José Carlos Chiaramonte (1931-2024)

José Carlos Chiaramonte was undoubtedly one of the most outstanding Argentine historians of the twentieth century. Born on December 3, 1931, in Arroyo Seco, Santa Fe Province, he spent his childhood in this small countryside town, surrounded by cultivated fields and open land. At age ten his father died, and the family moved to live with his grandmother in Rosario, where he finished his elementary and secondary education at the Escuela Normal Mariano Moreno. After graduating as a maestro normal, he taught at this school for about ten years.In 1949 he entered the Universidad Nacional del Litoral's Rosario campus, where initially he studied history and philosophy. He eventually decided to concentrate in the latter. After obtaining his professor of philosophy degree in 1956, he taught at the university's Paraná campus a course titled History of Argentine Thought and Culture. Moving frequently between Rosario and Paraná, he befriended painters—Leónidas Gambartes and Juan Grela—and writers—Juan J. Saer, Juan L. Ortiz, and Hugo Gola—who later became well known.His 2013 autobiographical recollections paint his university years in depressing terms: “Those were times . . . in which to study philosophy and history, for someone who was not addicted to the government party [Peronism], meant renouncing to the possibility of teaching, because only those affiliated with the party could aspire to a teaching job.”1 Due to this repressive environment and his economic need to work full-time at a grain-trading company, he took some course examinations as an alumno libre, without attending classes.In 1949 he joined the Argentine Communist Party, through which he met his first wife Clelia; they had two children. The party's intense sociability enabled Chiaramonte to interact with leftist politicians, artists, and literati. Yet as a Communist militant, he was scrutinized by the Peronist police, suffering at least two short-term arrests. In 1963 he joined the New Left group Pasado y Presente and contributed to its magazine (Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente); after reading the first issue the party expelled Chiaramonte and the other editors.He studied philosophy to acquire theoretical and methodological fundamentals, but after graduating he devoted his time to reading history. Motivated by discussions within Rosario and Paraná Marxist circles, he tried to link history to sociology. In 1961 he obtained a scholarship to do research at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) under the guidance of historian José Luis Romero, the most important Argentine representative of the Annales school. (It was probably Romero who inspired Chiaramonte to read about the Spanish Enlightenment's influence in Argentina.) That year he took seminars on European contemporary history and on economic history research methodology with Ruggiero Romano.In 1963 he helped found the Asociación Argentina de Historia Social y Económica, along with José Luis Romero and Ceferino Garzón Maceda, a historian from Córdoba. After the June 1966 coup, he assisted young, now-unemployed Universidad Nacional de Rosario historians in their research on original historical documents. This was the origin of his second book, Nacionalismo y liberalismo económicos en Argentina, 1860–1880 (1971), which extended to all Argentina and to the second half of the nineteenth century the tensions between protectionism and liberalism that he had found in Corrientes. In 1972 he won a cátedra in Argentine social history at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, in Bahía Blanca.In March 1975, the government shut down Chiaramonte's university. Soon afterward, aware that he was on a list of targets for the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, he went into exile, hired by the History Department of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia; a year later he joined the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México's Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales. In 1984 he was appointed national researcher at Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. While in Mexico, he elaborated his influential Formas de sociedad y economía en Hispanoamérica (1984). He revised key aspects of his Marxist formation, criticizing the concept of mode of production and separating himself from historical materialism's most dogmatic form. Ampler research funds in Mexico, including a grant from the US-based Social Science Research Council, allowed him to travel and research in Berkeley, Washington, Porto Alegre, and Rio de Janeiro; his assistant visited archives in miliary-ruled Argentina.In December 1985, two years after democracy's return, Chiaramonte came back to Argentina. The following year he was appointed director of the Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani in Buenos Aires. He attracted graduate students interested in the politics, economy, and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of whom became important historians: Jorge Gelman, Marcela Ternavasio, Noemí Goldman, Pilar González Bernaldo, Pablo Buchbinder, Roberto Schmit, Fabio Wasserman, Roberto Di Stefano, Fabian Herrero, Sonia Tedeschi, and Ana Frega, among others. Chiaramonte reconstructed the institute from the ground up, increasing the number of researchers, relaunching its historical journal, reorganizing the library and archive, and creating new programs and seminars. He also improved its financial foundations by providing the double sponsorship of UBA and the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). He transformed the Instituto Ravignani into a center of scholarly excellence, admired throughout the Americas and in Europe.As his research had expanded from Argentina to Spanish America, he was able to build (through correspondence and conferences) long-lasting conversations with scholars in France, Italy, Spain, and several countries in Latin America. In Buenos Aires, he maintained conversations with sociologist José Nun, cultural critic Carlos Altamirano, and historian Tulio Halperin Donghi. During and after Raúl Alfonsín's term, he attended meetings and talks at the Club de Cultura Socialista. Proud of his transformative insights into the origins of Argentine independence and the legal basis of the Spanish Enlightenment, Chiaramonte was always ready to engage in public debate and conversations with peers.After stepping down as its director in 2012, Chiaramonte continued going to the Instituto Ravignani weekly to do research. He started to publish opinion notes in the newspapers on current political topics, while continuing to write articles and books until quite recently. Usos políticos de la historia: Lenguaje de clases y revisionismo histórico (2013) testifies to his commitment to professional history and his concern for democracy and public debate in Argentina. His advice to young historians is well known: don't fall into the trap of academic fashions; don't write history inspired by nationalist or ideological commitments; don't look at the past with the lenses and terms of the present; try to understand historical phenomena in broader, comparative context.Chiaramonte's books are crucial to understanding the origins of political identity and language, nationality, and legal traditions in Argentina and Latin America between the colonial and postindependence periods. I will summarize findings of some of the most important works of his abundant bibliography.In