defectos se reproducen; pueblos hay, que revelan en todos sus actos quienes los gobiernan. …

(III, 128-29)

The contemporary reader would regard Sarmiento's three examples for the transmission of moral aptitudes as exemplifying three entirely different issues. The example comparing young people to their parents suggests the genetic inheritance of not only physical attributes, but also moral traits. In the consideration given to perverse tyrants, there is a suggestion—perhaps intended as a figure of speech—that social practices can be passed from one generation to another, very much like a communicable disease. Lastly, the reference to the relationship between the rulers and the ruled explicitly defends the transformational power of education, either for better or for worse, in shaping the moral values of a community. The first two examples suggest the strong causal power of the material organism over man's moral and social habits, but the third seems to contradict the original premise about the biological determination of moral aptitudes. The lack of methodological rigor in this passage suggests Sarmiento's inability and perhaps his discomfort at attempting to rationalize racial prejudices with a quasi-scientific language.

The above quote is not an isolated occurrence which one could ascribe to the writer's hasty pen in an unmediated moment of creative exuberance, because the same general idea of a physical or biological determinism over the behavior of certain groups is repeated throughout his writing. In the following passage a biological analogy is used to fortify Sarmiento's discussion on historical change:

Porque las grandes luchas de las naciones, ni aun las conmociones populares, se engendran a sí mismas. La ley inmutable de la naturaleza orgánica es que en la vida la simiente guarde y envuelva el germen, y que este germen sometido a cierto grado de temperatura, se desenvuelva y produzca el árbol fructífero y saludable, o la planta venenosa o erizada de espinas.

(III, 266)

Here, he suggests that not only social struggles, but also human intelligence and physical growth, are governed according to the immutable laws of the natural world. The biological metaphor, a commonplace in nineteenth-century writing, receives at his hands a deterministic thrust. It is somewhat tautological to argue that whatever ends well originated in a good seed. But this argument functions on a rhetorical level to draw attention away from the contradiction of a progressive white bourgeoisie in a context of telluric determinism. The metaphor also has utility in substantiating for the social elite a politics of containment, apartheid, or genocide for an undesirable social group. Within this frame of thought, he who owns the word also defines the goals and limits of education. He who speaks or writes assumes the authority for deciding which seed will be allowed to develop into a fructiferous and healthy tree, and which ones will have to be destroyed before they grow into venomous and spiny plants.

When writing as educator or historian, Sarmiento many times abandoned the quest for impartial truth, and instead strove for rhetorical efficiency according to the exigencies of his sociopolitical situation. He portrayed the Indians and gauchos of Argentina as beings whose character and social institutions were overwhelmingly determined by a barbarian physical environment. Throughout his writing one can encounter many damning statements regarding racial and ethnic minority groups. Even in De la educación popular, his most enlightened work for its promise of instruction, and therefore progress, for South America's masses, Sarmiento excludes the Indian for his “ineducabilidad” (XI, 212) and the people of mixed race, who were for him “incapaces o inadecuadas para la civilización” (XI, 38).

“Las ideas no tienen patria,” Chilean minister Montt had persuaded him (III, 196), and perhaps Sarmiento learned too well the lesson of his lifelong friend and supporter. The original context of the utterance was Montt's assurance to the newly arrived Argentine exile that in Chile he was appreciated by those who mattered, even though others might attempt to defame him with the accusation that he was a foreigner meddling in local affairs. But the words of Montt also have significance within the context of Sarmiento's discourse itself, in the sense that ideas need not be joined through systems, and systems need not be dealt with according to discourse's supposed structure or methodological consistency. Indeed, the epistemological discontinuities and displacements in Sarmiento's discourse are notorious. He was a pragmatic thinker and not a purist. The worthiness of an idea was to be judged not in relation to its ideological “homeland,” but rather in relation to the effect which that idea's articulation would have over the body politic.

Perhaps Sarmiento had learned the laws of rhetoric from the old maestros—whose lessons have been incorporated into the deconstructive criticism of the 1980s—that truth is dependent only upon contingent factors which are specific to a particular reading of a text or a given reality. Truth is a function of discourse; it does not exist outside of language itself. A doctrine's pretense to truth illustrates nothing less than its own mystification, its own unwillingness to accept the “ideology of ideology,” in the words of Louis Althusser.²³ The truth about truth is that it has no homeland; it can be utilized in the struggle either for or against the ideological masks of oppression.

