Note
This extract, from a speech delivered at the graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, on 24 May 1880, clarifies very well the nefarious nature of patriotism, an attitude that Samuel Johnson had already defined as “the last refuge of the scoundrel” (1775).
Source: Juan Bautista Alberdi, La Omnipotencia del Estado es la Negación de la Libertad Individual, 1880.
One of the deepest roots of our modern tyrannies in South America is the Greco-Roman notion of patriotism and homeland, which we owe to the half-classical education that our universities have copied from France.
Homeland, as the Greeks and Romans understood it, was essentially and radically opposed to what we understand it to be in our modern times and societies. It was an institution of religious and holy origin and character, equivalent to what the Church is today, not to say holier than it, for it was the association of souls, of persons and of the interests of its members.
Its power was omnipotent and without limits with respect to the individuals of which it was composed. The Fatherland, thus understood, was and had to be the negation of individual liberty, in which all modern societies that are really free base their freedom. The individual man owed everything to the Fatherland; he owed it his soul, his person, his will, his fortune, his life, his family, his honour.
To withhold any of these things from the Fatherland was to betray it; it was an act of impiety. According to these ideas, patriotism was not only reconcilable, but identical and the same as the most absolute and omnipotent despotism in the social order.
The great revolution brought about by Christianity in the notions of man, of God, of the family, of society as a whole, radically and diametrically changed the foundations of the Greco-Roman social system.
However, the rebirth of ancient civilisation from the ruins of the Roman Empire and the formation of Modern States, preserved or revived the foundations of the past and dead civilisation, no longer in the interest of the still formless States themselves, but in the majesty of their rulers, in whom the majesty, omnipotence and authority of the Fatherland were personified.
Hence, we have the despotism of the Absolute Kings who emerged from the feudalism of Europe regenerated by Christianity. The State, or the Fatherland, continued to be omnipotent in respect of the person of each of its members; but the Fatherland personified in its monarchs or sovereigns, not in its peoples.
The omnipotence of Kings took the place of the omnipotence of the State or Fatherland.
Those who did not say: “I am the State,” thought and believed as the one who said it [i.e. We are the State]. When the people rose up against the kings, they replaced them in the exercise of the power of the nation, a power which was ultimately more legitimate in terms of its origin. The sovereignty of the people took the place of the sovereignty of the monarchs, albeit theoretically.
The Fatherland was everything and it was considered as the only legitimate power. It retained the original nature of its absolute and omnipotent power over the person of each of its members. The omnipotence of the Fatherland itself remained the negation of the liberty of the individual in the republic, as it had been in the monarchy. And modern Christian society, in which the human being and his rights are theoretically the most important thing, continued in reality to be governed by the rules of ancient and pagan societies, in which the Fatherland was the most absolute negation of liberty.
Divorced from freedom, patriotism was united with glory, understood as the Greeks and Romans understood it. This is the present condition of societies of Greco-Roman origin in both worlds.
Its individuals, rather than free, are the servants of the Fatherland.
The Fatherland is free, inasmuch as it does not depend on the foreigner; but the individual lacks freedom, inasmuch as he depends on the State in an omnipotent and absolute manner. The Fatherland is free, inasmuch as it absorbs and monopolises the liberties of all its individuals; but its individuals are not free because the Government owns all their liberties. Such is the social regime which the French Revolution has produced, and such is the political society which the Latin America of Greco-Latin race has begotten, following the example, till the present day, of the French Revolution.
Rousseau's Social Contract, turned into the catechism of our revolution by his illustrious coryphaeus Dr. Moreno [1], has governed our society, in which the citizen has remained a belonging of the State or of the Fatherland, incarnated and personified in its Governments, as natural representatives of the majesty of the omnipotent State.
The omnipotence of the State, exercised according to the rules of the ancient societies of Greece and Rome, has been the raison d'être of its representatives, the governments, called free only because they ceased to emanate from abroad.
[…]
The ancients knew neither freedom of private life, nor freedom of education, nor freedom of religion. The human person was counted for very little before that holy and almost divine authority which was called the Fatherland or the State. It was not surprising, according to these historical precedents, that, distorted in their meaning, they induced the French revolutionaries of the last century, unconscious imitators of the ancient society of Greece and Rome, to copy enthusiastically these dead models.
The disastrous revolutionary maxim that the health of the State is the supreme law of society was formulated in Greek and Roman antiquity.
It was then thought that law, justice, morality, everything had to yield to the interests of the Fatherland. There was, then, no greater error than to believe that in the ancient cities the human being enjoyed freedom. They did not even have the idea of it. They did not believe that any right could exist in opposition to the city and its gods.
It is true that later revolutions changed this form of Government; but the nature of the State remained almost the same. The Government was called successively monarchy, aristocracy, democracy; but none of these revolutions gave men true liberty, which is personal liberty.
