For the Generation of '80, the settlers of the first liberal conventions on Argentine historiography, the constitution represented a true foundational act that broke the long government of Juan Manuel de Rosas.

[citation needed]For the UCR, a group with social-democrat tendencies, the constitution represented an unfulfilled political ideal against the oligarchic government Generation of '80, perpetuated in power through electoral fraud.

Even though the more urgent concern of establishing sovereign control effective against the resisting Spanish royal forces put the organizational decisions of the republic on hold, much was discussed and written on the matter that would later be taken into account.

Buenos Aires benefited from the flow of goods brought by ships from the United Kingdom, for which it paid with the taxes collected from the exportation of the country's agricultural production, that being mainly raw leather and minerals.

The governors of Santiago del Estero, Córdoba and La Rioja, (Mariano Fragueiro, Juan Felipe Ibarra and Facundo Quiroga, respectively), at the beginning of the 1830, urged to create a representative assembly.

On April 6, 1852, Urquiza had a meeting with governors Vicente López y Planes of Buenos Aires, Juan Pujol of Corrientes, and delegates of Santa Fe, where it was decided to call for a Constitutional Congress under the terms of the Federal Pact of 1831.

Deliberations lasted for two days before they signed the San Nicolás Agreement, which granted provisional Directorship of the Confederation to Urquiza, and set the opening of the constitutional convention for August, to which each province would send 2 representatives.

Urquiza personally controlled the government of the province until September, when he left to Santa Fe for the constitutional convention together with elected deputies Salvador María del Carril and Eduardo Lahitte, leaving General José Miguel Galán as provisional governor.

On November 21 an army under the command of Juan Madariaga attempted to take over the city of Concepción del Uruguay, but was repelled by the forces of Ricardo López Jordán, who quickly informed Urquiza of the situation.

The historical revisionism in Argentina has emphasised this, suggesting that these congressmen were not completely representative of the provincial population, to which others point out that the selection of the delegates of all the provinces was not precisely popular, since it was composed of jurists and intellectuals, many of which had been in the exile for years during the government of Rosas.

The similarity of the constitutional text with that of the United States was not welcomed by all the congressmen; Zuviría read, at the inauguration of the sessions of April 20, a long speech against the indiscriminate application of foreign principles to a country whose organization, he said, was not habituated to it.

The rest of the congressmen, either for ideologic reasons or for the political urgency of establishing a national constitution, decided to support the initiative of the commission; the text would be worked out in the following ten days.

The negation of sharing those profits for the national finances had always been one of the main points of controversy between Urquiza and the oligarchy of Buenos Aires; at the same time, it confronted the interests of the businessmen of the city, supporters of a liberal commerce, and the artisans and small industries of the interior, who without any kind of protection or importations restrictions could not compete and develop.

At the same time a moderate group, headed by Zuviría and Roque Gondra, considered such federalization wouldn't be convenient, for it would upset the porteños and void any attempt of negotiation to pacifically reincorporate it into the Confederation.

After arduous negotiations they arrived at a compromise solution, in which Buenos Aires was made capital by the 3rd article, but tied to a special law, approved together with the constitution, to facilitate a possible future modification.

On the contrary, those more influenced by Alberdi and the ideas of the Generation of 1837 pleaded for the freedom of cults, pointing out that it would encourage immigration to Argentina, simplify the relations with foreign nations, and that the conscience was not a matter of legislation but of public acts.

The rights expressly recognized were gathered mainly in the 14th article, which instituted the freedom of work, navigation, commerce, residence and traveling, press, association, cult, education, and petition to the authorities.

Article 29, finally, transmitted the constitutional dispositions of the recent history, forbidding the concession of the sum of public power to any functionary, which had allowed Rosas to reach and sustain his second government.

The incompatibilities inside the exercise of the legislative function extended to the priesthood's regular functions— in view of the vote of obedience that links the clerics with their superiors— and the activity in the executive power, as a ministry or any other positions alike, unless with special authorization.

This organization, in spite of the oligarchical characteristic of the minimal rent, differed greatly in the Unitarian project of 1819, that stipulated one senator per province and three for the Armed Forces, three for the Catholic Church, one for each university, and the former Supreme Directors of the Confederation after the finalisation of their mandates.

Therefore, the president was the authority in charge of the military business; able to command the Army, designate its officers — with agreement of the Senate for the higher ranks — call for parades, carte blanches, and declare war or siege in case of a foreign attack.

This implied that for decades the president of the nation had to put up with the governor of Buenos Aires, who was the direct chief of the administration of the surrounding area and meant that the presidential power often faced a wall of bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, by that time the provincial oligarchies had already adopted a profile similar to that of their Unitarian counterparts, with the development of the model of agricultural exportations, and the formation of extensive Latifundios (large estates) that would control the national economy during the following five decades.

When the historical revisionism —criticising the devastation of the national industry, the flourishing of large estates, and the internal colonialism resulting from the liberal politic of the Generation of '80— revised the origins of constitutional text, it referred to the same general criteria idea but in an inverse sense.

Sarmiento and Roca describe the constitution as a means to modernise the country through free commerce, European immigration, the abolition of provincial political leadership, and the dislocation of the traditional cultures inherited from Spain and adapted during centuries to the local peculiarities.

That being a civilization that was founded from; the displacement of the aboriginals, the massive sacrifice of gauchos and morenos conscripted for the successive wars of the Triple Alliance and the Conquest of the Desert, the brutal accumulation of lands for the formation of latifundios or large estates for agricultural export, and the destruction of the emerging national industry and the systematic electoral fraud.

Historian José María Rosa pointed out the linguistic game of the lemma: Civilisation —related to our city—, was understood in an opposite sense: as of the foreigners; whereas Barbarism —from the Barbarians, that is foreigners— signified, in the liberal language, the Argentine in contraposition to the European.

For these authors, the alternative reflects one of the clashes effectively existent in the Argentine politics of that time: between the illustrated classes, based on the principles of the theoretic right of the millenary European tradition; and the pragmatic provincial leaders, men of action rather than theory.

Given the intellectual ambient of the moment, in which the ideologists of the French revolutionaries had given place to the illumining positivism, it was natural that the thought of the first inclined for the defence of the liberal order, in which the abolition of the historical and traditional limits gave in for a new era of cooperation between people.

Even if the ideals of the 1853 constitution, and Alberdi's writings that served as its base, depended in great part on the project of integrating Argentina into the world processes, the compromise with the economic liberalism was not necessarily coded in them.