The official texts of a frozen continent have taught uncritical school children over the last century to esteem the universality of Sarmiento's ideas on education and history and to pay homage to Latin America's first educator-president. But since “ideas have no homeland,” they must not be interpreted from an abstract and universal criterion. Ideas, like the tool in the hand, have no worth apart from the objectives which they are used to defend. To Sarmiento's eternal credit, he was his country's and his continent's most constant defender of popular education. When he spoke as an idealist, popular education had the goal of saving the masses of children in the country from a slow economic and social marginalization; it was the indispensable instrument of social articulation in an age of universal progress. But when those ideas are viewed in relation to the social and political context in which they were articulated, one arrives at a somewhat different conclusion. During most of his adulthood he believed that the struggle between civilization and barbarism in his country was more specifically that between the biologically endowed white race and the genetically inferior people of color; between society's urban and educated elite, and the uncultured rural inhabitants. In truth, as Martínez Estrada succinctly states, “Enseñar fue para Sarmiento, siempre, una de las formas de dirigir.”²⁴ For one like Sarmiento, the pursuit of truth was motivated sometimes by a benevolent humanism, and at other moments by the goal of social and racial domination.

Notes

1. This is not the only misquote by Sarmiento in Facundo. Ana María Barrenechea, “Función estética y significación histórica de las campañas pastoras en el Facundo,” in José Montovani et al., Sarmiento: educador, sociólogo, escritor, político (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1963), p. 49, states that the epigraph in French for Facundo's first chapter comes not from Francis B. Head, as is indicated, but rather from Alexander Von Humboldt's Tableau de la Nature (Paris, 1808). This type of error is never entirely gratuitous; it leads one to hypothesize about the role of mistaken source references in relation to an implicit or explicit function of Sarmiento's discourse production.

2. The editor of Sarmiento's Obras Completas provides a brief history of the epithet “loco” as applied to Sarmiento (XIII, 263). Sarmiento himself documents its first use: in an 1848 letter written by José Santos Ramírez, a Federalist military official, who denounces Sarmiento for having urged him to join the opposition. Years later Sarmiento wrote in the margin to his copy of that letter: “Primera aparición en documento oficial del epíteto de loco.” The editor continues by stating that Urquiza then adopted the epithet, calling Sarmiento the “loco boletinero.” After that, it was only natural that his opponents would refer to Sarmiento in the same manner with the goal of discrediting him and his objectives.

3. A most interesting reading of Sarmiento's works would be this search for universal acceptance, as suggested by Adolfo Prieto, La literatura autobiográfica argentina (Rosario: Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Letras, 1962), p. 56, who argues that the writer, due to his world of “inseguridad organizada,” went to extreme lengths to gain popularity and renown through his writings and acts.

4. Raimundo Lida, “Sarmiento y Herder,” Memoria del Segundo Congreso Internacional de Catedráticos de Literatura Iberoamericana (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1941), pp 156-58; and Didier T. Jaén, “Hispanoamerica como problema a través de la generación romántica en Argentina y Chile,” Diss. University of Texas, 1965, pp. 41-50.

5. Johann Gottfried Von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, introd. Frank El Manuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 29.

6. Herder, Reflections, p. 29.

7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, Notes by Phillips Bradley (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1945), p. 357. See the chapter, “El modelo lejano: Tocqueville,” in Raúl A. Orgaz, Sarmiento y el naturalismo histórico, in Vol. III of Obras Completas, introd. Arturo Capdevila (Córdoba: Assandri, 1950), pp. 279-88, for a study of Tocqueville's influence on Sarmiento's thought.

8. Ibid., pp. 27-28.

9. Enrique Anderson Imbert, Genio y figura de Sarmiento, (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1967), pp. 52-53.

10. Juan Domingo Perón's words, as recorded by Eduardo Galeano, “Perón, los gorriones y la Providencia,” in Violencia y enajenación (Madrid: Nuestro Tiempo, 1971), p. 87, are reminiscent of Sarmiento's conception of providence: “‘A los traidores, a los tránsfugas hay que dejarlos volar, pero sin darles nunca descanso. Y esperar a que la Providencia haga su obra. Hay que dejar actuar la Providencia … ;’ y subrayó, guiñándome un ojo: ‘Especialmente porque la Providencia muy a menudo la manejo yo.”’

