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Beyond Revisionism:

The Bicentennial of Independence,

the Early Republican Experience,

and Intellectual History in Latin America

Elas Jose Palti

Latin Americas Revolution of Independence was an event of world-

historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created

new nation states and established republican systems of government. This

occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of nation and

republic remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates

naturally emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of

dilemmas and problems contained therein.

Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has beenprecluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional

approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians

to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that pre-

vented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal

concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the

concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as deviations from

the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was nec-

essary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the de-

bates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth

century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for

systematic analysis. The rise of a new intellectual history, insofar as it has

Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 70, Number 4 (October 2009)

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Palti Intellectual History in Latin America

Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has

occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of na-

tionalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on

which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets

of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded:

enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; liberty of the

Modern / liberty of Ancient; modernity / tradition; individualism / or-

ganicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism

in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual his-

tory, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.

THE TRADITION OF HISTORY OF

IDEAS IN LATIN AMERICA

Many scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence

of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for

the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire

region): Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could re-

count to ourselves a delicious story: here we had an-always-assumed-as

beautiful and heroic liberal tradition; which was democratic, nationalistic,

republican, revolutionary and even Zapatista (and that was good); that tra-

dition sought to counter, with patriotic vigor, an opposite one held by a

minority of conservatives: monarchists, authoritarians, strangers to the na-

tion, positivists (who were very bad).4 Hale himself has repeatedly main-

tained that his chief contribution lies in having moved the local

historiography of ideas from the subjective, ideological level (in which he,

as a foreigner, supposedly did not participate) to the firm ground of objec-

tive history.5 As we will see, it is not exactly here that Hales contributionlies. The point is that the vehemence of the revisionist critique of the preced-

ing tradition of the history of ideas, whose main representative was the

Mexican, Leopoldo Zea, has obscured the achievements of that older tradi-

tion, ones on which the perspectives of its very critics still rest.

Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that Zea invented

the history of ideas in Latin America, he was the first to develop the prem-

4 Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, La imposibilidad del liberalismo en Mexico, in Recep-

cion y transformacion del liberalismo en Mexico. Homenaje al profesor Charles A. Hale,

ed. Josefina Va zquez (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1991), 14.5 Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 18211853 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1968), 6.

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2009

ises needed to establish it as a specific field of research. These premises,

barely modified, persist to the present, and continue to inform the work of

his critics. Zeas contribution was crucial to the development of intellectual

history in Latin American as a scholarly discipline. His work provided the

definitions and delimitations necessary for the study of ideas in an area

which has been viewed as marginal vis a vis the centers of intellectual pro-

duction. Zea was, in fact, the first to approach systematically the particular

problems that the writing of the history of ideas in the periphery of the

West raised; that is, in regions whose cultures have a derivative nature, a

term he himself coined. Zea asked what was the sense and the object of

analyzing the work of thinkers who, he admitted, did not make any contri-

bution to the history of ideas in general? What kinds of approaches wererequired to make the study of these authors relevant?

Once they accepted that Latin American thought could never occupy a

proper place in the universal history of the ideas, and that that its marginal-

ity was not merely circumstantial (an infantile illness), Zea and the mem-

bers of his generation were forced to problematize intellectual history as

a timeless struggle of a set of ideas against other sets of ideas. In an

interpretation of this type, wrote Zea in his seminal work, El positivismo

en Mexico (1943), Mexico and all Mexican positivists could be spared,

since they would be nothing but poor interpreters of a doctrine to which

they made no contribution worthy of the universal attention.6 But, on the

other hand, if these authors had made some contributions, discovering

them would not have been relevant for the comprehension of the local cul-

ture. The fact that the ones who made those contributions were Mexican

positivists would have been merely an incidental happening. These contri-

butions could have perfectly been made by men of any other country.7

Ultimately, it was not from its eventual relation with the kingdom of the

eternally valid things that a local history of ideas gained its sense. Thequestion, then, was: from where? Thus posed, the answer to the question

immediately emerged: from its relation with that circumstance called

Mexico.8 What really mattered was not the Latin American contribu-

tions to thought in general, but, on the contrary, its failures, its devia-

tions; in short, the type of refractions that European ideas underwent

when they were detached from their original habitat and transplanted to

this region.

6 Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 2 vols. (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1943),

1: 35.7 Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 1: 17.8 Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 1: 17.

