Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence,the Early Republican Experience,

and Intellectual History in Latin America

Elıas Jose Palti

Latin America’s Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously creatednew nation states and established republican systems of government. Thisoccurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of ‘‘nation’’ and‘‘republic’’ remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debatesnaturally emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind ofdilemmas and problems contained therein.

Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has beenprecluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditionalapproaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historiansto interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that pre-vented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberalconcept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, theconcerns of Latin American commentators were seen as ‘‘deviations’’ fromthe 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 nineteenthcentury could reveal their historical significance and become matters forsystematic 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)

593

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putativemodels and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, hasopened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues forscholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual his-tory.

The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portu-guese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by theapproach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influencedby this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in LatinAmerica have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to reviseestablished perspectives in the field. This has made room for the develop-ment of a self-defined ‘‘revisionist’’ position. However, what is to be revisedhas not always been clear.

The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence asthe epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover theirrights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalisticbiases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already presentat the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could beperceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however,the revisionists’ contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America ofMarxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence ofAmerican and European historians in the field, had already destabilizedManichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a strugglebetween liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nu-ances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged fromthe rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new stateswere 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 countriesof 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 ascholarly 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 historiografıa sobreIberoamerica (1945–1988). 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 ‘‘unfinished revolu-tion.’’ Basically, it would question the revolutionary character of the rupture with Spainand Portugal and emphasize instead, the continuity, after independence, of the social andeconomic structures inherited from the colonial era.

594

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline hasoccurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of na-tionalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises onwhich these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the setsof antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded:enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; ‘‘liberty of theModern’’ / ‘‘liberty of Ancient;’’ modernity / tradition; individualism / or-ganicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionismin 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 emergenceof the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, forthe case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entireregion): ‘‘Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could re-count to ourselves a delicious story: here we had an-always-assumed-asbeautiful 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 aminority 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 localhistoriography 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 Hale’s 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 theMexican, 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 Vazquez (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1991), 14.5 Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1968), 6.

595

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 ofhis critics. Zea’s contribution was crucial to the development of intellectualhistory in Latin American as a scholarly discipline. His work provided thedefinitions and delimitations necessary for the study of ideas in an areawhich has been viewed as marginal vis a vis the centers of intellectual pro-duction. Zea was, in fact, the first to approach systematically the particularproblems that the writing of the history of ideas in the ‘‘periphery’’ of theWest raised; that is, in regions whose cultures have ‘‘a derivative’’ nature, aterm he himself coined. Zea asked what was the sense and the object ofanalyzing 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 aproper 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 asa timeless ‘‘struggle of a set of ideas against other sets of ideas.’’ ‘‘In aninterpretation of this type,’’ wrote Zea in his seminal work, El positivismoen Mexico (1943), ‘‘Mexico and all Mexican positivists could be spared,since they would be nothing but poor interpreters of a doctrine to whichthey made no contribution worthy of the universal attention.’’6 But, on theother hand, if these authors had made some contributions, discoveringthem would not have been relevant for the comprehension of the local cul-ture. ‘‘The fact that the ones who made those contributions were Mexicanpositivists 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 theeternally valid things’’ that a local history of ideas gained its sense. Thequestion, then, was: from where? Thus posed, the answer to the questionimmediately emerged: ‘‘from its relation with that circumstance calledMexico.’’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 underwentwhen they were detached from their original habitat and transplanted tothis 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.

596

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

Zea also developed analytic units for this type of comparative en-deavor, which he called ‘‘philosophemas.’’ These were the counterparts tothe ‘‘unit-idea’’ that Arthur Lovejoy employed when establishing the ‘‘his-tory of ideas’’ as a scholarly discipline in the United States.9 According toZea, the meaningful deviations produced by contextual displacements wereimprinted on the particular concepts, thus serving as records of them. ‘‘Ifwe compare the philosophemas used by two or more diverse cultures,’’ hestated, ‘‘we can observe that these philosophemas, although they verballyappear alike, change their contents.’’10

Here we encounter the basic design of an approach founded on thescheme of ‘‘models’’ and ‘‘deviations,’’ one which today still dominates thediscipline. It emerges from the attempt to historicize ideas, the need to re-move them from the abstract frameworks of the generic categories aroundwhich 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, Zea’s project is not so easy to refute. But one of theproblems in Zea’s work is that it is not always possible to distinguish the‘‘methodological aspects’’ of his interpretive model from the ‘‘substantiveaspects’’ of it. The latter are most definitely open to criticism. In effect, theemergence 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 subsequentlyLatin American) ‘‘national being.’’ There is a second factor that tends toobscure Zea’s contribution, one less obvious but much more importantthan the former. The scheme of ‘‘models’’ and ‘‘deviations’’ readily becamepart of the common sense of the historians of Latin American ideas. Thisobscured the fact that the search for ‘‘local deviations’’ was not a ‘‘naturalobject’’ for Latin American intellectual history, but rather the result of atruly theoretical tour de force which sprang from specific historical andepistemological conditions.