11. “El deseo” constituted a foremost quality of the civilized man, according to Sarmiento. In XV, 222, he argues that “el deseo” is one of the primary qualifications for a successful statesman.

12. Alejandro Korn, Influencias filosóficas en la evolución nacional, in Vol. III of Obras (La Plata: Universidad Nacional de la Plata, 1940), p. 168, states about the Generation of 1837: “Ninguna época imaginó mayores proyectos y empresas, ninguna realizó menos. Fue necesario que surgiera una generación menos soñadora, que templada en la adversidad, en el ostracismo, en la brega diaria, afrontada con criterio práctico y, sobre todo, con voluntad enérgica la tarea del momento, para llevarla a cabo no en los dominios fantásticos de la imaginación, sino dentro de las realidades y posibilidades precarias y contingentes de la acción viable.”

13. Alberto Palcos, Sarmiento: la vida, la obra, las ideas, el genio (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1938), p. 91.

14. Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Prólogo,” Campaña en el Ejército Grande Aliado de Sud América by Domingo F. Sarmiento (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958), p. xxvii: “El régimen político que bajo máscara republicana organice una dictadura heredera de los instrumentos de compulsión creados por el rosismo, orientados ahora por un plan de progreso económico acelerado, es lo que Alberdi llama la república posible.”

15. In some passages Sarmiento is ambiguous about the desirability of such a brave new world, at least for a transitional man such as himself, whose character was tempered as much by the passions as it was by the intellect. In Viajes, for instance, he opens himself to introspection upon experiencing the profound emotions stimulated by a visit to the volcano Vesubius: “¡No hay placer como el de tener mucho miedo, cuando esto no degrada, y es solicitado espontáneamente, ni sensaciones que agiten más profundamente el corazón que las del terror! ¡Oh! Yo me he hartado en el Vesubio con estos raros goces …” (V, 278). He writes of a similar reaction upon visiting the Spanish bullfight: “He visto los toros, y sentido todo su sublime atractivo. Espectáculo bárbaro, terrible, sanguinario, y sin embargo, lleno de seducción y de estímulo. … ¡Oh, las emociones del corazón, la necesidad de emociones que el hombre siente, y que satisfacen los toros, como no satisface el teatro, ni espectáculo alguno civilizado!” (V, 163)

16. Delfina Varela Domínguez de Ghioldi, Filosofía argentina: los ideólogos (Buenos Aires: 1938), p. 53, likens Sarmiento to Moreno and Rivadavia in that all studied French scientific theory in its application to educational principles. She is basically correct in the assessment that all rejected the path of the sentiments and the emotions, but she is incorrect in her assertion that this was learned from Rousseau's Emile.

17. J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 294.

18. Francois Guizot, The History of France, in Essays and Lectures, ed. and introd. Stanley Mellon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 357-58.

19. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Sarmiento (Buenos Aires: Argos, 1956), p. 166, also notes the unresolved contradiction between Sarmiento's optimistic idealism and pessimistic “realism”: “El idealismo de Sarmiento se aplicaba a la realidad sin ajustarse a ella, y su realismo era pesimista. Era idealista cuando concebía una legislación y un gobierno democráticos, sanos y decentes, sin profundizar mucho en las posibilidades de que tal utopía se pudiese cumplir; era realista cuando advertía que el móvil de la historia es, con la cruza irracional de razas, la barbarie. Pero ni supo extraer de esa realidad grosera un idealismo realista, ni de aquel idealismo teórico un sistema de aplicaciones prácticas que coincidiera con la realidad.”

20. This paragraph is based on the ideas presented by Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Prólogo” to Sarmiento's Campaña en el Ejército Grande, pp. xii-xix.

21. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 345-47.

22. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, introd. Frank E. Manuel, abr. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 29.

23. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 168, states: “In every case, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that the ‘ideas’ of a human subject exist in his actions, or ought to exist in his actions, and if that is not the case, it lends him other ideas corresponding to the actions (however perverse) that he does perform.”

24. Martínez Estrada, Sarmiento, p. 7.