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Zea also developed analytic units for this type of comparative en-

deavor, which he called philosophemas. These were the counterparts to

the unit-idea that Arthur Lovejoy employed when establishing the his-

tory of ideas as a scholarly discipline in the United States.9 According to

Zea, the meaningful deviations produced by contextual displacements were

imprinted on the particular concepts, thus serving as records of them. If

we compare the philosophemas used by two or more diverse cultures, he

stated, we can observe that these philosophemas, although they verbally

appear alike, change their contents.10

Here we encounter the basic design of an approach founded on the

scheme of models and deviations, one which today still dominates the

discipline. It emerges from the attempt to historicize ideas, the need to re-move them from the abstract frameworks of the generic categories around

which the discipline had hitherto revolved, and to locate them in the partic-

ular context of their articulation. When considered on the basis of its fun-

damental premises, Zeas project is not so easy to refute. But one of the

problems in Zeas work is that it is not always possible to distinguish the

methodological aspects of his interpretive model from the substantive

aspects of it. The latter are most definitely open to criticism. In effect, the

emergence of the history of ideas as a scholarly discipline in Latin Americawas intimately associated to the spread of the Lo Mexicano movement,11

and would remain tied in a shared search for Mexican (and subsequently

Latin American) national being. There is a second factor that tends to

obscure Zeas contribution, one less obvious but much more important

than the former. The scheme of models and deviations readily became

part of the common sense of the historians of Latin American ideas. This

obscured the fact that the search for local deviations was not a natural

object for Latin American intellectual history, but rather the result of a

truly theoretical tour de force which sprang from specific historical and

epistemological conditions.

Thus criticism of Zeas approach did not question his historico-

philosophical method, as he called it, but only the way in which he put it

into practice. This method, Zea wrote, would allow him to eliminate the

contradictions wherein the historians of the philosophy became trapped;

9 See Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on the History of Ideas, JHI(1940): 323.10 Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 1: 24.11 See G. W. Hewes, Mexican in Search of the Mexican (Review), The American Jour-

nal of Economics and Sociology 13 (1954): 20922; and Henry Schmidt, The Roots of

Lo Mexicano: Self and Society in Mexican Thought, 19001934 (College Station: Texas

A&M University Press, 1978).

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in this fashion, those which seemed to be contradictions now are revealed

as diverse stages of a single cultural development.12 More precisely, his

attempt to historicize ideas was associated with his goal of integrating posi-

tivismwhich, after Revolution, had been execrated as an ideology foreign

to Mexico and its authentic liberal traditionas a dialectically necessary

stage in the process of mental emancipation initiated by independence.

Thus, although the origins of positivism were alien to the Mexican circum-

stances, it was adapted to them and used to impose a new order.13 How-

ever, this perspective would not find fertile soil in which to thrive. The

institutionalization of the Revolution, which produced, as a reaction, the

exacerbation of the nationalistic tendencies in Lo Mexicano movement,

made efforts to vindicate Mexican positivism open to criticisms of encour-aging the most conservative wing of the PRI (the ruling party that emerged

from the Revolution). These circumstances led Zea to partially revise his

earlier positions and to condemn the positivist movement and along with it

the whole liberal tradition that preceded the Revolution, as an ideology

which had managed to adapt itself to Mexicos national being but was not

yet an authentic manifestation of it.14

Hales criticism focused on that side of Zeas approach, which, as we

saw, was the most erratic one. Liberalism, Hale maintained, was really notforeign to Mexico; rather, it had deep roots and precedents in local history.

In his view, Zea had ignored the fact that, in their attempts at mental

emancipation from colonization, Mexican liberals only continued the

Bourbon reformist tradition. From this Hale drew two central theses. First,

that Mexican liberalism and conservatism were more similar to each other

than the Mexican historians of ideas used to believe. There may be points

of continuity in Mexican thought and policy that run deeper that political

liberalism and conservatism, which, for Hale, consisted of their shared

centralist trends.15 Second, the contradictory mixture of liberalism and cen-

tralism characteristic of Mexican and Latin American liberalism was not

completely unknown in the European liberal tradition. Following Guido de

Ruggiero,16 Hale posited two ideal types in permanent conflict: English

liberalism (incarnated in Locke) and French liberalism (represented by

12 Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 1: 23.13 Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 1: 48.14 Leopoldo Zea, Dialectica de la conciencia en Mexico, Cuadernos Americanos 57

(1951): 100101.15 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 8.16 Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter

Smith, 1981).

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Rousseau). The former promoted individual rights and political decentral-

ization; and the latter was, on the contrary, organicist and markedly cen-

tralist. The internal conflict between these two ideal types, he asserted,

can be observed in all the Western nations.17 The main difference is that,

whereas in the Anglo-Saxon countries (and the United States, in particular)

both ideal types would become incorporated in a smooth way, giving rise

to a political regime of democratic representation, in the countries of the

Latin basinand in Hispanic America, in particularthey would mutually

clash, rendering the establishment of democratic systems of government

impossible.

We find here Hales most important contribution to the study of

nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual history. It does not lie, as hebelieves, in having detached it from the ideological terrain and turning it

into a scholarly, objective endeavor, but rather in having turned away from

a hitherto prevalent parochialism. Given his familiarity with the debates

taking place in France regarding the 1789 Revolution triggered by the neo-

Tocquevillian currents in the years during which he was completing his doc-

toral studies, Hale was able to suggest that most of the dilemmas in which

Latin-Americanists were entangled were less idiosyncratic than previously

thought. This permitted Hale, in Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora,to shift the debates on the supposed tensions in Mexican liberal thought

from their local context and to resituate them in larger trans-

Atlantic arenas. Yet it is also at this point that the inherent limitations of

the history of ideas, to which revisionist approaches are still indebted,

became more clearly manifest.

