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 worldhistorical 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-dened. 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 been precluded 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 prevented 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 necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical signicance 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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questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the eld of Latin American politico-intellectual history. The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly inuenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the eld. This has made room for the development of a self-dened revisionist position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear. The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the eld, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise.
1 For a comprehensive, systematic review of the state of the art in the different countries of the region, see Manuel Chust and Jose Antonio Serrano, eds., Debates sobre las inde pendencias iberoamericanas (Madrid: AHILA-Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2007). 2 As Francois-Xavier Guerra indicated, the writing of history was much more than a scholarly practice, it was a political action, in the ethimological acceptation of the word: that of the citizen defending his polis, narrating the epic of the heroes that founded it. Francois-Xavier Guerra, El olvidado siglo XIX, in Balance de la historiografa sobre Iberoamerica (19451988). Actas de las IV Conversaciones Internacionales de Historia, ed. Vazquez de Prada and Olabarri (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1989), 595. 3 This new historiography would revolve around the topic of the unnished revolution. Basically, it would question the revolutionary character of the rupture with Spain and Portugal and emphasize instead, the continuity, after independence, of the social and economic structures inherited from the colonial era.

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Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic 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 / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the eld of politico-intellectual history, 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 gure 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 recount 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 tradition sought to counter, with patriotic vigor, an opposite one held by a minority of conservatives: monarchists, authoritarians, strangers to the nation, positivists (who were very bad).4 Hale himself has repeatedly maintained 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 rm ground of objective history.5 As we will see, it is not exactly here that Hales contribution lies. The point is that the vehemence of the revisionist critique of the preceding tradition of the history of ideas, whose main representative was the Mexican, Leopoldo Zea, has obscured the achievements of that older tradition, 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 rst to develop the prem4 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. Josena Vazquez (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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ises needed to establish it as a specic eld of research. These premises, barely modied, 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 denitions 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 rst 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 contribution to the history of ideas in general? What kinds of approaches were required 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 marginality was not merely circumstantial (an infantile illness), Zea and the members 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 culture. The fact that the ones who made those contributions were Mexican positivists would have been merely an incidental happening. These contributions 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. The question, 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 contributions to thought in general, but, on the contrary, its failures, its deviations; in short, the type of refractions that European ideas underwent when they were detached from their original habitat and transplanted to this region.
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 endeavor, which he called philosophemas. These were the counterparts to the unit-idea that Arthur Lovejoy employed when establishing the history 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 remove them from the abstract frameworks of the generic categories around which the discipline had hitherto revolved, and to locate them in the particular context of their articulation. When considered on the basis of its fundamental 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 denitely open to criticism. In effect, the emergence of the history of ideas as a scholarly discipline in Latin America was 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 specic historical and epistemological conditions. Thus criticism of Zeas approach did not question his historicophilosophical 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;
See Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reections on the History of Ideas, JHI (1940): 323. Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 1: 24. 11 See G. W. Hewes, Mexican in Search of the Mexican (Review), The American Journal 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 positivismwhich, 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 circumstances, it was adapted to them and used to impose a new order.13 However, this perspective would not nd 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 encouraging 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 not foreign 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 centralism 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 conict: English liberalism (incarnated in Locke) and French liberalism (represented by
Zea, El positivismo en Mexico, 1: 23. 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 decentralization; and the latter was, on the contrary, organicist and markedly centralist. The internal conict 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 nd here Hales most important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual history. It does not lie, as he believes, 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 neoTocquevillian currents in the years during which he was completing his doctoral 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 transAtlantic 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 action of common cultural patterns that arced across Mexicos entire ideological spectrum and historical eras: the Hispanic ethos. It is undeniable, he argued, that liberalism in Mexico has been conditioned by the traditional Hispanic ethos.18 To Hale, this uniform cultural substratum contained 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 nd in the age
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Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 5455. 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 socioeconomic 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 inuence: 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 inuential work, Hartz outlined what became for many years the standard version of American intellectual history.20 According 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, fullling, 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 and liberal culture was dominant, Latin America continued to manifest its feudal inheritance.21 Morse adopted this approach, but gave it a new twist. As Claudio Sanchez 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, nally, was transferred, 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.
Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 304. 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 Sanchez 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 generative force.23 Societies with an Hispanic inheritance would always tend to persevere this imprint, since they lacked any immanent principle of development. A Protestant civilization, Morse claimed, can develop its energies 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 mankind.24 This presumedly explained the fact that patrimonialist culture had remained 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 chiey 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 organiccorporatist.26 In Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, Hale took issue with Morses 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 modied the culturalist interpretationthe Bourbons were far more plausible in the role of precursors to nineteenthcentury reformist liberals than were the Hapsburgswhile remaining, nevertheless, within its framework. He simply transferred the moment of the origin 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 sufcient complexity
