Beyond the “History of Ideas”:

The Issue of the “Ideological Origins of the

Revolutions of Independence” Revisited

Elı́as Palti

“It is less instructive to search for alleged origins—European or

otherwise—than to focus on the global conditions and interactions
through which the modern world emerged.”
—Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History?

The issue of the “ideological origins of the revolutions of independence”

has recently returned as a central topic in Latin American historiography.1
The standard view, whose origin can be traced back to the period of the
wars of independence, affirms the existence of an intimate relation between
the revolutionary outburst and the arrival of the ideas of the Enlightenment,
coming mainly from France. According to this view, Rousseau’s concept of
the social contract provided the basis upon which the entire revolutionary
discourse stood.
This standard view implies, in turn, another assumption: that local
societies, educated in the Catholic milieu of the Spanish tradition, were not

1
For a detailed state of the art on the different views of the revolutions of independence
in Latin America from the perspective of conceptual history, see Elı́as Palti, “¿De la tradi-
ción a la modernidad? Revisionismo e historia polı́tico-conceptual de las revoluciones de
Independencia,” in Independencia y revolución: Pasado, presente y futuro, coord. Gus-
tavo Leyva et al. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica / Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana, 2010), 174–90.

Copyright  by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 79, Number 1 (January 2018)

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ready for independence. Hence, in this context, only the intervention of an

external factor could explain the end of the colonial system and the forma-
tion of new nations founded on modern, republican systems of government.
We find here the fundamental antinomy that has structured the interpreta-
tions of the revolutions of independence in Latin America: the postulate of
a contradiction between liberal ideas that were imported from abroad and
local culture and traditions that were reluctant to accept those liberal ideas.
As Charles Hale states in his contribution to the Cambridge History of
Latin America, these ideas “were applied in an environment which was
resistant and hostile.”2 This allegedly sealed a permanent maladjustment
that determined the entire history of Latin American political and intellec-
tual history.
On this model, the American Revolution serves as counterpoint to the
Latin American revolutions: the revolutions in the two regions were prem-
ised on two opposite principles. While the former was founded on a liberal
ideology, giving rise to an individualistic, democratic concept of society and
politics, the latter remained tied to an organicist view that precluded the
affirmation of modern, democratic systems of government. In short, mod-
ern, liberal ideas are “misplaced ideas” in the Latin American context.3
This opposition results in an essentialist perspective, in which North
America and Latin America appear as expressions of two transhistorical
essences in mutual opposition—the incarnations of two eternal or quasi-
eternal principles. The entire historical development of these two regions
would be determined by their origins, when the basic matrix of their politi-
cal cultures was supposedly established. And no subsequent event could
change it; they only reproduce that inner nature of which they are an outer
expression.
In the American academy, this view was established by the author of
The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Louis Hartz.4 In the prologue
to his edited collection The Founding of New Nations (1964), Hartz
affirms the thesis that the nations that emerged from the expansion of
Europe fixed their political culture according to the pattern that prevailed

2
Charles Hale, “Political and Social Ideas in Latin America, 1879–1930,” in The Cam-
bridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989), 368.
3
See Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso,
1992); and Palti, “The Problem of ‘Misplaced Ideas’ Revisited: Beyond the History of
Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 1 (2006) 149–79.
4
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Com-
pany, 1955).

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 Palti ✦ Beyond the “History of Ideas”

in the metropolis at the time of the conquest.5 Thus, while North America
inherited from England a modern, bourgeois, liberal pattern of thinking,
Latin America retained the medieval, feudal, organicist tradition that pre-
vailed in fifteenth-century Spain.6
In great measure, the affirmation of that view was conditioned by the
wave of military coups that were spreading in the region in the sixties and
seventies, when these views were elaborated. Besides, that dichotomy fit a
well-established interpretive framework in the field, whose basic expression
was provided by Isaiah Berlin’s opposition between “negative liberty” and
“positive liberty” (itself a reformulation of Benjamin Constant’s distinction
between the “liberty of the moderns” and the “liberty of the ancients”).7
The paradox here is that, at that very moment, the very interpretation of
the ideological origins of the American Revolution, which associated them
with the liberal creed, had already begun to become undermined by the
precursor work of Bernard Bailyn (which would be further elaborated by
Gordon Wood and John Pocock, among others). According to Bailyn, the
discourse of the American revolutionaries was founded upon a much older
ideological tradition that he called “civic humanism,” and subsequently
was redefined by the other authors in terms of “classical republicanism.”8
Meanwhile, in tune with that new perspective, a more recent interpre-
tation of the issue of the ideological origins of Latin American indepen-
dence emerged, uniting its organicist vein with the republican concept,9
which would have deep roots in the Spanish political tradition.10 It could
be traced back to the neo-scholastic thinking of the seventeenth century,
when the concept of a social pact, that revolutionaries supposedly adopted
to justify their separation from Spain, was originally formulated.11

