This article aims to highlight some of the major economic ideas of the nineteenth century's Argentinian economist and thinker Juan Bautista Alberdi. This interpretation is based on two of his major works: Bases y Puntos de Partida para La Organización Política de La República Argentina, originally written in 1852, and his posthumous Estudios Económicos, originally published in 1886. Juan Bautista Alberdi was a lawyer, writer, journalist and economist always concerned with the construction of the nationality of the region that would become Argentina in those early stages of capitalism's expansion that had England as its center of interest. Alberdi tried to understand his country from a liberal perspective, but with the local structures in mind. He defended, in the process, social and regional inclusion, a better power-sharing and a more equitable fiscal federalism for the region. He went far beyond the simple defense of international division of labor. If, at the beginning of his intellectual life, he presented himself as an optimistic thinker, with the course of events, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century, he looked with distrust and pessimism at the liberalism's construction led by Buenos Aires.
History of Latin American economic thought; Latin American; History of Latin America; Argentina; Liberalism