Eugenio Espejo, la Ilustración у las élites

Abstract

Research on the Enlightenment in colonial Spanish America has hitherto concentrated on the History of Ideas. However, the case of Eugenio Espejo in the district of the Audiencia of Quito offers an important insight into the dimension of Hispanic American Enlightenment that until now has only rarely been addressed. The mestizo Espejo, who came from a modest background, defended the superiority of the values of individual knowledge and achievement against collective hereditary status. By doing so he broke up the social vacuum which characterized the enlightened body of thought of the highest political, cultural and representatives of the society of Quito. The concept of a socially open elite defined by function or capacity, that can be derived from Espejo's thoughts, inevitably had to be in conflict with the idea of a hierarchic, estate-based socio-political order that dominated the value system of the upper stratum of the city of Quito until the end of the colonial period.