To have political rights, to vote, to appoint or elect magistrates, to be able to be one of them, is all that was called liberty; but the human being remained no less subjugated to the State than he was before.
[…]
It follows from the observations contained in this study that what we usually understand by Homeland and patriotism are very dangerous bases and starting points for the organisation of a free country, because far from leading to freedom, they can lead us to the opposite pole, that is to say, to despotism, even if that path is not fully followed.
It is a very simple path by which extreme love of the country can lead away from the freedom of the individual and lead to the patriotic despotism of the State. He who loves the Fatherland above all things is not far from giving it all powers and making it omnipotent. But the omnipotence of the Fatherland or of the State is the exclusion and negation of individual liberty, that is to say, of man's liberty, which is, in itself, only a power moderating the power of the State.
Personal liberty is the sacred limit at which the power of the Fatherland ends.
The omnipotence of the Fatherland or of the State is the whole cause and raison d'être of the omnipotence of the government of the Fatherland, which serves as its personification or representation in the action of its sovereign power.
All public crimes against the liberty of man have been committed, not only with impunity, but legally, in the name of the Omnipotent Fatherland, invoked by its Omnipotent Government.
The liberty of man may not only be incompatible with the liberty of the Fatherland, but the former may be disregarded and devoured by the latter. They are two different freedoms which are often at odds with each other and are separate. The freedom of the Fatherland is independence from every foreign country. The freedom of the human being is the independence of the individual from the government of his own country.
The freedom of the Fatherland is compatible with the greatest tyranny, and both can coexist in the same country. The freedom of the individual ceases to exist by the very fact that the Fatherland assumes an omnipotent power in ruling the country.
Individual liberty literally means the absence of all omnipotent power concentrated in the State and in the government of the State.
[…]
The omnipotence of the Fatherland excludes not only all liberty, but all public progress, because the main agent of this progress is the individual who knows how to use his natural energy and efforts to preserve and improve his person, his fortune and his condition as a civilised human being.
Now, as the mass or aggregate of these particular individuals is what is commonly referred as the people, it follows that it is the people, and not the Government, to whom the gradual work of progress and civilisation is entrusted taking into account the conditions of South American society. And the people's favourite means of achieving this is civil or social liberty, distributed equally among its native and foreign individuals, who form the association or people of South America. If this natural and inevitable law of individual self-aggrandisement is called selfishness, it must be admitted that selfishness is bound to precede patriotism in the hierarchy of the agents and servants of national progress.
The progress of the country must necessarily be in direct proportion to the number of its intelligent, industrious and energetic individuals, and to the facilities and guarantees which their fertile and civilising selfishness finds for exercising and developing itself.
South American society would be saved and assured of a future of freedom and progress if it were intelligent selfishness and not selfish patriotism that was called upon to build and construct the edifice of the Republics of South America.
And as it is not natural for healthy selfishness to neglect the work of its own individual development, on pain of damaging its cardinal interest, it may be said with perfect truth that the future progress of South America is guaranteed and assured by the fact that it remains under the watchful protectorate of the individual selfishness which never sleeps.
The Omnipotence of the Fatherland, fatally converted into the Omnipotence of the Government, is not only the negation of liberty, but also the negation of social progress, because it suppresses personal initiative in the work of that progress. The State absorbs all the activity of individuals, when it has absorbed all their means and work of improvement. In order to carry out this absorption, the State enlists in the ranks of its employees those individuals who would be more capable if they were left to themselves.
The State intervenes in everything, and everything is done on its initiative in the management of its public interests. The State becomes a manufacturer, builder, entrepreneur, banker, merchant, publisher, and thus distracts itself from its essential and unique mandate, which is to protect the individuals against all internal and external aggression. In all functions which are not essential to government, it acts as an ignorant and harmful competitor of the individuals, worsening the service to the country, far away from serving it better.
Public administration becomes an industry and a way of life for half of the individuals of which society is composed. The exercise of this administrative and political industry, which is merely a way of life, takes the name of patriotism, since the service that each individual performs for the country in order to live takes on the appearance of service to the Fatherland. Naturally, then, the love for the hand that provides the bread on which one lives takes the appearance of love for the country — a great and essentially disinterested sentiment. How can one not love one's country as one loves one's life, when it is the country that gives one the means of life?
Thus, patriotism is not religion as in the old Greek and Roman times, nor is it even superstition or fanaticism. It is often mere hypocrisy in its pretensions to virtue, and in reality, a simple industry of living.
[…]
If more than one young man, instead of competing for the honour of receiving a salary as an employee or agent or salaried servant of the State, would prefer the honour of being master of himself in the management of his farm or rural property, the country would henceforth be placed on the road to its greatness, its freedom and its true progress.
Note
[1] Mariano Moreno (1778-1811) was an Argentine lawyer, journalist, and politician. He translated into Spanish The Social Contract of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.