5
Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin
America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harvest / HBJ, 1964).
6
Richard Morse was in charge of the piece dedicated to Latin America in the book edited
by Hartz [Morse, “The Heritage of Latin America,” in Hartz, The Founding of New
Societies, 123–77].
7
See Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the
University of Oxford on 31 October 1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958); Benjamin
Constant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
8
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Rev-
olution (New York: Random House, 1993); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975).
9
See, for example, Natalio Botana, La tradición republicana (Buenos Aires: Sudameri-
cana, 1984).
10
For an antecedent of this interpretation, see Guillermo Furlong, Nacimiento y desar-
rollo de la filosofı́a en el Rı́o de la Plata 1536–1810 (Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1962).
11
A different version of this view was provided by Ricardo Levene, who sought the local

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2018

In effect, the so-called second generation of neo-scholastics, whose

main representative was the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), elabo-
rated on the idea that sovereignty did not come to the king directly from
God, but rather through the intercession of the people, who conferred it on
the monarch. Thus, by postulating that the idea of a social contract that the
revolutionaries invoked to justify breaking colonial ties with Spain was not
taken from Rousseau or the Enlightenment, this interpretation challenged
the standard view but preserved the basic antinomy on which that view
rested.
The shift in the dispute from an opposition between the Enlightenment
and neo-scholasticism to an opposition between liberalism and republican-
ism is, in fact, merely a transposition of the terms within the same interpre-
tive scheme. The paradox, in this case, is that the reformulation of the
antimony resorts to the findings of those very authors who intended to
show that what would have happened in Latin America would likewise
apply to the American Revolution—that the presumed ideological premises
were not the liberal ideas but rather the republican ideas.
Lastly, these reinterpretations miss the crucial aspect: rather than
reformulating the terms of the antinomy, the new views call into question
that very opposition. Even more radically, the inconsistency reveals that,
thus posed, the whole discussion about the issue is misleading and inevita-
bly leads to absurd conclusions. As a matter of fact, there is no way to
establish whether the idea of the social contract that the revolutionaries
endorsed was taken from the Enlightenment or from neo-scholasticism,
whether it had liberal or republican premises. As Daniel T. Rogers shows,
as the debate escalated, the definitions of the very concepts at stake, like
those of liberalism and republicanism, became inconsistent and contradic-
tory.12 And, more importantly, even if it were possible to establish this,
it would be absolutely irrelevant to the comprehension of revolutionary
discourse.
This is what the work of the Argentinean historian Tulio Halperin
Donghi reveals. In Tradición politica española e ideologı́a revolucionaria de
Mayo (1961), he reformulated the whole question. According to Halperin
Donghi, the point is not to establish the origins of these motifs and ideas,
but rather to determine what the revolutionaries at the end of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth century did with them—to

roots of the independence movements in Spanish juridical tradition [Ricardo Levene, Las
Indias no eran colonias (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1973)].
12
Daniel T. Rogers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American
History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11–38.

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 Palti ✦ Beyond the “History of Ideas”

understand how those motifs or ideas then became rearranged and re-
signified, giving rise to the peculiar conceptual universe within which the
revolutions took place. It is clear that these motifs and ideas then served
new purposes and were addressed to specific problems and questions that
were absolutely different from those to which they had been addressed in
their origins. At that point, even though the ideas hadn’t changed, the logic
of their articulation had, giving rise to new ideological constellations: “If,
as we have seen, the originality of any thinking does not reside in each of
the ideas that is coordinated in it, seeking the source of each one of them
seems to be the least fruitful (as well as the least sure) method to study the
history of thought.”13
The history of ideas is thus radically incapable of understanding what
changed at this moment, since the kind of conceptual rupture produced by
the emergence of a revolutionary discourse cannot be perceived on the level
of the ideas that it gathered but in the ways in which it articulated them.
Nor can these transformations be defined in terms of variations of models
without smoothing over all the intricacies and problematic edges intrinsic
to these kinds of complex historical–conceptual processes. And it is this
(the fact of missing how ideas became resignfied in the given specific con-
text) that explains why, beyond the differences among its participants, this
entire debate has remained locked within the frameworks of the antinomies
of the tradition of the “history of ideas,” such as individualism and organi-
cism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, rationalism and irrationalism,
modernity and tradition, etc. These thus appear as kinds of eternal sub-
stances that cross through the whole of Western intellectual history. And
all conceptual formations could be classified according to this binary grid.
Every form of thinking necessarily will fall on one or the other side of the
antinomy (or, eventually, will appear as an inconsistent mixture of the two
terms).
The point is that within the frameworks of this dichotomic grid, the
result of historical research will always be predictable. We will find nothing
that we do not know beforehand, except empirical specifications—how
well or how badly a given reality adjusted to a given model, but this has no
effect on the models themselves. Historical events here appear as merely
factual, external circumstances. They do not play any role in the definition
of the models, which can be perfectly established a priori, independent of
those circumstances. In this fashion, the debate on the topic inevitably

13
Tulio Halperin Donghi, Tradición polı́tica española e ideologı́a revolucionaria de mayo
(Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1985), 17 (hereafter cited in text).