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE AND SATURNS RINGS

As we saw, behind manifest political antagonism Hale discovered the ac-

tion of common cultural patterns that arced across Mexicos entire ideolog-

ical spectrum and historical eras: the Hispanic ethos. It is undeniable,

he argued, that liberalism in Mexico has been conditioned by the tradi-

tional Hispanic ethos.18 To Hale, this uniform cultural substratum con-

tained the key to explaining and making sense of the contradictions that

agitated, and still agitate, Mexican and Latin American history. According

to Hale, pursuing further the question of continuity, we can find in the age

17 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 5455.18 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 304.

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of Mora a model that will help us understand the present drift of socioeco-

nomic policy in a Mexico emerging from revolution [ . . . ] It was again the

inspiration of late eighteenth century Spain that prevailed.19

Although the idea of the traditionalist, organicist, or centralist

Mexican and Latin American culture has occupied a long-lasting place in

the Mexican imaginary, in Hales work we can observe a more precise in-

fluence: that of the so-called culturalist school begun by one his teachers

at Columbia University, Richard Morse. The perspectives of Morse and

Hale had a common source: Louis Hartzs The Liberal Tradition in

America (1955). In that influential work, Hartz outlined what became for

many years the standard version of American intellectual history.20 Accord-

ing to Hartz, when transplanted to the United States, where a traditional

aristocracy that could prevent its expansion was missing, liberalism lost the

antagonistic dynamics that characterized it in its original European context.

Thus liberalism became a unifying myth, a kind of second nature for the

Americans, fulfilling, in that country at least, its universalizing role. In a

later text, Hartz expanded this interpretative model to all societies that

arose from European colonization. Each of them, he maintained, adopted

the political culture and traditions prevailing in the colonizing nation at the

moment of conquest. Thus, whereas in the United States a bourgeois andliberal culture was dominant, Latin America continued to manifest its feu-

dal inheritance.21

Morse adopted this approach, but gave it a new twist. As Claudio San-

chez Albornoz and others had already suggested,22 feudalism in Spain was

never hegemonic. The Reconquista had created an early centralist impulse,

incarnated in Castile. By the sixteenth century, following the defeat of the

Cortes and the nobility (which represented older democratic traditions),

this centralism expanded across the Iberian peninsula and, finally, wastransferred, in a uniform fashion, to the colonies. The Habsburgs were the

best expressions of an early absolutism. Spain and by extension Spanish

America, would be thus marked by a precocious variant of modernization.

19 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 304.20 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political

Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955).21 Hartz, The Fragmentation of European Culture and Ideology, in The Founding of

New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa,

Canada, and Australia, ed. Hartz (New York: Harvest / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1964), 323.22 Claudio Sa nchez Albornoz, Espana, un enigma historico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Sudam-

ericana, 1956), 1: 18687.

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Because Spain and Portugal had modernized prematurely their political

institutions and renewed their scholastic ideology in the early period of

national construction and ultramarine expansion of Europe, they avoided

the implications of the great revolutions and failed to internalize their gen-

erative force.23 Societies with an Hispanic inheritance would always tend

to persevere this imprint, since they lacked any immanent principle of devel-

opment. A Protestant civilization, Morse claimed, can develop its ener-

gies in wilderness, as did the United States. A Catholic civilization stagnates

when it is not in vital contact with the diverse tribes and cultures of man-

kind.24

This presumedly explained the fact that patrimonialist culture had re-

mained unchanged in the region. As Howard J. Wiara, a member of the

culturalist school, explained rather than instituting democratic rule, the

founding fathers of Latin America were chiefly concerned with preserving

existing hierarchies and the authoritarian and undemocratic institutions of

the past;25 in contrast to the North American colonies [ . . . ], the Latin

American colonies remained essentially authoritarian, absolutist, feudal

(in the particularly Iberian sense) patrimonialist, elitist and organic-

corporatist.26

In Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, Hale took issue with Mor-

ses Hartzian perspective. While he agreed with Morse that Hispanic

America never had a feudal political tradition (although indeed it did have

feudal societies), he argued that the centralist tendencies in local liberalism

were not a legacy of the Habsburgs, but rather of the Bourbons and their

reformist tradition. Thus, Hale modified the culturalist interpretationthe

Bourbons were far more plausible in the role of precursors to nineteenth-

century reformist liberals than were the Hapsburgswhile remaining, nev-

ertheless, within its framework. He simply transferred the moment of theorigin from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century while preserving

its fundamental premise. Since in every process of appropriation of ideas a

selective mechanism was at work, no external borrowing could explain,

by itself, the regions failure in instituting democratic governments. As

Claudio Veliz notes, there was in France or Britain sufficient complexity

23 Richard Morse, New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Balti-

more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 106.24 Morse, The Heritage of Latin America, in The Founding of New Societies, 177.25 Howard Wiarda, Introduction, in Politics and Social Change: The Distinct Tradition,

ed. Howard Wiarda (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 17.26 Wiarda, Introduction, in Politics and Social Change, 1516.

