In Rivadavia’s Buenos Aires (1827): Coming Down in the Reformist Practice

When Mora arrived in Buenos Aires in February 1827, the new republic-building process was at its height under Rivadavia’s presidency. From the beginning he returned to the intense activity he had carried out in London but now in the service of President Rivadavia who had invited him to move to Buenos Aires. Besides personally advising President Rivadavia, he also edited two journals through which Mora attempted to persuade the Buenos Aires elites of the advisability of establishing a regime of “moderate and just” liberty. In Crónica Política y Literaria de Buenos Aires, Mora published a series of economic articles that tried to legitimise Rivadavia’s liberal economic and political reform projects but also spread out British classical political economy among the Argentinian liberal elites. These articles, however, outlined a version of Mora’s economic development model, but it still lacks cohesion. This was undoubtedly the article’s secondary purpose, although the fact that publication of the journal was suddenly interrupted on 6 October 1827 meant that the final version of the model had to be postponed until Mora’s sojourn in Chile. Nevertheless, he still had time to sketch out the three central elements: free trade, the distribution of the tax burden and the importance of promoting agriculture.