28 A Troubled Belle Epoque
Letelier, and Pedro Bannen. The meeting, held in Santiago, touched on a
variety of social issues. On the topic of public education (one that was
certainly on the back burner of the oligarchy’s legislative agenda), the Radi-
cals called for a law mandating free, obligatory, and secular primary instruc-
tion. The party also aimed for the ‘‘improvement of the legal condition of
women’’ and ‘‘the improvement of conditions for the proletarians and la-
borers.’’
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The need for reform measures from above to stall more radical
ideas for social change that were beginning to surge from below was the
underlying theme of convention discussion. While espousing a rhetoric of
reform, the party lacked a clearly articulated program. Although it adopted a
platform that briefly mentioned workers and alluded to their poor living
conditions, the convention remained relatively silent regarding the working
class and the social question—a fact that may have contributed to the steady
growth of Malaquías Concha’s PD.
Apparent during and after the 1888 convention was Radicalism’s attention
to ‘‘order’’ and ‘‘progress.’’ Drawing on notions of social evolution and the
sociological positivism of Comte and Littré, the Radicals explicitly rejected
violence as a means of social change but, unlike more orthodox positivists in
Latin America, did not find abstract, metaphysical, and universal concepts,
such as liberty, equality, fraternity, or the republican spirit, anachronistic. In
the first issue of the Radical newspaper La Lei in 1894, the party pledged to
follow a course of social reform without breaching the political norms of
republican constitutionalism, calling the preservation of ‘‘legal and social
order’’ a ‘‘great cause.’’
∞Ω
The key to maintaining social peace was fundamen-
tal reform through the evolution of political institutions. Without rejecting
their positivist dedication to order and progress, many Radicals endorsed a
‘‘socialist’’ disposition during the first decade of the century. At the PR’s
third national convention held in Santiago in 1906, a tendency in favor of a
so-called socialismo de Estado, or ‘‘state socialism,’’ emerged; it prompted the
most heated debates over the party’s ideological foundation to that date.
Spearheaded by the former rector of the Pedagogical Institute, Valentín
Letelier, a Radical bloc touting ‘‘socialism’’ proposed increased government
intervention in social and economic affairs and, in general, espoused a
nebulous but powerful notion of a criollo gemeinschaft, of sorts. Chile’s
long-standing tradition of upholding free trade as an economic pillar was
among the primary targets of the party’s Letelierian branch. Letelier, an
admirer of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany (a system he witnessed firsthand
in the late 1880s), argued on the convention floor: ‘‘All of the cultured peo-
ples of the world have at this moment something of socialism, in the sense