On the “Ideological Origins” of the Revolutions of Independence

Abstract

Abstract The anecdote is probably fake; nevertheless, it illustrates the thinkers’ normative pretension regarding reality, their anxiety, behind their interest of comprehending historical reality, to dictate how it should have been. In his criticism of God’s realization, Alphonse would be probably thinking of the “epicycles”; that is, the series of weird movements that, according to the Ptolemaic astronomy on which he based, planets have to do to match the observational data regarding their trajectory in their revolution around the Earth (which in that astronomical system was supposed to be in the center of the universe). In the astronomer-king’s mind, there was no room to suspect that perhaps what was wrong was not the design of the universe, or that incongruence was not in it but in his own theory, which was inadequate to the kind of phenomena he intended to observe. And, again, the same can be said of the historians of ideas, including the revisionists. They could not consider the possibility that the kind of pathologies they observed in Latin American history were not really in it, but were in their own approaches to it, which were inadequate to the kind of phenomena they intended to analyze. More precisely, in the conceptual tools with which they constructed their objects, the binary grid (tradition–modernity, or, eventually, a correlate of it) according to which they intended to render these objects meaningful and within which they were thus forced to make them fit, no matter how forcefully they had to push to get them there. This suspicion will lead us, again, to shift our sight from the sky they contemplated to the ground on which their views stood, to reconstruct the kind of intellectual operations behind the ways they created their objects and made sense of them. And, eventually, to explore alternative perspectives that depart from these teleological frameworks. Chapter 5 is an analysis of the historiographical debates around a crucial event in Latin American history: the revolutions of independence, and, more specifically, the topic of their “ideological foundations.” In the analysis of the early work of Tulio Halperin Donghi provides an alternative model for an approach to the period from the decline of the Spanish imperial system and independence that departs from the topic of “influences” and focus on the ways in which ideas become re-articulated in the function of the changing contexts. As the chapter shows, Halperin Donghi’s perspective is much more sensitive to the crucial challenge that the comprehension of complex ideological processes, like that here at stake, poses; more particularly, the paradox that the issue of the “ideological origins” of independence raises: how the very intellectual formations that originally served as an ideological sustentation of the absolutist régime and the imperial system successively twisted finally to serve as the intellectual foundation for a revolutionary discourse.