ESHET Conference 2019 University of Lille Money, Banks and Finance in Economic Thought
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ESHET Conference 2019 University of Lille Money, banks and finance in economic thought Working Paper Between law-making and policymaking: Rui Barbosa and the international dissemination of economics in the turn of the 20th century1 Luiz Felipe Bruzzi Curi Cedeplar/UFMG, [email protected] Alexandre Mendes Cunha Cedeplar/UFMG, [email protected] 1. Introduction As its first Finance Minister and as one of the jurists responsible for drafting its first constitution, Rui Barbosa (1849-1923) was one of the founding fathers of the Brazilian republic. He received his legal education and started his successful career as a lawyer in imperial Brazil, having adhered to republicanism shortly before Emperor Pedro II was dethroned by a military coup in November 1889. While he reached a widespread, positive reputation as a jurist and publicist, Barbosa experienced frustrations as a policymaker and as a politician in general. He ran for president four times between 1910 and 1919, having lost all the elections, which were held within an oligarchic system in which Rui Barbosa was an ambiguous figure. On the one hand, he was a member of the ruling elite, in that he was a deputy in the Empire, a minister in the first republican cabinet and, from his resignation until his final days, a senator of the republic. On the other hand, Barbosa failed to become a true achiever in the realm of politics. In addition to his frustrated presidential ambitions, he had to deal with the bad reputation he acquired as a policymaker: he became associated with the financial crisis that burst during his ministerial term (1889-1891). Facing an initial shortage of means of payment due to the abolition of slavery and the consequent expansion of wage labor, Barbosa began his tenure by increasing the monetary supply by means of regional banks with issuing power. The conjuncture was marked by an initial enthusiasm followed by speculation and currency devaluation. The expansionary policy went out of control and Barbosa attempted, in vain, to regain control 1 This research was funded by CAPES-Brazil, through the National Program for Post-Doctors (PNPD). of the economy. The causes for this crisis are disputed in economic historiography. While contemporary observers tended to emphasize the excesses of Rui Barbosa, more recent research has highlighted the importance of the international financial panic created by the Baring collapse of 1890 as factor that aggravated the Brazilian crisis in a decisive way.2 Barbosa’s legacy as a policymaker remains disputed, but after the rise of developmentalist ideology in mid-20th century Brazil the prevailing tendency has been to rehabilitate him as Finance Minister, associating his policy with industrialism and national development. For the intellectual historian, an interesting aspect of Rui Barbosa’s being a frustrated policymaker is that he felt compelled to react to the criticism he received and to defend his legacy. Therefore, he mobilized a relatively sophisticated arsenal of ideas, which reflected both his expertise as a professional jurist and his self-taught incursions into various aspects of economics. In that respect, studying his economic ideas is also studying the international dissemination of economic thought in this context. The importance of the international diffusion of ideas in his work is reinforced by the fact that Barbosa possessed one of the richest libraries of Rio de Janeiro, which included not only a very large legal collection, but also a broad variety of volumes on economics in general and on specific subdisciplines of the field, such as money, banking and public finance. In this working paper, we discuss specifically Rui Barbosa’s appropriation of French 19th-century liberal thought, represented by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843-1916). Beaulieu was very influential in his native France, particularly due to his writings on public finance and imperialism The focus here is on Barbosa’s assimilations of Beaulieu’s ideas on public finance, which reflected his eclectic approach to this subdiscipline of economics. This eclecticism is expressed, for example, by the fact that Barbosa also incorporated some features of Adolph Wagner’s Finanzwissenschaft into his economic discourse. This might seem paradoxical, since Wagner and Leroy-Beaulieu belonged to “opposed” schools of economics. Beaulieu was a bourgeois liberal, who severely criticized the German reformist school of social-economic thought represented by Wagner. We argue that this apparent paradox is part of Barbosa’s way of approaching economic matters, which was informed by his legal expertise and by the need to give legitimacy to a widely criticized tenure as Finance Minister. The working paper is arranged in three sections, after this introduction. Section 2 briefly discusses the specificity of the approach, focused on the international dissemination of ideas, and the sources used. The following part examines the concrete 2 See Franco (1983) and Triner and Wandschneider (2005). 