From Colony to Republic: a Case Study in Bureaucratic Change
It is axiomatic, but certainly deserving of periodic repetition, that the longterm configuration of political, social and economic institutions in Iberian America has been determined both by the apparatus, operation and rationale of the metropolitan state, as well as by the premises and patterns of colonization. Equally apparent is the premise that the politico-administrative crisis associated with the achievement of independence in early nineteenth-century Latin America must be studied in the light of this ' set' of New World institutions, and particularly in relation to what Richard Morse calls the Spanish patrimonial state.1 According to Morse, the construct of ideas known as Spanish neo-Thomism and generally attributed to Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), ' offer sophisticated theoretical formulation of the ideals and many sociological realities of the Spanish patrimonial state'.2 Greatly condensed and simplified, Suarezian thought holds that: (i) natural law is clearly distinguishable from conscience-society is ordered by objective, infallible natural law, rather than by consensus, which is nothing more than collective conscience and therefore fallible; (2) although the power of the sovereign originates with the collectivity of men, it does not revert in the case of a collapse of central authority, since the people do not delegate, but rather alienate sovereignty to the prince; (3) only in certain cases can the law of the sovereign lose force or legitimacy, as would be the case if the law were unjust, excessively harsh, or if the majority had already ceased to obey it; (4) the prince is bound only by his own law, and is responsible only to God, or to His representative.3 Suarezian neo-Thomism, Morse argues, has in large part determined the characteristics of the Spanish patrimonial state on the one hand, and colonial