Thus criticism of Zea’s approach did not question his ‘‘historico-philosophical method,’’ as he called it, but only the way in which he put itinto practice. This method, Zea wrote, would allow him ‘‘to eliminate thecontradictions wherein the historians of the philosophy became trapped;’’

9 See Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘‘Reflections on the History of Ideas,’’ JHI (1940): 3–23.10 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): 209–22; and Henry Schmidt, The Roots ofLo Mexicano: Self and Society in Mexican Thought, 1900–1934 (College Station: TexasA&M University Press, 1978).

597

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

in this fashion, ‘‘those which seemed to be contradictions now are revealedas diverse stages of a single cultural development.’’12 More precisely, hisattempt to historicize ideas was associated with his goal of integrating posi-tivism—which, after Revolution, had been execrated as an ideology foreignto Mexico and its authentic liberal tradition—as a dialectically necessarystage 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, theexacerbation 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 emergedfrom the Revolution). These circumstances led Zea to partially revise hisearlier positions and to condemn the positivist movement and along with itthe whole liberal tradition that preceded the Revolution, as an ideologywhich had managed to adapt itself to Mexico’s national being but was notyet an authentic manifestation of it.14

Hale’s criticism focused on that side of Zea’s approach, which, as wesaw, 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 ‘‘mentalemancipation’’ from colonization, Mexican liberals only continued theBourbon reformist tradition. From this Hale drew two central theses. First,that Mexican liberalism and conservatism were more similar to each otherthan the Mexican historians of ideas used to believe. ‘‘There may be pointsof continuity in Mexican thought and policy that run deeper that politicalliberalism and conservatism,’’ which, for Hale, consisted of their sharedcentralist trends.15 Second, the contradictory mixture of liberalism and cen-tralism characteristic of Mexican and Latin American liberalism was notcompletely unknown in the European liberal tradition. Following Guido deRuggiero,16 Hale posited two ‘‘ideal types’’ in permanent conflict: ‘‘Englishliberalism’’ (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): 100–101.15 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 8.16 Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Gloucester, Mass.: PeterSmith, 1981).

598

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

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 riseto a political regime of democratic representation, in the countries of theLatin basin—and in Hispanic America, in particular—they would mutuallyclash, rendering the establishment of democratic systems of governmentimpossible.

We find here Hale’s most important contribution to the study ofnineteenth-century Latin American intellectual history. It does not lie, as hebelieves, in having detached it from the ideological terrain and turning itinto a scholarly, objective endeavor, but rather in having turned away froma hitherto prevalent parochialism. Given his familiarity with the debatestaking 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 whichLatin-Americanists were entangled were less idiosyncratic than previouslythought. This permitted Hale, in Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora,to shift the debates on the supposed tensions in Mexican liberal thoughtfrom their local context and to resituate them in larger trans-Atlantic arenas. Yet it is also at this point that the inherent limitations ofthe history of ‘‘ideas,’’ to which revisionist approaches are still indebted,became more clearly manifest.

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE AND SATURN’S RINGS

As we saw, behind manifest political antagonism Hale discovered the ac-tion of common cultural patterns that arced across Mexico’s 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 thatagitated, and still agitate, Mexican and Latin American history. Accordingto Hale, ‘‘pursuing further the question of continuity, we can find in the age

17 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 54–55.18 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 304.