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[of ideas] and richness of detail to satisfy the extremes of radical and con-

servative opinion in Latin America.27 Therefore, the ultimate cause could

be found in Latin American culture, in particular the local traditions of

centralism. Yet, Hales transposition of the original moment of Mexican

liberalism from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons destabilizes that character-

istic mode of intellectual procedure, in so far as it tends to expand the

selection process to traditions themselves. Paraphrasing Veliz, we could

now say that local traditions were sufficiently rich to satisfy extreme radi-

cals and extreme conservatives. The question that this position raises, then,

is given such a diversity of traditions, why Mora chose the Bourbons

instead of the Hapsburgs.

The expansion of the idea of selectivity to the traditions reveals the factthat they are not a given, but something constantly renewed. Only some of

them endure, gaining in the process new meanings and fulfilling new func-

tions, whereas others are forgotten or completely redefined. It makes it im-

possible to distinguish to what extent traditions are the cause or the

consequence of political history. The very relation between past and pres-

ent, or between traditions and ideas, becomes a problem. Determining

which of the two terms is the explanans and which the explanandum is no

longer feasible.After the publication of Hales Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora,

Morse revised the position he had taken in his contribution to Hartzs ed-

ited volume on The Founding of New Societies (1964). He re-discovered in

the origins of Latin America the presence of two traditions in permanent

conflict: a medieval and Thomist one, represented by Castile; and a Renais-

sance and Machiavellian one, incarnated in Aragon. Although the Thomist

legacy was predominant from the beginning, by the end of eighteenth cen-

tury, and, especially after Independence, the hidden substratum of Renais-

sance ideas reemerged. Thus arose a conflict between these two opposing

traditions. In the wake of Independence, Hispanic Americans were rein-

troduced to the historical conflict in sixteenth-century Spain between neo-

Thomist natural law and Machiavellian realism.28 Nonetheless, Morse in-

sisted that neo-Thomist ideas would continue to prevail. Machiavellian

doctrine, he claimed, could be assimilated only in so far as it was reelabo-

rated in terms acceptable to the Neoscholastic matrix of inherited

27 Claudio Veliz, The Centralist Tradition of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1980), 170.28 Morse, Claims of Political Tradition, in New World Soundings, 112.

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thought.29 Thus Reformist and the Enlightened ideologies in Latin America

would be characterized by their radical eclecticism; they would constitute

an ideological mosaic, rather than a system.30

Ultimately, Morse applied a genetic method to the Bourbonist hy-

pothesis that aimed to identify the underlying historical matrix of atti-

tude and social action.31 Since, as Hale notes, no political development

can be explained exclusively by external influences, the reformist project of

the Bourbons needed to be explained in terms of predating traditions. In

this way, the logic of the genetic method always leads backwards in time to

a primitive moment which works as an arkhe or last unfounded foundation.

By referring the opposition between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons to a

previousand more primitiveone between the Castilians and the Ara-

gonese, Morses re-interpretation rescues the genetic method from the circle

of traditions and influences within which Hales proposal seemed to

have trapped it. But, in so doing, he reinforces the essentialist, a-historical

character of this culturalist approach.

In last instance, culturalist explanations presuppose an idea of a cul-

tural totality, of an organic substratum of traditions and values. Question-

ing the existence of such a uniform, solid bedrock can render such

approaches unstable, however. Appeals to the existence of something likean Hispanic ethos do not change its status as undemonstrable postulate. In

his Peopling of British North America Bernard Bailyn uses a very apt image

to refer to the idea of a North American culture. Bailyn compares it to

Saturns rings. When viewed from six hundred thousand million kilometers

away, rings appear as a uniform set of flat and homogenous arcs. However,

in 1980, the spaceship Voyager I offered a very different image of them.

When viewed from about fifty thousand kilometers away we discover an

infinite myriad of celestial bodies of very diverse sizes and characteristics.The homogeneous image of the rings is then revealed as only a luminary

illusion emanating from a multitude of frozen rocks and dust. It would not

be even possible to speak about a ring, since the space between these

rocks and Saturns surface contains, as well, infinite small bodies which are

not visible from the Earth.32 The same can be said of cultures. That the

29 Morse, Claims of Political Tradition, in New World Soundings, 112.30 Morse, Claims of Political Tradition, in New World Soundings, 107.31 Morse, The Heritage of Latin America, in The Founding of New Societies, 171.32 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America An Introduction (New York:

Random House, 1989), 4749.

