Sarmiento on the Conflict between Civilization and Barbarism

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Saturday 15 February 2025 is the 214^th anniversary of the birth of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (15 February 1811 – 11 September 1888), who was born in Carrascol, a suburb of San Juan, in north central Argentina, on this date in 1811.

Sarmiento was the seventh President of Argentina from 1868 to 1874, and a tireless advocate for the modernization of Argentina and Latin America. As President of Argentina, he didn’t just write about modernization; he was in a position to act upon modernization initiatives, which he did, especially focusing on education. Sarmiento traveled widely to study educational systems in other nation-states, so as to apply this knowledge in Argentina.

Sarmiento in his Recollections of a Provincial Past recounts his contact with modern European ideas of history and philosophy and how he was won over by them. In what follows it’s important not to confuse the name of Manuel Quiroga Rosas mentioned by Sarmiento, and Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom I will discuss next:

“In 1838, my unfortunate friend Manuel Quiroga Rosas returned to San Juan, his spirit still inadequately prepared, but full of faith and enthusiasm for the new ideas that were shaking the literary world in France, and in possession of a choice library of modern authors. Villemain and Schlegel, on literature; Jouffroy, Lerminier, Guizot, Cousin, on philosophy and history; Tocqueville, Pierre Leroux, on democracy; the Revue Enciclopédique as a synthesis of all the doctrines; Charles Didier and a hundred other names, unknown to me until then, fed my thirst for knowledge for a long time. For two consecutive years, these books provided material for impassioned discussions at evening gatherings, where Doctors Cortinez, Aberastain, Quiroga Rosas, Rodriguez, and I discussed the new doctrines, resisting them, attacking them, and finally ending up more or less won over by them.”

The influence of modernizing European ideas seems to have stayed with Sarmiento throughout his life. If anything, they only became more powerful influences over time. And Sarmiento had imbibed Enlightenment philosophy of history at its sources, and eventually this attitude expressed itself in a great book that is variously translated as Facundo, or Barbarism and Civilization, or Life in the Argentine Republic in the days of the Tyrants. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, who wrote an introduction to one of the English translations of the book, said of it:

“Sarmiento’s Facundo, published in 1845, is the first Latin American classic and the most important book written by a Latin American in any discipline or genre.”

The book is, in part, a critique of what we now might call “strongman” governments, or what Spengler would have called Caesarism. Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West:

“So far as Rome is concerned, [Flamminius] was the archetype of opposition Caesarism, with him there came to an end the idea of state service and there began the ‘will to power’ which ignored traditions and reckoned only with forces. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics, though they stood on the threshold of Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. Caesar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding.”

Here we see that Spengler implicitly invokes Nietzsche by invoking the will to power as the distinguishing drive of the Caesarism. I’ll return to this later. In Latin American Spanish, Caesarism or a strongman ruler is called a caudillo, and Latin America has had its share of caudilllos.

Sarmiento’s book was more specifically a critique of the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas, a brutal and effective leader who rose up out of the countryside with a private army and eventually came to control all of Argentina, holding political power from 1829 until 1852. Rosas came to power by raising an army of gauchos, which is something akin to herding cats. Of the Gauchos Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria wrote:

“Gauchos were nomadic inhabitants of the Pampas whose culture centered on horsemanship, self-reliance, stoicism, and contentment. The gauchos did not want to be anything else, feeling in fact a mixture of pity and scorn for city folk and their ways. Nature provided plentifully for the gauchos’ needs, which were few, and they knew how to defend themselves from its threats… and from those who would ‘civilize’ them… They reveled in their defiant solitude. The limitless plains and fabulously abundant cattle gave them meat and hides to barter or sell, and to make ropes, saddles, and other tools of their trade. Very much like the American cowboy, the gaucho wanted to be left alone.”

Rosas managed to win over the gauchos and organized a gaucho army that brought him to power, but, once in power, Rosas instituted centralization measures far beyond anything imagined by his rivals, including Sarmiento, called the “Unitarists” because they wanted a unified Argentina. Many years later, when Rosas lost the Platine War, he fled Argentina and lived out the rest of his life in England, where he had received asylum. Sarmiento’s book takes account of these events, but it’s much more than a political critique of Rosas and his regime. Sarmiento was a great writer, and the book immediately strikes the reader as a classic from its opening lines, which, in the best tradition of historical writing, begins with a sketch of the landscape:

“The American continent ends to the south in a point, at whose extreme end the Strait of Magellan is formed. To the west, and at a short distance from the Pacific, the Chilean Andes run parallel to the coast. The land that lies to the east of that chain of mountains and to the west of the Atlantic, following the Rio de la Plata toward the interior upstream along the Uruguay, is the territory formerly called the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, and there, blood is still being shed in order to name it either the Argentine Republic or the Argentine Confederation.”