Pensamiento de la Ilustración: Economía y sociedad iberoamericanas en el siglo XVIII (1979) he gave novel answers to old questions about the Enlightenment in Spanish America. He argued that the region had participated in the Enlightenment through the reformist ideas transmitted from Spain. These ideas, neither anti-Hispanic nor anti-Christian, were intended to improve the colonies’ administration and included only some aspects of the European Enlightenment. More importantly, he maintained that these reformist ideas did not contain the seeds for a future independence movement. In Mercaderes del litoral: Economía y sociedad en la provincia de Corrientes, primera mitad del siglo XIX (1991) he presented Corrientes and Governor Pedro Ferré as leading the opposition to Buenos Aires’ centralist policies. Unlike other provinces in postindependence Argentina, Corrientes had a diversified economy, a stable civil government, and reasonable social order. Ferré fought for the free navigation of rivers, the equitable distribution of customs revenues, and the protection of local handicrafts.In Ciudades, provincias, estados: Orígenes de la nación argentina (1800–1846) (1997) Chiaramonte presented new arguments about the crucial problem of sovereignty in the transition from colony to independent nation. He saw a natural progression from cities to provinces to national state in the exercise of sovereignty. After 1820, acting as autonomous entities, provinces searched for a confederate alliance that would later constitute the basis for the national state. A liberal government introduced reforms in education, the press, elections, and religious freedom that added fuel to interprovincial conflicts and led to civil wars. For Chiaramonte, the political ideas and language of independence came from the colonial period: after independence, cities assumed sovereignty on the principle of retroversion of power basic to Hispanic political culture. The sovereignty claimed by the revolutionary juntas was an extension of the city's prerogatives, and political representation was based on the concept of vecindad, an old form of citizenship devoid of any pretense of egalitarianism.Nación y estado en Iberoamérica: El lenguaje político en tiempos de la independencia (2004) introduces a history of political action rooted in contemporary actors’ common understanding and language. Chiaramonte reexamines the historical meaning of nation and state, reaching quite interesting conclusions. Against the grain of revisionist nationalism, he argues that by the 1840s and 1850s the nation was considered an origin and a community of destination—the first imagined, the latter not yet attained. Nation and states were considered synonymous; in fact, the nation-state was the concept closer to reality, for it was defined and legally established by independent political entities through pacts and treaties. During postindependence, the doctrine of natural rights was the foundation of common ideas and beliefs about the political community: the retroversion of power, the contractualist nature of pacts among provinces, and the indivisibility of the state.In his more recent Usos políticos de la historia, Chiaramonte criticizes 1930s historical revisionism and uses of the past by ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He argues that the former was not an original current. Earlier Argentine constitutionalist historians had affirmed that the federative constitution that emerged in 1853–60 was the work not of the caudillos but of independent entities, the provinces, who sought confederative alliances. These were the rule creators at a time when national sovereignty was fragmented among 14 provinces. Chiaramonte then criticized the new holiday commemorating the Battle of Vuelta de Obligadoas as a falsification of the 1845 event, remolded to fit a twentieth-century anti-imperialist lens. He also took issue with Kirchnerismo's political appropriation of the bicentennial; he saw the celebration as a complete fabrication. Argentine nationhood did not exist before the 1850s; there was instead a multiplicity of states struggling to form a nation-state. And it was not nationalist sentiments or ideology that constituted the early nation-state but the contractual interactions among provincial states. Chiaramonte praises the post-1983 professionalization of history, rescues the constitutionalist historians for their revision of the nation-state's juridical origins, and advises young historians to stay away from political militancy and nationalism.In 2016 Chiaramonte tried to integrate his various research projects. He said that he had been always searching for a “deep intellectual history,” one concerned with contemporary ordinary people's fundamental ideas and common beliefs. He had looked for these foundational ideas in his studies of public finance, political identities and vocabulary, federalism's various forms, and the role of natural rights in political discourse.2 A common belief in an ancient constitution structured postindependence political language. Though sentiments of nationhood (patria chica) developed and grew with conflicts over nation-state building, there was no such thing as a preexisting Argentine nation. Hence, it was anachronistic to assume that concepts such as nation, people, and democracy meant what they mean in the present. The loose alliance of provinces during Juan Manuel de Rosas's time was a confederation, not a true federal state. Once one understood the nature of postindependence political language, things appeared quite different than generally assumed: cities and provinces were independent, deputies were mere apoderados of such entities, and the provinces’ attempt to unite into loose alliances stemmed from Hispanic political culture. In the end, he believed that the doctrine of natural rights was foundational, because individuals, cities, and provinces acted on contractualist notions based in natural rights.Chiaramonte's work was very influential for the history of ideas and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout Latin America, his works are well known, now studied by scholars in the United States and Europe.3 Five Argentine universities granted him honorary doctorates between 2002 and 2019. His work has also been recognized by scholars at home and overseas: he received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1982 and the Premio Bernardo Houssay in 2005 for his career and contributions to the humanities and the social sciences. He has been visiting professor or research fellow at Hebrew University, Brown University, the Instituto Universitario de Investigación Ortega y Gasset, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and various Italian universities.At the time of his death, Chiaramonte was honorary professor at UBA and emeritus researcher at CONICET. He is survived by his wife Susana, his children Marina, Gustavo, and Laura, and seven grandchildren. Historians of Argentina have lost a great teacher, a superb writer, an erudite scholar, and a person committed to the formation of well-rounded professional historians. His books are perhaps his most enduring legacy, for they contain the keys for interpreting the origins and conflictive formation of the Argentine nation-state, the natural rights foundations of nineteenth-century political discourse, and the existence of a common understanding about government and politics shared by elites and ordinary citizens

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