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multitude of men and women, from diverse generations, cultural back-

grounds, social positions, etc., who populate a given region comprise a sin-

gle culture and share the same ethos, may be merely an illusion. As

Edmundo OGorman points out, that there are richer and poorer countries,

more and less democratic governments, etc., are all questions that can be

discussed and analyzed on empirical bases. But claims that prosperity or

democracy are culturally determined are unverifiable in practice. Such

statements lead us beyond the realm of history to an ontological field of

eternal essences and a priori ideas, of entelequias.33 Nothing prevents

one from postulating the presence of that kind of entelequias; but history

has nothing to say about themand, as Wittgenstein said (Tractatus, pro-

posal 7), of which it is not possible to speak, it is better to remain silent.

THE MODELS IN QUESTION

The ultimate question that the history of ideas raises is, rather, how not

to speak of a local culture, how not to refer the ideas in Latin America

back to some supposed cultural substratum which explains the local system

in terms of deviations and distortions. The culturalist school, as

such, has actually been marginal in the field of Latin American studies.

It work represents efforts by American academics to overcome prevailing

prejudices about Latin American culture and to understand it in its own

terms,34 attempts which, in last instance, have a-critically replicated the

worst stereotypes in the field. Even though the culturalist school is mar-

ginal among the students in the field, explaining Latin American history of

ideas in terms of the peculiarities of the local culture does constitute an

almost universal practice. Notwithstanding its culturalist origin, Hales

statement that the distinctive experience of liberalism derived from thefact that liberal ideas were applied in countries which were highly stratified,

socially and racially, as well as economically underdeveloped, and in which

the tradition of centralized state authority ran deep35 appears to be an

indisputable truth. This truism is accepted well beyond the confines of the

school and constitutes an essential part of the established common sense

of the profession.

33 Edmundo OGorman, Mexico. El trauma de su historia (Mexico: UNAM, 1977), 69.34 Wiarda, Conclusio n, in Politics and Social Change, 353.35 Hale, Political and Social Ideas in Latin America, 18701930, in The Cambridge

History of Latin America. From c.1870 to 1930, vols. 45, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4: 368.

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This situation prevents critical scrutiny of the presumed phenomena of

deviations of local culture from liberal principles. But explanatory refer-

ences to local culture do meet a conceptual demand in the discipline. They

fill a hole within a given theoretical grid. Latin American particularities

serve as the objective, material substratum in which the abstract forms of

the ideal types come to be impressed and incarnated in actual history.

They render concrete the generic categories of the history of ideas, thus

making relevant the study of them in the local context.

In effect, within the frameworks of the history of ideas, without

local peculiarities analyses of the evolution of ideas in Latin America or

deviations lack any sense. As Zea put it, Mexico and all the Mexican

authors can be spared. Yet as J.G.A. Pocock has insisted, such moves failto rescue the historian of ideas from the circumstance that the intellectual

constructs he was trying to control were not historical phenomena at all,

to the extent to which they had been built up by non-historical modes of

inquiry.36 Models of thought considered in themselves appear as perfectly

consistent, logically integrated, and, therefore, a priori definable. Local cul-

tures are, by definition, static essences. All deviation from the ideal

typesthe logoscan be conceived only as symptomatic of a hidden pa-

thos, a traditionalist culture and a hierarchical society that historians mustdis-cover. The results are pseudo-historical narratives that connect two ab-

stractions.

Cultural matrixes, then, are nothing but the necessary counterpart

of the ideal types of the historiography of political ideas. When critiquing

culturalist approaches it is not enough to the eliminate essentialist appeals

to tradition and local cultures as the ultimate explanatory principle. It is

necessary to interrogate the epistemological assumptions upon which such

appeals are based, that is, to critically scrutinize the very models that in

the local history of ideas are givens. Thus, questioning the cultural stereo-

types on which the scheme of models and deviations hinges leads us

beyond the boundaries of Latin American intellectual history and forces us

to confront that which constitutes an inherent limit to the whole tradition

of history of ideas: the ideal type. At this point, we also reach the

ultimate limit of Hales revisionism. Although, as we saw, his approach

breaks with the parochialism of the local historiography of ideas and lo-

cates the contradictions of Mexican liberal thought in a broader context,

he preserves, nevertheless, the same antinomies upon which the old history

36J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11.