Sarmiento is unambiguous on the point that civilization is to be found in cities and barbarism in to the found in the countryside. He is the antithesis of Rousseau’s praise of the natural and uncivilized man as morally superior to the civilized man, and equally the antithesis of the attitude of Herder that what is best and authentic in a people emerges from a pastoral idyll of virtuous peasants. What Rousseau or Herder would have said of the gauchos, if they had known about them, would be an interesting counterfactual.

The counter-Enlightenment, which was unfolding in Europe with the work of philosophers like Rousseau and Herder, as Latin America was only just experiencing the first stirring of the Enlightenment itself, would have, for the most part, left Sarmiento cold. Sarmiento will have no truck with such ideas as the virtue of natural man.

Still, his attitude to European scholarship is mixed. Rousseau is mentioned several times in Facundo, but in changing contexts, so it’s difficult to understand exactly where Sarmiento stands in relation to the Enlightenment—and in relation to the counter-Enlightenment as it first appears in Rousseau. The Enlightenment came to Latin America later than North America and later still than Europe, the source of the ideas that were then transforming Western civilization.

At the far periphery of Western civilization, the ideas hatched in Europe were put into practice in a way that they could never have been put into practice in Europe, because of Europe’s long history and its old institutions, resistant to change. After a series of revolutions in both North and South America that threw off the political yoke of direct European control of the Western hemisphere, the peoples of the Americas then decided to place themselves under the yoke of the indirect dominion of European ideas rather than under the yoke of direct political dominion backed by military force. Sarmiento saw this danger, but it wasn’t a sufficient danger for him to question his belief in progress. Here’s a passage from Facundo in which Sarmiento discusses European ideas and how they were mirrored in Latin America:

“Today, studies of constitutions, races, beliefs—history, in a word—have made common a certain practical knowledge that instructs us against the glitter of theories conceived a priori; but before 1820, none of this had spread through the European world. With the paradoxes of the Social Contract, France rose up; Buenos Aires did the same; Montesquieu separated three distinct powers, and at once we had three powers; Benjamin Constant and Bentham annulled the executive, here it was constituted null at birth; Say and Smith preached free trade, and free trade, we repeated. Buenos Aires professed and believed everything that the learned European world believed and professed. Only after the revolution of 1830 in France, and its incomplete results, did the social sciences take a new direction and illusions begin to vanish. From then on, European books started to reach us showing that Voltaire was not really right, that Rousseau was a sophist, and Mably and Raynal, just anarchists; that there were not three powers, or a social contract, et cetera. From then on, we learned something about races, tendencies, national customs, historical causes. Tocqueville revealed to us, for the first time, the secret of North America; Sismondi showed us the futility of constitutions; Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot, the spirit of history; the revolution of 1830, all the deception of Benjamin Constant’s constitutionalism; the Spanish Revolution, all that is incomplete and backward in our race.”

Here we can see that the counter-Enlightenment was taken by Sarmiento as a necessary qualification to earlier Enlightenment ideas, but not a fundamental qualification that requires a root-and-branch re-thinking of the Enlightenment. I won’t try to unpack everything in this dense paragraph, as that would require a volume of no inconsiderable size, but you can easily get a sense of the competing influences to which Sarmiento was subject. He here mentions many figures—Mably, Tocqueville, Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot—whom I’ve written about or recorded episodes about in relation to philosophy of history, so this is truly philosophy of history entering back into the historical process through Sarmiento’s engagement with the tradition.

None of these completing currents and counter-currents seemed to shake Sarmiento’s belief in the need for the progressive ideologies of cities to triumph in the name of civilization over the barbarism of the countryside. Sarmiento wrote:

“The man of the city wears European dress, lives a civilized life as we know it everywhere: in the city, there are laws, ideas of progress, means of instruction, some municipal organization, a regular government, etc. Leaving the city district, everything changes in aspect. The man of the country wears other dress, which I will call American, since it is common to all peoples; his way of life is different, his needs, specific and limited. They are like two distinct societies, two peoples strange to one another. And more still: the man of the country, far from aspiring to resemble the man of the city, rejects with scorn his luxuries and his polite manners; and the clothing of the city dweller, his tailcoat, his cape, his saddle—no such sign of Europe can appear in the countryside with impunity. All that is civilized in the city is blockaded, banished outside of it, and anyone who would dare show up in a frock coat, for example, and mounted on an English saddle, would draw upon himself the peasants’ jeers and their brutal aggression.”