599

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

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 theinspiration 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 inthe Mexican imaginary, in Hale’s work we can observe a more precise in-fluence: that of the so-called ‘‘culturalist school’’ begun by one his teachersat Columbia University, Richard Morse. The perspectives of Morse andHale had a common source: Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition inAmerica (1955). In that influential work, Hartz outlined what became formany years the standard version of American intellectual history.20 Accord-ing to Hartz, when transplanted to the United States, where a traditionalaristocracy that could prevent its expansion was missing, liberalism lost theantagonistic dynamics that characterized it in its original European context.Thus liberalism became a unifying myth, a kind of ‘‘second nature’’ for theAmericans, fulfilling, in that country at least, its universalizing role. In alater text, Hartz expanded this interpretative model to all societies thatarose from European colonization. Each of them, he maintained, adoptedthe political culture and traditions prevailing in the colonizing nation at themoment 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 wasnever hegemonic. The Reconquista had created an early centralist impulse,incarnated in Castile. By the sixteenth century, following the defeat of theCortes 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 thebest expressions of an early absolutism. Spain and by extension SpanishAmerica, 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 PoliticalThought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955).21 Hartz, ‘‘The Fragmentation of European Culture and Ideology,’’ in The Founding ofNew 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), 3–23.22 Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, Espana, un enigma historico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Sudam-ericana, 1956), 1: 186–87.

600

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

‘‘Because Spain and Portugal had modernized prematurely their politicalinstitutions and renewed their scholastic ideology in the early period ofnational construction and ultramarine expansion of Europe, they avoidedthe implications of the great revolutions and failed to internalize their gen-erative force.’’23 Societies with an Hispanic inheritance would always tendto 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 stagnateswhen 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 theculturalist school, explained ‘‘rather than instituting democratic rule, thefounding fathers of Latin America were chiefly concerned with preservingexisting hierarchies and the authoritarian and undemocratic institutions ofthe past’’;25 ‘‘in contrast to the North American colonies [ . . . ], the LatinAmerican 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-se’s Hartzian perspective. While he agreed with Morse that HispanicAmerica never had a feudal political tradition (although indeed it did havefeudal societies), he argued that the centralist tendencies in local liberalismwere not a legacy of the Habsburgs, but rather of the Bourbons and theirreformist tradition. Thus, Hale modified the culturalist interpretation—theBourbons were far more plausible in the role of precursors to nineteenth-century reformist liberals than were the Hapsburgs—while remaining, nev-ertheless, within its framework. He simply transferred the moment of theorigin from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century while preservingits fundamental premise. Since in every process of appropriation of ideas aselective mechanism was at work, no ‘‘external borrowing’’ could explain,by itself, the region’s failure in instituting democratic governments. AsClaudio 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, 15–16.

601

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

[of ideas] and richness of detail to satisfy the extremes of radical and con-servative opinion in Latin America.’’27 Therefore, the ultimate cause couldbe found in Latin American culture, in particular the local traditions ofcentralism. Yet, Hale’s transposition of the original moment of Mexicanliberalism from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons destabilizes that character-istic mode of intellectual procedure, in so far as it tends to expand theselection process to traditions themselves. Paraphrasing Veliz, we couldnow 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 Bourbon’sinstead of the Hapsburg’s.

The expansion of the idea of selectivity to the traditions reveals the factthat they are not a given, but something constantly renewed. Only some ofthem 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 theconsequence of political history. The very relation between past and pres-ent, or between ‘‘traditions’’ and ‘‘ideas,’’ becomes a problem. Determiningwhich of the two terms is the explanans and which the explanandum is nolonger feasible.

After the publication of Hale’s Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora,Morse revised the position he had taken in his contribution to Hartz’s ed-ited volume on The Founding of New Societies (1964). He re-discovered inthe origins of Latin America the presence of two traditions in permanentconflict: a medieval and Thomist one, represented by Castile; and a Renais-sance and Machiavellian one, incarnated in Aragon. Although the Thomistlegacy 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 opposingtraditions. 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. Machiavelliandoctrine, 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.

602

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

thought.29 Thus Reformist and the Enlightened ideologies in Latin Americawould 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 developmentcan be explained exclusively by external influences, the reformist project ofthe Bourbons needed to be explained in terms of predating traditions. Inthis way, the logic of the genetic method always leads backwards in time toa primitive moment which works as an arkhe or last unfounded foundation.By referring the opposition between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons to aprevious—and more primitive—one between the Castilians and the Ara-gonese, Morse’s re-interpretation rescues the genetic method from the circleof ‘‘traditions’’ and ‘‘influences’’ within which Hale’s proposal seemed tohave trapped it. But, in so doing, he reinforces the essentialist, a-historicalcharacter 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 suchapproaches unstable, however. Appeals to the existence of something likean Hispanic ethos do not change its status as undemonstrable postulate. Inhis Peopling of British North America Bernard Bailyn uses a very apt imageto refer to the idea of a North American culture. Bailyn compares it toSaturn’s rings. When viewed from six hundred thousand million kilometersaway, 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 aninfinite myriad of celestial bodies of very diverse sizes and characteristics.The homogeneous image of the rings is then revealed as only a luminaryillusion emanating from a multitude of frozen rocks and dust. It would notbe even possible to speak about a ‘‘ring,’’ since the space between theserocks and Saturn’s surface contains, as well, infinite small bodies which arenot 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), 47–49.