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engage in the discussion of how the ideas of Mora or other Latin American

liberal thinkers deviated from them).40

Behind the disputes regarding republicanism lies a still more funda-

mental reformulation, one of a theoretico-methodological nature. But ex-

tent and intensity of these debates has overshadowed the conceptual

renovation underway. In Pococks words, the point was not to add a new

hole in grid of the history of ideas (classical republicanism), but to move

from a history of ideas to a history of discourse or of political lan-

guages. As he put it:

The change that has come over this branch of historiography in

the past two decades may be characterized as a movement away

from emphasizing the history of thought (and even more sharply,

of ideas) toward emphasizing something rather different, for

which history of speech or history of discourse, although nei-

ther of them unproblematic or irreproachable, may be the best

terminology so far found.41

Most certainly, simply setting aside the terms liberalism and conserva-

tism and replacing them with republicanism or republican language

does not constitute an historiographical revolution. There is nothing pre-

venting new terms from being turned into another system of thought (or

ideal type), thus blurring a conceptual transformation and returning to

the same moulds whose anti-historical premises the changes were intended

to overcome. But current debates regarding liberalism and republican-

ism (or negative liberty and positive liberty) are predicated an erasure

of the crucial aspect that distinguishes languages from ideas. The latter

are a-historical entities. They may appear (or not) in a given moment orplace, but this circumstance does not affects their definition. Languages,

instead, are thoroughly historical entities. The language of classical republi-

canism language rested on a number of assumptions ( ideas of temporality,

concepts of nature, etc.) and cannot be projected beyond the horizon within

which these assumptions remain valid. As a matter of fact, it could not be

detached from a theocentric view of society. Hence, to recover it in the

40 On the disagreements among the specialists, see John Dunn, The Political Thought of

John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Govern-

ment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).41 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 12.

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present is not only materially impossible; it is conceptually absurd. Such

proposals involve the removal of that language from the categories upon

which it was erected and turning it into an ideal type, that is, reducing it

to a set of (more or less banal) statements or propositions which, in effect,

could be found in the most diverse discursive contexts, from the Greeks to

contemporary political philosophy.

As a matter of fact, there is more to it than that. The so-called new

intellectual history actually reveals a much more complex and multilayered

universe of symbolic reality in which the plane of ideas is only the most

superficial one. It would thereby open the field for the definition of new

problems and objects and would resituate scholarship on a radically new

terrain. This would have critical implications for research in and on LatinAmerica. The remaining section of this essay considers how the change in

focus from ideas to languages can help to reformulate our views of

Latin American politico-intellectual history. I will discuss the consequences

of emphasizing the pragmatic dimension of language, a central concern of

the Cambridge school, for three related issues. First, the question of the

continuity of colonial heritage in Latin America and the persistence of tradi-

tionalist, or organicist, patterns of thought. Second, the chronic search for

the peculiarities of ideas in Latin American. Third, why analyze the work ofauthors who allegedly made no contribution to the universal history of

thought? Certainly the work of authors like the Argentinean Esteban Echev-

erra or the Mexican Jose Luis Mara Mora, to mention just two names,

cannot be placed on the same level of a Hegel or a Marx, or approached

with the same kind of hermeneutic tools. In short, how should objects of

little intellectual density be rendered historically relevant.

LATIN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL

HISTORY AT A CROSSROADS

To begin with the first point, the persistence in Latin America of traditional-

ist ideals is less an empirical question than it is the result of a given method-

ology. In effect, the non-historical nature of ideas necessarily generates an

image of transhistorical stability. If only two or three basic systems of

thought (ideal types) exist, we assume that transformations in the realmof ideas are long-term processes. An organicist culture, presuming that

such a thing really existed, does not become individualistic suddenly. The

breaking of colonial ties represented a watershed in Latin American history;

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it marked not only a crucial political transformation but also a fundamental

shift on the level of discourses. Yet ideas do not record the changes that

occurred in the conditions of their enunciation, since these changes do not

necessarily relate to the propositional contents of discourses, nor are they,

therefore, perceivable on that level.

A remark by Francois-Xavier Guerra helps us to explain how changes

of political languages are produced. In analyzing the convocation of the

Courts in Cadiz, which would result in 1812 in the creation of a liberal

constitution for the entire Spanish Empire, Guerra states that, as Tocque-

ville noted in connection with an identical proposal made by Lomenie de

Brienne in 1788, by turning the constitution into a matter of debate, we

already pass from the restoration of fundamental laws to modern politics,to the kingdom of opinion.42 Guerra suggests that the best expression of

this change was the electoral triumph of the liberal party headed by Manuel

Quintana. However, what Tocqueville stated was the opposite. It was not

at all unthinkable that elections were won by historical constitutionalist or

even the absolutist factions; yet, this would have not changed the fact that,

from the moment that the constitution of the kingdom had become a matter

of public debate, the Ancient Regime ended. It is this very fact, and not the

posterior triumph of the liberal party that altered political languages, sinceit displaced the very terrain of the political debate.

Guerras misinterpretation is, nevertheless, highly illustrative of a hesi-

tant methodology which indecisively oscillates between ideas and lan-

guages. The change of political language, the emergence of modern

politics, refers to what was then at stake. We can see here what Colling-

wood called the primacy of the questions over the answers. It is the changes

in the questions raised that determines the transposition of the conceptual

coordinates in the function of which public debates are articulated. Thus, ahistory of political languages aims at tracing not how the ideas of the sub-

jects changed, but rather how the grounding of the underlying problems

they faced was reconfigured over time. Such transformations in political

languages are objective events which took place independently of the agents

awareness of them. This explains a first paradox: that the ideas of the sub-

ject may stay unmodified, yet, political languages radically change. They

are ultimately expressive of the broader historical changes that determine

42 Guerra, La poltica moderna en el mundo hispa nico: apuntes para unos anos cruciales

(18081809), in Las formas y las polticas del dominio agrario. Homenaje a Francois

Chevalier, eds. Ricardo A vila Palafox, Carlos Martnez Assad, and Jean Meyer (Guadala-

jara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1992), 178.