Sarmiento was right historically, insofar as civilization appeared as an institution when cities began to appear. Etymologically, “civilization” was derived from “city,” but Sarmiento made no effort to understand the sources of the peasants’ ridicule of the man in a frock coat and an English saddle showing up in the countryside. One might have thought, being part of the Hispanophone world, that Sarmiento might have learned something about this from Don Quixote, but there’s no mention of Cervantes in the two works from which I’m quoting today.

It would take an Argentinian of the following century to better understand this gap, when Jorge Luis Borges recounts, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” his experience of being called a “city slicker” and a “Buenos Airean” when he shows up in rural Uruguay. In Borges’ story, Funes is a strange figure who was thrown from his horse and who was crippled as a result, but who has gained from the accident perfect recall and a preternatural sharpness of his senses. Funes lies on a bed, but scarcely notices being crippled because the experiences of his senses and his memory are so overwhelming and vivid. The narrator of “Funes, the Memorious” calls Funes a “vernacular Zarathustra,” and I have to wonder if Juan Manuel de Rosas was also a vernacular Zarathustra, and that there might be something here more than the mere barbarism that Sarmiento attributed to him.

Recall that I quoted Spengler earlier on Caesarism, and how it’s distinguished by the will to power, and Borges—or, at least, the narrator of Borges’ story—sees in the figure of Funes a vernacular Zarathustra, i.e., a rural superman who has transcended the human condition. Funes in the Borges story has overcome the human, all-too-human. In the historical figure of Rosas, Sarmiento’s great rival, and in the fictional figure of Funes, we can glimpse an alternative history, a direction of human development that never happened, and which remains a counterfactual to the present day.

Our civilization, which originated in cities, is still dominated by cities, but something else might have arisen in subsequent history, and in fact other kinds of civilization have existed in the past. If Rosas had gone back to his plow, like Cincinnatus did after serving as Roman dictator, the history of Latin America might have been very different. Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation briefly discussed what he called a civilized countryside, immediately after describing what he considered to be one of the high points of (urban) civilization in Urbino under Federigo and Guidobaldo Montefeltro:

“…there is such thing as civilized countryside. Looking at the Tuscan landscape with its terraces of vines and olives and the dark vertical accents of the cypresses, one has the impression of timeless order. There must have been a time when it was all forest and swamp — shapeless and formless; and to bring order out of chaos is a process of civilization. But of this ancient, rustic civilization we have no record beyond the farmhouses themselves, whose noble proportions seem to be the basis of Italian architecture; and when the men of the Renaissance looked at the countryside it was not as a place of ploughing and digging, but as a kind of earthly paradise.” (Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, pp. 112-113)

Several of the themes in this quote were touchstones for Clark to which he returned repeatedly in his survey of civilization. His mention of “timeless order” invokes his earlier emphasis on permanence and the ambition to engage in monumental, multi-generational projects. For Clark, civilization is concerned with what is meant to last. But it’s a bit odd that Clark should mention the romanticization of the countryside during the renaissance as an earthly paradise, as this points to older models of the countryside as an Arcadian paradise, as in Virgil’s Pastorals, in which shepherds sing poetry to each other. This is an idyllic picture of the Golden Age in which the countryside is most definitely not civilized, but rather a retreat from the corruption of civilization—something that would have been familiar to Rousseau.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole idea of a civilized countryside both for its internal contradictions and romantic idealization of country life that has little to do with the reality of life in the country, but there’s more to it than that. Western civilization passed through a distinctive stage of development in which it was, essentially, a civilization of the countryside. The civilization of the early Middle Ages, which was a pervasively agrarian civilization, and, in so far as it approximated pure agriculturalism, was essentially a rural civilization. The great manors of feudal lords were located in the countryside because this is where the food production activity that was the basis of the medieval economy was centered. In other words, the economy was centered on the rural countryside, and not on cities.