603

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

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. AsEdmundo O’Gorman points out, that there are richer and poorer countries,more and less democratic governments, etc., are all questions that can bediscussed and analyzed on empirical bases. But claims that prosperity ordemocracy are culturally determined are unverifiable in practice. Suchstatements lead us beyond the realm of history to an ontological field ofeternal essences and a priori ideas, of ‘‘entelequias.’’33 Nothing preventsone from postulating the presence of that kind of entelequias; but historyhas nothing to say about them—and, 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 notto speak of a ‘‘local culture,’’ how not to refer the ideas in Latin Americaback to some supposed cultural substratum which explains the local systemin terms of ‘‘deviations’’ and ‘‘distortions.’’ The ‘‘culturalist school,’’ assuch, has actually been marginal in the field of Latin American studies.It work represents efforts by American academics to overcome prevailingprejudices about Latin American culture and to understand it ‘‘in its ownterms,’’34 attempts which, in last instance, have a-critically replicated theworst stereotypes in the field. Even though the ‘‘culturalist school’’ is mar-ginal among the students in the field, explaining Latin American history ofideas in terms of the peculiarities of the ‘‘local culture’’ does constitute analmost universal practice. Notwithstanding its culturalist origin, Hale’sstatement 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 whichthe tradition of centralized state authority ran deep’’35 appears to be anindisputable truth. This truism is accepted well beyond the confines of theschool and constitutes an essential part of the established ‘‘common sense’’of the profession.

33 Edmundo O‘Gorman, Mexico. El trauma de su historia (Mexico: UNAM, 1977), 69.34 Wiarda, ‘‘Conclusion,’’ in Politics and Social Change, 353.35 Hale, ‘‘Political and Social Ideas in Latin America, 1870–1930,’’ in The CambridgeHistory of Latin America. From c.1870 to 1930, vols. 4–5, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4: 368.

604

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

This situation prevents critical scrutiny of the presumed phenomena ofdeviations of local culture from liberal principles. But explanatory refer-ences to local culture do meet a conceptual demand in the discipline. Theyfill a hole within a given theoretical grid. Latin American ‘‘particularities’’serve as the objective, material substratum in which the abstract forms ofthe ‘‘ideal types’’ come to be impressed and incarnated in actual history.They render concrete the generic categories of the history of ideas, thusmaking 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 Mexicanauthors ‘‘can be spared.’’ Yet as J.G.A. Pocock has insisted, such moves failto rescue the historian of ideas ‘‘from the circumstance that the intellectualconstructs 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 ofinquiry.’’36 Models of thought considered in themselves appear as perfectlyconsistent, logically integrated, and, therefore, a priori definable. Local cul-tures are, by definition, static essences. All ‘‘deviation’’ from the idealtypes—the logos—can 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 counterpartof the ‘‘ideal types’’ of the historiography of political ideas. When critiquingculturalist approaches it is not enough to the eliminate essentialist appealsto tradition and local cultures as the ultimate explanatory principle. It isnecessary to interrogate the epistemological assumptions upon which suchappeals are based, that is, to critically scrutinize the very ‘‘models’’ that inthe local history of ideas are givens. Thus, questioning the cultural stereo-types on which the scheme of ‘‘models’’ and ‘‘deviations’’ hinges leads usbeyond the boundaries of Latin American intellectual history and forces usto confront that which constitutes an inherent limit to the whole traditionof history of ‘‘ideas’’: the ‘‘ideal type.’’ At this point, we also reach theultimate limit of Hale’s revisionism. Although, as we saw, his approachbreaks 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

36 J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11.

605

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

of ‘‘ideas’’ was founded. He simply places these contradictions in the bosomof the liberal tradition itself. That which hitherto had been depicted as anti-liberal Latin American oddities (centralism, authoritarianism, organicism,etc.) now characterizes a liberalism-that-is-not-truly-liberal (‘‘French liber-alism’’) which in turn is opposed to a liberalism-that-is-authentically-liberal(‘‘English liberalism’’). This perspective, however, soon finds itself detachedfrom the conceptual grounds on which it has hitherto rested.