Richard Morse, New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore: 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 conservative 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 characteristic 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 sufciently rich to satisfy extreme radicals 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 fact that they are not a given, but something constantly renewed. Only some of them endure, gaining in the process new meanings and fullling new functions, whereas others are forgotten or completely redened. It makes it impossible to distinguish to what extent traditions are the cause or the consequence of political history. The very relation between past and present, 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 edited volume on The Founding of New Societies (1964). He re-discovered in the origins of Latin America the presence of two traditions in permanent conict: a medieval and Thomist one, represented by Castile; and a Renaissance and Machiavellian one, incarnated in Aragon. Although the Thomist legacy was predominant from the beginning, by the end of eighteenth century, and, especially after Independence, the hidden substratum of Renaissance ideas reemerged. Thus arose a conict between these two opposing traditions. In the wake of Independence, Hispanic Americans were reintroduced to the historical conict in sixteenth-century Spain between neoThomist natural law and Machiavellian realism.28 Nonetheless, Morse insisted that neo-Thomist ideas would continue to prevail. Machiavellian doctrine, he claimed, could be assimilated only in so far as it was reelaborated in terms acceptable to the Neoscholastic matrix of inherited
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 hypothesis that aimed to identify the underlying historical matrix of attitude and social action.31 Since, as Hale notes, no political development can be explained exclusively by external inuences, 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 Aragonese, Morses re-interpretation rescues the genetic method from the circle of traditions and inuences 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 cultural totality, of an organic substratum of traditions and values. Questioning the existence of such a uniform, solid bedrock can render such approaches unstable, however. Appeals to the existence of something like an 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 at and homogenous arcs. However, in 1980, the spaceship Voyager I offered a very different image of them. When viewed from about fty thousand kilometers away we discover an innite 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, innite small bodies which are not visible from the Earth.32 The same can be said of cultures. That the
Morse, Claims of Political Tradition, in New World Soundings, 112. 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 backgrounds, social positions, etc., who populate a given region comprise a single 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 unveriable in practice. Such statements lead us beyond the realm of history to an ontological eld 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, proposal 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 eld 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 eld. Even though the culturalist school is marginal among the students in the eld, 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 the fact that liberal ideas were applied in countries which were highly stratied, 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 connes of the school and constitutes an essential part of the established common sense of the profession.
Edmundo OGorman, Mexico. El trauma de su historia (Mexico: UNAM, 1977), 69. Wiarda, Conclusion, 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 references to local culture do meet a conceptual demand in the discipline. They ll 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 fail to 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 denable. Local cultures are, by denition, static essences. All deviation from the ideal typesthe logoscan be conceived only as symptomatic of a hidden pathos, a traditionalist culture and a hierarchical society that historians must dis-cover. The results are pseudo-historical narratives that connect two abstractions. 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 stereotypes 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 locates the contradictions of Mexican liberal thought in a broader context, he preserves, nevertheless, the same antinomies upon which the old history
J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11.
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of ideas was founded. He simply places these contradictions in the bosom of the liberal tradition itself. That which hitherto had been depicted as antiliberal Latin American oddities (centralism, authoritarianism, organicism, etc.) now characterizes a liberalism-that-is-not-truly-liberal (French liberalism) which in turn is opposed to a liberalism-that-is-authentically-liberal (English liberalism). This perspective, however, soon nds itself detached from the conceptual grounds on which it has hitherto rested. While Hale prepared Mexican Liberalism, Bernard Baylin published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). In so doing, he began a process that would debunk Louis Hartzs model of liberalism.37 For Hartz, the liberal and democratic principles of the American Revolution embodied the true essence of that countrys political culture. In the course of analyzing the pamphlet literature of the era, however, Baylin discovered a conceptual universe quite different from the liberal one: an older and longer lasting tradition that he dened as civic humanist. This perspective became so popular among scholars that civic humanism redened by Gordon Wood38 and J. G. A. Pocock39 as republicanism soon replaced liberalism as the supposedly foundational matrix of the American universe of political ideas. The rise of this republican paradigm among historians of AngloAmerican political thought was troublesome for histories of Latin American ideas anchored in Hartzs (dichotomical) perspective. The extended debate on republicanism generated different denitions of liberalism (and its relationship to republicanism), and resulted successive reformulations of it, none of which were free from fundamental objections. These complexities could not be assimilated with a Latin American history of ideas which depended upon clearly delimited and well dened models. Once they begin to lose their previous transparency, and their denitions are rendered problematic, the scheme of models and deviations inevitably will crumble. Hence the current paradox that today the only scholars who know, or believe to know, what Lockean liberalism is are Latin American historians of ideas (since otherwise, if they do not assume the denition of it to be transparent and unproblematic, there would be no way that they could
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 38 Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). 39 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
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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 fundamental reformulation, one of a theoretico-methodological nature. But extent 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 languages. 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 neither of them unproblematic or irreproachable, may be the best terminology so far found.41 Most certainly, simply setting aside the terms liberalism and conservatism and replacing them with republicanism or republican language does not constitute an historiographical revolution. There is nothing preventing 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 republicanism (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 or place, but this circumstance does not affects their denition. Languages, instead, are thoroughly historical entities. The language of classical republicanism 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
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 Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 41 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12.
40