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the conditions of the enunciation of discourses. And this first paradox ex-

presses, in turn, a second one.

The work of another important scholar, Antonio Annino, is here illus-

trative. As Annino shows, the new institutional orders that emerged in

Latin America after independence would not be erected on the basis of the

subjects willbut on that ofjustice, which was the principle that articulated

the societies of the old regime. Justice here meant the preservation of the

natural order, which was conceived as the incarnation of the divine design

of Creation, thus making unconceivable the modern idea of an abstract,

uniform body of law. Rights and duties remained relative to the social con-

dition of the subjects and contingent upon the particular body to which

each one belonged. The enthusiastic embracement by the pueblos of the

cause of independence could thus be explained by the fact that the rupture

with Spain allowed them to be in a better position to defend their tradi-

tional privileges as bodies. Thus they did not seek to become citizens of a

republic and make manifest their wills as such, but instead to preserve a

natural order they perceived as under threat by the centralizing policies of

the Bourbons.

However, as different recent studies clearly show,43 the breaking of co-

lonial ties was, at the same time, destructive of the basis upon which that

principle rested. The idea of justice was, in fact, undetachable from that of

sanction. Since all prerogatives emanated from the king, the judicial institu-

tion of them depended upon royal acknowledgement. With no sanction,

there was no right nor law. Now, after independence, claims in this matter

bloomed. Each community interpreted what were its particular rights and

duties as a body. Often, these claims were mutually contradictory, and,

with the monarch missing, there was now no longer a final authority enti-

tled to determine such disputes. This had devastating effects on the tradi-tional order: lacking a transcendent ground upon which to be erected, the

very concept ofjustice that for three centuries had been the basis for a social

order and was considered as natural, eternal, and intangible, turned into

the center of a properly politicalantagonism. As Annino remarks, the artic-

ulating principle of new societies would not be opinion, but justice; yet, the

43 See especially Guillermo Palacios, ed., Ensayos sobre la nueva historia poltica de

America Latina, Siglo XIX (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 2007); Juan Ortiz Escamilla

and Jose Antonio Serrano Ortega, eds., Ayuntamientos y liberalismo gaditano en Mexico

(Zamora, Michoaca n: El Colegio de Michoaca n / Universidad Verzcruzana, 2007); and

Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa,

Peru 17801854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

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question of what was just or unjust would, it itself, now become a matter

of opinion.

We can thus observe the kind of conceptual twists in which a tradi-

tional principle turned upon itself to find another one which was no longer

so, or one actually incompatible with it. Justice indicated an objective

order; it was not, by definition, a matter of opinion and could not become

so with destroying the very concept. This illustrates a second paradox: how

new categories that contradicted preexisting vocabularies could, however,

emerge out of conceptual torsions produced in the interior of those very

languages whose logic those categories, at the same time, dislocated. This

does not express a merely local, Latin American oddity, but is an inherent

feature of the kind of conceptual transformation we are analyzing. And thisleads to my second point, the issue of the peculiar features of ideas in Latin

America.

Ultimately, beyond the differences regarding the contents of their nar-

ratives, the goal of revisionist enterprise is actually the same as that of the

history of ideas. Both look for the ways in which European (particularly,

liberal) ideas, once translated and superimposed on Latin American reality

(one supposedly alien, and in many regards hostile, to them), deviated in

manners not always compatible with their original models, upon whichthey, therefore, frequently inflicted violence. The result of the collision be-

tween the native traditionalist culture (the so-called Hispanic ethos) and

the universal principles of liberalism was a kind of compromise ideology

that Jose Luis Romero termed liberal-conservative.44 This perspective

synthesizes what Roberto Schwarz called, in a fortunate expression, the

problem ofmisplaced ideas.45

However, in this fashion, these approaches systematically and neces-

sarily failed in their attempt to find anything particular to Latin America: itis obvious that centralism and conservatism, or indeed the contradictory

mixture of conservatism and liberalism expressed in Romeros for-

mula, were not Latin American inventions; they were not less generic

and foreign categories than their opposites, federalism and liberal-

ism. To postulate the finding of a Latin American peculiarity, whatever

that may be, these approaches must simplify the history of European ideas,

smoothing over the intricacies of its actual course. And even then they could

44Jose Luis Romero, Las ideas polticas en Argentina (Buenos Aires: FCE, 1975).45 See Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London and New

York: Verso, 1992); and Elas Palti, The Problem of Misplaced Ideas Revisited. Beyond

the History of Ideas, JHI67 (2006): 14979.