This would change with the recovery of urbanism which I discussed in my episodes on Henri Pirenne and Carl Stephenson. Eventually there would be thriving and cosmopolitan cities engaged in sea-borne commerce with the known world, but this commerce directly touched the lives of only a very few persons. The vast majority of the population were peasants working the land; a few percent were landed nobility and a few percent were churchmen. Cities were to become an important part of the economy of the later Middle Ages, but even then it wasn’t central to the medieval economy, granted a few exceptions. What was central was agrarian production on great landed estates, which were the true measure of medieval wealth.

Cities today are the center of civilization, as they were when civilization first appeared, because cities are the centers of industrialization. The earliest paradigm of industrial cities as centers of industrial production is already changing as industrial production facilities move to industrial parks on the outskirts of cities, and we tend to identify the great cities as centers of administration, education and research, the arts and cultural opportunities, and so on. But whatever the function of the city, whether producing articles of manufacture or producing the prestige requirements of the élite, the city is central to the kind of civilization we have created since the end of the Middle Ages and the end of medieval agrarian civilization.

The life of the countryside has its own complexity, but this complexity is of a different order and of a different kind than the complexity of life in the city. In the city, one finds that the primary features of the intellectual landscape are the actions of other human beings, whereas in the country the primary intellectual landscape is that of the natural order of things. These differing sources of complexity structure lives differently. A certain kind of mind is cultivated by urban life in the same way that a certain kind of mind is cultivated by life in the country, which Marx ridiculed as rural idiocy. The mind and life of the country, as opposed to the city, results in its own distinctive institutions. The kind of civilization that emerges in the countryside is the kind of civilization that is going to emerge from the kind of mind that is cultivated by life in the country, and, contrariwise, the kind of civilization that emerges in the city is the kind of civilization that is going to emerge from the kind of mind that is cultivated by urban life.

At least for the moment, the tradition of rural civilization has been lost to us. The great demographic development of our time is the movement of mass populations into urban areas, and the corollary movement of rural depopulation. It’s almost as though by a spontaneous acclaim the world’s peoples had decided to attempt to prove Constantinos Doxiadis right about ecumenopolis as the telos of the city and of human life. This demographic trend shows every sign of smoothly extrapolating into the future, so that we can expect even more urban growth and rural depopulation over time.

Nevertheless, it remains possible to consider alternative futures in which this trend is reversed or replaced by a different trend—or even replaced by a different kind of civilization. There’s nothing inevitable about the relentless expansion or indefinite continuation of industrialized civilization. But our historical imagination is constrained by our position in history. Agrarian civilization, like the European Middle Ages with which it is identified, can now be see whole as a completed part of our past, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this way we can fashion a narrative of agrarian civilization, but we can’t yet fashion a parallel narrative of industrialized civilization, since this is today a going concern and not a completed whole.

Other kinds of civilizations have existed in the past, and distinct forms of civilization remain possible today, however unlikely they are, or seem to be. The Americas might have nurtured a distinct kind of civilization of their own if the early promise of the American republic or a counterfactual of Latin American history suggests. If the gauchos had risen up against centralization in the way they fought for Rosas, and had continued to rise up whenever their way of life was threatened, the caudillo might have played a marginal role in Latin American history.

My North American listeners will probably recognize a lot of familiar attitudes in what I’ve discussed here, and we’ve already seen that Echevarria compared gauchos to cowboys. The ideal of a Jeffersonian democracy, which would have been a political order based on the interests of small, independent land holders, couldn’t survive the onslaught of industrialization, and the ambitions of financialization already implicit in the policies of Alexander Hamilton, but we caught a glimpse of this in the early American republic—a glimpse that vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.

It’s worth noting that Sarmiento was writing when Argentina was growing in status to become a world power and a wealthy nation-state. Argentina had a distinctive path to industrialization that peaked early. By 1900, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, so even as Sarmiento was criticizing Rosas, the fortunes of Argentina were on a steady upswing, so that we may imagine that there were many who were sympathetic to Rosas, and many of course who were sympathetic to Sarmiento himself. In the subsequent century, after the fortunes of Argentina had peaked, Latin America, and indeed much of the world, experienced communist insurgencies frequently based upon the discontent of rural peoples who founds themselves ruled by distant cities. In this way the rural/urban divide reasserted itself. In North America today, the rural/urban ideological division of the population is nearly absolute, but rather than the countryside being the source of communist insurgency, the countryside in North America is the source of reactionary resistance to the progressive culture of cities, and these are conditions not unlike those which gave rise to the career of Juan Manuel de Rosas.

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