While Hale prepared Mexican Liberalism, Bernard Baylin publishedThe Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). In so doing,he began a process that would debunk Louis Hartz’s model of liberalism.37

For Hartz, the liberal and democratic principles of the American Revolu-tion embodied the true essence of that country’s political culture. In thecourse of analyzing the pamphlet literature of the era, however, Baylin dis-covered a conceptual universe quite different from the liberal one: an olderand longer lasting tradition that he defined as ‘‘civic humanist.’’ Thisperspective became so popular among scholars that civic humanism—redefined by Gordon Wood38 and J. G. A. Pocock39 as ‘‘republicanism’’—soon replaced ‘‘liberalism’’ as the supposedly foundational matrix of theAmerican universe of political ideas.

The rise of this ‘‘republican paradigm’’ among historians of Anglo-American political thought was troublesome for histories of Latin Ameri-can ideas anchored in Hartz’s (dichotomical) perspective. The extended de-bate on ‘‘republicanism’’ generated different definitions of liberalism (andits relationship to republicanism), and resulted successive reformulations ofit, none of which were free from fundamental objections. These complexi-ties could not be assimilated with a Latin American history of ideas whichdepended upon clearly delimited and well defined models. Once they beginto lose their previous transparency, and their definitions are rendered prob-lematic, the scheme of ‘‘models’’ and ‘‘deviations’’ inevitably will crumble.Hence the current paradox that today the only scholars who know, or be-lieve to know, what ‘‘Lockean liberalism’’ is are Latin American historiansof ideas (since otherwise, if they do not assume the definition of it to betransparent and unproblematic, there would be no way that they could

37 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 ofNorth Carolina Press, 1969).39 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the At-lantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

606

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

engage in the discussion of how the ideas of Mora or other Latin Americanliberal 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 conceptualrenovation underway. In Pocock’s words, the point was not to add a newhole in grid of the history of ideas (‘‘classical republicanism’’), but to movefrom 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 inthe past two decades may be characterized as a movement awayfrom emphasizing the history of thought (and even more sharply,‘‘of ideas’’) toward emphasizing something rather different, forwhich ‘‘history of speech’’ or ‘‘history of discourse,’’ although nei-ther of them unproblematic or irreproachable, may be the bestterminology 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 tothe same moulds whose anti-historical premises the changes were intendedto overcome. But current debates regarding ‘‘liberalism’’ and ‘‘republican-ism’’ (or ‘‘negative liberty’’ and ‘‘positive liberty’’) are predicated an erasureof the crucial aspect that distinguishes ‘‘languages’’ from ‘‘ideas.’’ The latterare 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 withinwhich these assumptions remain valid. As a matter of fact, it could not bedetached 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 ofJohn 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 UniversityPress, 1991), 1–2.

607

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

present is not only ‘‘materially’’ impossible; it is conceptually absurd. Suchproposals involve the removal of that language from the categories uponwhich it was erected and turning it into an ‘‘ideal type,’’ that is, reducing itto 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 tocontemporary political philosophy.

As a matter of fact, there is more to it than that. The so-called ‘‘newintellectual history’’ actually reveals a much more complex and multilayereduniverse of symbolic reality in which the plane of ideas is only the mostsuperficial one. It would thereby open the field for the definition of newproblems and objects and would resituate scholarship on a radically newterrain. This would have critical implications for research in and on LatinAmerica. The remaining section of this essay considers how the change infocus from ‘‘ideas’’ to ‘‘languages’’ can help to reformulate our views ofLatin American politico-intellectual history. I will discuss the consequencesof emphasizing the pragmatic dimension of language, a central concern ofthe ‘‘Cambridge school,’’ for three related issues. First, the question of thecontinuity of colonial heritage in Latin America and the persistence of tradi-tionalist, or organicist, patterns of thought. Second, the chronic search forthe peculiarities of ideas in Latin American. Third, why analyze the work ofauthors who allegedly made no contribution to the ‘‘universal’’ history ofthought? Certainly the work of authors like the Argentinean Esteban Echev-errıa or the Mexican Jose Luis Marıa Mora, to mention just two names,cannot be placed on the same level of a Hegel or a Marx, or approachedwith the same kind of hermeneutic tools. In short, how should objects oflittle intellectual density be rendered historically relevant.