2 assimilations of Leroy-Beaulieu’s ideas in Rui Barbosa’s economic discourse, showing how they are conveniently integrated into a discourse influenced by other, divergent lines of economic thought. The fourth part consists of the Final Remarks. 2. Rui Barbosa and the international dissemination of economics The international dissemination of economic thought has been recognized as an important field within the history of economics, for several reasons which can be summed up into two. First, the study of the international diffusion of ideas, whether pertaining to the field of economics or not, may allow for a more precise understanding of the ideas “exported” to another context and the new discourses they eventually help to forge. This reflects the notion that the historical understanding of a text must go beyond its internal content, since its reception and its transmission and adaptation are essential features of its historical significance. Second, the international dissemination of an economic discourse has a specific attribute: it involves a selection of ideas that often intertwines with the framing of economic policy and the defense of concrete political propositions, particularly in the receiving countries. Thus, the analysis of these processes may take on a socio-historical status, allowing for a cross-fertilization between intellectual history and the history of economic structures and institutions.3 Early 20th-century Brazil is a relatively known example of a country in which intellectuals and policymakers received Western economic thought and adapted it, with varying levels of creativity, to their own environment.4 In the turn of the 20th century, Rui Barbosa is one of the most interesting cases for the study of the international diffusion of ideas in Brazil, not only because he was one of the prominent intellectuals of the late Second Empire and the early Republic, but because he left sources whose potential for the study of the international dissemination of economics has just begun to be explored.5 His library was unrivalled in early 20th-century Rio de Janeiro, in terms of size and richness. Furthermore, the collection has been very well preserved since Barbosa’s death in 1923. Due to his reputation as a national intellectual, the Brazilian federal government acquired his house and library shortly after his death and turned them into a museum. Most canonical writers in the field of economics are represented in the collection. Just to name some examples, from Britain: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Marshall; from Germany: Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Bücher, Gustav Schmoller, Lujo 3 See, for example, Cardoso (2003) and Cardoso (2017). 4 For the international diffusion of economics in early 20th-century Brazil, see, for example, Love (1996), Boianovsky (2013) and Bruzzi Curi (2017). 5 See Bruzzi Curi (2019). 3 Brentano, and Adolph Wagner; from France: Jean-Baptiste Say, Léon Say and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. Barbosa possessed three books by Beaulieu: the fourth (1888) and fifth (1891) editions of the Traité de la science des finances and the Précis d’économie politique (1888). These are books from a relatively “late” phase of Beaulieu’s intellectual production, which interpreters tend to relate to his dissatisfaction with the course taken by the French Third Republic after 1877, when monarchists (or legitimists) were ousted from power by “advanced republicans” who accepted some measure of social change in order to consolidate the new political order. Sharif Gemie (1992) sees Beaulieu as a conservative, whose general intellectual project was to avoid social reform. He refers to three phases in his political-ideological evolution. From the mid-1860s to the mid-1870s, Beaulieu was a moderately optimistic liberal, opposed to both the French Second Empire and the “monarchist” Republic. The second phase, beginning in the mid-1870s, was marked by a savage antagonism, directed at first against particular forms of republicanism, and then against the republican rtate itself. In the mid-1890s a third phase of radical disillusionment began, during which he came to re-think some of his principles (Gemie, 1992, p. 354). By the same token, Dan Warshaw (1991, pp. 66-69) observes that there was a “turning point” in Leroy-Beaulieu’s thought between 1877 and 1880. In his view, French “established liberals” such as Beaulieu came under increasing intellectual challenge as French representatives of the reformist line of economic thought popular in Germany started to widen their audience and ascend to important positions. This group included the Emile de Laveleye, Charles Gide and Paul Cauwès, who was appointed instructor of political economy at the Paris school of law. Albeit a critic of German public economics (Finanzwissenschaft) and its French enthusiasts, Leroy-Beaulieu contributed to establish the term “science des finances” in French academia. The expression had a bad reputation in Frence, Faccarello (2010, p. 751) suggests, because the term “finances”, used to refer to the fiscal economy, reminded people of the mismanagement of public finances during the absolute monarchy.