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hardly find a way to describe the postulated idiosyncrasies with non-

European categories. We meet here the basic contradiction in the history

of ideas: it generates an anxiety for peculiarity which it can never sat-

isfy. These very approaches prevent it: if considered from the perspective of

its ideological content, every system of thought necessarily falls within a

limited range of alternatives, none of which can aspire to be exclusive to

Latin America. Yet, within the framework of these approaches, and insofar

as, according to the general consensus, we cannot say that Latin American

thinkers have made any contribution to the universal history of ideas,

the only thing which may justify the study of Latin American ideas and

make them relevant is the expectation of finding distortions (how ideas

deviated from the presumed pattern), without never really finding them.In short, the history of ideas leads to a dead end. The need to postulate

a goal which is unattainable within its framework undermines the very

foundations of this undertaking. Thus, in the Latin American context, a

history of ideas appears as either unfeasible or irrelevant.

We come, finally, to the third and most fundamental point raised by

the theoretical transformations that have occurred in the discipline. The

turn towards pragmatic dimensions of language involves a redefinition of

analytical unit from ideas to texts considered as discursive events.While the meaning of ideas is not contingent on the conditions of their

utterance, and, therefore, may eventually reappear in the most diverse dis-

cursive contexts, texts are unique and singular, by definition; and this dis-

solves the whole problem of local deviations. No two texts are alike,

even though their contents are identical. But that which singularizes a given

discourse, its peculiarities, is not to be found on the level of its contents but

on that of its pragmatics. Now, this entails, in turn, giving up the expecta-

tion of finding any common features that particularize ideas in LatinAmerica and distinguish them from those of any other region (a search with

an implicit essentialist premise). We meet here the core of the revolution,

in Pococks words, that gave rise to the emergence of the so-called new

intellectual history, and which also lies behind the revisionist currents

in Latin American, but has been unevenly assimilated by them.

In effect, the enhanced complexity of our views of the linguistic uni-

verse has made obsolete distinctions on which the entire history of ideas

has rested: between texts and contexts, between ideas and reality.

Implicit or explicit assumptions that there is, on the one hand, a crudely

empirical reality of social and political practices which are previous and

independent from the conceptual frameworks within which they unfold,

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and, on the other hand, a universe of ideas autonomously generated which

only subsequently are incarnated in actual practices are now highly prob-

lematic. Considered as social facts, texts cross through the borders dividing

ideas and realities: as such, discourses are as realas other forms of political

practice, inherent (material) factors of them, and, therefore, constitutive

elements of their contexts.

Returning to Latin American intellectual history, even though it is cer-

tainly true that local thinking is marginal in Western culture, considered

from the view of the public uses of discourses, the dynamics of languages

in Latin America are no less complex than in any other region. Their study

requires sophisticated and elaborated theoretical frameworks similar those

used to analyze discourses in Germany or France. Such studies, in turn, may

eventually raise epistemological problems whose relevance moves beyond

local frameworks. Like that of any other local cases, they may serve to test

our theories and eventually oblige us to revise them.

To conclude, the difficult construal and acceptance of concepts like

popular sovereignty or representative democracy cannot be under-

stood if approached as simply expressing some local pathologysuch as a

traditionalist cultureor a kind of regrettable misunderstanding by local

thinkers of their true meaning.46 Nineteenth-century Latin American intel-lectual history becomes meaningful only in so far as we assume the contin-

gent nature of the foundations and rationale of the core categories of

modern political discourse. And it helps us, in turn, to reveal the aporias

and dilemmas that the conception of a post-traditional political order

already deprived, therefore, of any transcendental guaranteeraises.

At this point, I have come full circle. Making sense of the study of

intellectual history in Latin America today demands the critical undermin-

ing and dislocation of that very scheme of models and deviationswhich hitherto seemed to be the only one which rendered it relevant. The

new approaches to politico-intellectual history which originally triggered

the emergence of revisionism in the region today point to beyond its bound-

aries. They push the discipline to confront that which hitherto appeared as

its ultimate limit, its unthought, and unthinkable, premise: the assumption

of the full transparency, logical consistency, and rationality of the models

46 In fact, for the authors of the epoch, these above-mentioned notions expressed termino-

logical contradictions, and this was not for negligible reasons. As they believed, the idea

of sovereignty necessarily entailed that of subjects. The fact that sovereigns are also

their own subjects seemed to them an insurmountable contradiction, one that was at the

same time foundational and destructive to modern politics.

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of Western intellectual tradition, the ideal types.47 The new politico-

intellectual history thus relocates studies in the field in Latin America. It

places them on a completely new terrain and may eventually cast light on

fundamental aspects of the modern republican experience at large.

Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.

47 See Elas Palti, On the Thesis of the Essential Contestability of Concepts, and Latin

American Intellectual History, Re-Descriptions 9 (2005): 11334.

614

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