LATIN AMERICAN INTELLECTUALHISTORY 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 animage of transhistorical stability. If only two or three basic systems ofthought (‘‘ideal types’’) exist, we assume that transformations in the realmof ‘‘ideas’’ are long-term processes. An ‘‘organicist’’ culture, presuming thatsuch a thing really existed, does not become ‘‘individualistic’’ suddenly. Thebreaking of colonial ties represented a watershed in Latin American history;

608

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

it marked not only a crucial political transformation but also a fundamentalshift on the level of discourses. Yet ‘‘ideas’’ do not record the changes thatoccurred in the conditions of their enunciation, since these changes do notnecessarily 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 changesof political languages are produced. In analyzing the convocation of theCourts in Cadiz, which would result in 1812 in the creation of a liberalconstitution for the entire Spanish Empire, Guerra states that, ‘‘as Tocque-ville noted in connection with an identical proposal made by Lomenie deBrienne in 1788, by turning the constitution into a matter of debate, wealready pass from the restoration of fundamental laws to modern politics,to the kingdom of opinion.’’42 Guerra suggests that the best expression ofthis change was the electoral triumph of the liberal party headed by ManuelQuintana. However, what Tocqueville stated was the opposite. It was notat all unthinkable that elections were won by historical constitutionalist oreven the absolutist factions; yet, this would have not changed the fact that,from the moment that the constitution of the kingdom had become a matterof public debate, the Ancient Regime ended. It is this very fact, and not theposterior triumph of the liberal party that altered political languages, sinceit displaced the very terrain of the political debate.

Guerra’s 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 modernpolitics, 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 changesin the questions raised that determines the transposition of the conceptualcoordinates 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 problemsthey faced was reconfigured over time. Such transformations in politicallanguages are objective events which took place independently of the agentsawareness of them. This explains a first paradox: that the ideas of the sub-ject may stay unmodified, yet, political languages radically change. Theyare ultimately expressive of the broader historical changes that determine

42 Guerra, ‘‘La polıtica moderna en el mundo hispanico: apuntes para unos anos cruciales(1808–1809),’’ in Las formas y las polıticas del dominio agrario. Homenaje a FrancoisChevalier, eds. Ricardo Avila Palafox, Carlos Martınez Assad, and Jean Meyer (Guadala-jara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1992), 178.

609

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

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 inLatin America after independence would not be erected on the basis of thesubject’s will but on that of justice, which was the principle that articulatedthe societies of the old regime. Justice here meant the preservation of thenatural order, which was conceived as the incarnation of the divine designof 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 whicheach one belonged. The enthusiastic embracement by the pueblos of thecause of independence could thus be explained by the fact that the rupturewith 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 arepublic and make manifest their wills as such, but instead to preserve anatural order they perceived as under threat by the centralizing policies ofthe 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 thatprinciple rested. The idea of justice was, in fact, undetachable from that ofsanction. 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 matterbloomed. Each community interpreted what were its particular rights andduties 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, thevery concept of justice that for three centuries had been the basis for a socialorder and was considered as natural, eternal, and intangible, turned intothe center of a properly political antagonism. 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 polıtica deAmerica Latina, Siglo XIX (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 2007); Juan Ortiz Escamillaand Jose Antonio Serrano Ortega, eds., Ayuntamientos y liberalismo gaditano en Mexico(Zamora, Michoacan: El Colegio de Michoacan / Universidad Verzcruzana, 2007); andSarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa,Peru 1780–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

610

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

question of what was just or unjust would, it itself, now become a matterof 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 longerso, or one actually incompatible with it. Justice indicated an objectiveorder; it was not, by definition, a matter of opinion and could not becomeso with destroying the very concept. This illustrates a second paradox: hownew categories that contradicted preexisting vocabularies could, however,emerge out of conceptual torsions produced in the interior of those verylanguages whose logic those categories, at the same time, dislocated. Thisdoes not express a merely local, Latin American oddity, but is an inherentfeature of the kind of conceptual transformation we are analyzing. And thisleads to my second point, the issue of the peculiar features of ideas in LatinAmerica.