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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 supercial one. It would thereby open the eld for the denition of new problems and objects and would resituate scholarship on a radically new terrain. This would have critical implications for research in and on Latin America. 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 traditionalist, or organicist, patterns of thought. Second, the chronic search for the peculiarities of ideas in Latin American. Third, why analyze the work of authors who allegedly made no contribution to the universal history of thought? Certainly the work of authors like the Argentinean Esteban Echeverra 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 rst point, the persistence in Latin America of traditionalist ideals is less an empirical question than it is the result of a given methodology. 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 realm of 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 Tocqueville 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, since it displaced the very terrain of the political debate. Guerras misinterpretation is, nevertheless, highly illustrative of a hesitant methodology which indecisively oscillates between ideas and languages. The change of political language, the emergence of modern politics, refers to what was then at stake. We can see here what Collingwood 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, a history of political languages aims at tracing not how the ideas of the subjects changed, but rather how the grounding of the underlying problems they faced was recongured over time. Such transformations in political languages are objective events which took place independently of the agents awareness of them. This explains a rst paradox: that the ideas of the subject may stay unmodied, yet, political languages radically change. They are ultimately expressive of the broader historical changes that determine
42

Guerra, La poltica moderna en el mundo hispanico: apuntes para unos anos cruciales (18081809), in Las formas y las polticas del dominio agrario. Homenaje a Francois Chevalier, eds. Ricardo Avila 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 rst paradox expresses, in turn, a second one. The work of another important scholar, Antonio Annino, is here illustrative. As Annino shows, the new institutional orders that emerged in Latin America after independence would not be erected on the basis of the subjects will but on that of justice, 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 condition 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 traditional 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 colonial 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 institution 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 nal authority entitled to determine such disputes. This had devastating effects on the traditional order: lacking a transcendent ground upon which to be erected, the very concept of justice 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 political antagonism. As Annino remarks, the articulating principle of new societies would not be opinion, but justice; yet, the
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, Michoacan: El Colegio de Michoacan / 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 traditional principle turned upon itself to nd another one which was no longer so, or one actually incompatible with it. Justice indicated an objective order; it was not, by denition, 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 this leads to my second point, the issue of the peculiar features of ideas in Latin America. Ultimately, beyond the differences regarding the contents of their narratives, 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 which they, therefore, frequently inicted violence. The result of the collision between 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 of misplaced ideas.45 However, in this fashion, these approaches systematically and necessarily failed in their attempt to nd anything particular to Latin America: it is obvious that centralism and conservatism, or indeed the contradictory mixture of conservatism and liberalism expressed in Romeros formula, were not Latin American inventions; they were not less generic and foreign categories than their opposites, federalism and liberalism. To postulate the nding 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
44 45

Jose Luis Romero, Las ideas polticas en Argentina (Buenos Aires: FCE, 1975). 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, JHI 67 (2006): 14979.

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hardly nd a way to describe the postulated idiosyncrasies with nonEuropean categories. We meet here the basic contradiction in the history of ideas: it generates an anxiety for peculiarity which it can never satisfy. 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 nding distortions (how ideas deviated from the presumed pattern), without never really nding 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, nally, 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 redenition 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 discursive contexts, texts are unique and singular, by denition; and this dissolves 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 expectation of nding any common features that particularize ideas in Latin America 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 universe 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 problematic. Considered as social facts, texts cross through the borders dividing ideas and realities: as such, discourses are as real as 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 certainly 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 difcult construal and acceptance of concepts like popular sovereignty or representative democracy cannot be understood 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 intellectual history becomes meaningful only in so far as we assume the contingent 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 undermining and dislocation of that very scheme of models and deviations which 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 boundaries. 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 terminological 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 politicointellectual history thus relocates studies in the eld 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.

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