Ultimately, beyond the differences regarding the contents of their nar-ratives, the goal of revisionist enterprise is actually the same as that of thehistory 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’’ inmanners 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’’) andthe universal principles of liberalism was a kind of compromise ideologythat Jose Luis Romero termed ‘‘liberal-conservative.’’44 This perspectivesynthesizes what Roberto Schwarz called, in a fortunate expression, theproblem of misplaced 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 contradictorymixture of ‘‘conservatism’’ and ‘‘liberalism’’ expressed in Romero’s 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,’’ whateverthat 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 Jose Luis Romero, Las ideas polıticas en Argentina (Buenos Aires: FCE, 1975).45 See Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London and NewYork: Verso, 1992); and Elıas Palti, ‘‘The Problem of ‘Misplaced Ideas’ Revisited. Beyondthe History of Ideas,’’ JHI 67 (2006): 149–79.

611

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

hardly find a way to describe the postulated ‘‘idiosyncrasies’’ with ‘‘non-European categories.’’ We meet here the basic contradiction in the historyof ‘‘ideas’’: it generates an ‘‘anxiety’’ for peculiarity which it can never sat-isfy. These very approaches prevent it: if considered from the perspective ofits ideological content, every system of thought necessarily falls within alimited range of alternatives, none of which can aspire to be exclusive toLatin America. Yet, within the framework of these approaches, and insofaras, according to the general consensus, we cannot say that Latin Americanthinkers have made any contribution to the ‘‘universal’’ history of ideas,the only thing which may justify the study of Latin American ideas andmake 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 postulatea goal which is unattainable within its framework undermines the veryfoundations 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 bythe theoretical transformations that have occurred in the discipline. Theturn towards pragmatic dimensions of language involves a redefinition ofanalytical unit from ‘‘ideas’’ to ‘‘texts’’ considered as discursive events.While the meaning of ideas is not contingent on the conditions of theirutterance, 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 givendiscourse, its peculiarities, is not to be found on the level of its contents buton 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 withan implicit essentialist premise). We meet here the core of the ‘‘revolution,’’in Pocock’s words, that gave rise to the emergence of the so-called ‘‘newintellectual history,’’ and which also lies behind the ‘‘revisionist’’ currentsin 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 crudelyempirical reality of social and political practices which are previous andindependent from the conceptual frameworks within which they unfold,

612

Palti ✦ Intellectual History in Latin America

and, on the other hand, a universe of ideas autonomously generated whichonly subsequently are incarnated in actual practices are now highly prob-lematic. Considered as social facts, texts cross through the borders dividingideas and realities: as such, discourses are as real as other forms of politicalpractice, inherent (material) factors of them, and, therefore, constitutiveelements of their contexts.

Returning to Latin American intellectual history, even though it is cer-tainly true that local thinking is marginal in Western culture, consideredfrom the view of the public uses of discourses, the dynamics of languagesin Latin America are no less complex than in any other region. Their studyrequires sophisticated and elaborated theoretical frameworks similar thoseused to analyze discourses in Germany or France. Such studies, in turn, mayeventually raise epistemological problems whose relevance moves beyondlocal frameworks. Like that of any other local cases, they may serve to testour 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 pathology—such as atraditionalist culture—or a kind of regrettable misunderstanding by localthinkers 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 ofmodern political discourse. And it helps us, in turn, to reveal the aporiasand dilemmas that the conception of a post-traditional political order—already deprived, therefore, of any transcendental guarantee—raises.

At this point, I have come full circle. Making sense of the study ofintellectual history in Latin America today demands the critical undermin-ing and dislocation of that very scheme of ‘‘models’’ and ‘‘deviations’’which hitherto seemed to be the only one which rendered it relevant. Thenew approaches to politico-intellectual history which originally triggeredthe emergence of revisionism in the region today point to beyond its bound-aries. They push the discipline to confront that which hitherto appeared asits ultimate limit, its unthought, and unthinkable, premise: the assumptionof 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 ideaof ‘‘sovereignty’’ necessarily entailed that of ‘‘subjects.’’ The fact that sovereigns are alsotheir own subjects seemed to them an insurmountable contradiction, one that was at thesame time foundational and destructive to modern politics.

613

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2009

of Western intellectual tradition, the ‘‘ideal types.’’47 The new politico-intellectual history thus relocates studies in the field in Latin America. Itplaces them on a completely new terrain and may eventually cast light onfundamental aspects of the modern republican experience at large.

Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.

47 See Elıas Palti, ‘‘On the Thesis of the Essential Contestability of Concepts, and LatinAmerican Intellectual History,’’ Re-Descriptions 9 (2005): 113–34.

614