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results in anachronistic transpositions, the series of “mythologies” that, as

Quentin Skinner and others have denounced, are intrinsic to the history of
ideas.14 In the following pages I intend to analyze how, in the classic work
quoted above, Halperin Donghi approached the issue of the “ideological
origins” of the revolutions of independence in Latin America and reframed
that issue within a perspective far removed from the traditional frameworks
of the “history of ideas,” thus providing the basis for what we can call a
“new conceptual history” of Latin American independence. It breaks with
the scheme of “models” and “deviation” to recreate the historical–conceptual
process, highlighting the intricacies that are proper to them.
In effect, for Halperin Donghi, tracing the origin of the ideas and
motifs that the revolutionary discourse gathered is irrelevant. The point is
to understand how they were re-signified once they became inscribed into
new discursive fields. Ultimately, the standard view, under its different ver-
sions, misses the crucial point: how the very traditional ideas would eventu-
ally serve as a basis to a revolution that radically reconfigured local politics.
At that moment, Latin American societies mutated, facing dilemmas and
problems that had been completely unknown. And this reconfigured the
terms of the political debate, thanks to which even very old ideas gained a
completely different meaning.
Yet, the new perspective provided by Halperin Donghi does not simply
shift our focus from (past) origins to (present) connections, but rather it
transcends that very opposition and recreates historical–conceptual proc-
esses. Halperin Donghi was led, in turn, to the definition of the basic para-
dox that the revolutionary discourse raised and he intended to unravel: that
the very revolutionary vocation for a radical rupture with the past had its
roots in the very past with which it wanted so violently to break. As he
shows, “the ideas in whose name the pre-revolutionary reality was con-
demned were born out of that same reality” (9). But, unlike the standard
view, this corroboration no longer results in the assumption of a lineal con-
tinuity between the pre- and the post-revolutionary ideas. In that perspec-
tive, Latin America appears as a kind of eternal substance, a land with no
history, perpetually attached to its feudal, medieval roots, opposed to
another eternal essence called North America, obliterating the series of con-
ceptual torsions that these ideas underwent since their origin in order to
produce that paradoxical result—a revolution that demolished a three-
centennial political regime and deeply transformed local societies. As he

14
Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and
Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53.

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 Palti ✦ Beyond the “History of Ideas”

affirms: “[By looking for the origins of ideas, these interpretations] run the
risk of underlining the affinity between the world of revolutionary ideas
and that existing before revolution, overlooking a fact which is much more
essential than that very affinity: that—as we already have remarked—those
ideas now structured a revolutionary ideology, an ideological tool to deny
and condemn the past” (12).
According to Halperin Donghi, this is precisely the point at stake, that
which a conceptual history of the revolutions of independence should be
aimed at recreating: the series of semantic displacements through which
traditional ideas ended up giving rise to a revolutionary ideology that was
alien to (and indeed contradicted) the conceptual frameworks within which
those ideas were initially conceived. His book thus serves as a model for
approaching the political–conceptual process that led to the revolutions of
independence in Latin America as what we can call, taking an expression
from Hans Blumenberg, a “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte).15

IDEOLOGICAL CHANGE AND THE RECONFIGURATION

OF THE DISCURSIVE FIELD

For Halperin Donghi, the line of interpretation emphasizing the traditional

roots of the idea of the social contract endorsed by the revolutionaries made
a fundamental contribution insofar as it allowed us to assume a critical
distance from the self-interpretation of its agents, who perceived the
moment of the revolution as a kind of virginal dawn of liberty. This self-
perception, he thinks, cannot be taken at face value but it deserves exami-
nation. As he affirms, the anxiety to radically break with the past actually
had its roots in the same past with which these agents desired to break.
The inability of the revolutionary discourse to come to terms with its own
conditions of possibility is, to him, symptomatic.
Yet, this critical view of the self-perceptions of the agents, in turn,
misses a critical point: how those traditional ideas were reformulated
through this process, assuming a completely different meaning from the
established one. As a matter of fact, the conceptual ground on which the
neo-scholastic idea of the social contract was founded was very different

15
See Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1987), 123. In that book, Blumenberg describes the series of torsions that Aris-
totle’s physics and its fundamental concepts underwent as a result of the efforts to save
it from the anomalies that it had presented in the centuries immediately preceding the
astronomical revolution initiated by Copernicus.

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from that of the Enlightenment. Although the idea endured, the language
in which it was articulated had already mutated.
In the first place, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought, it was
impossible to conceive of the community as self-constituting. The idea that
a political community could exist at the margins of any center of power,
around which it could coalesce and in whose terms it could define itself,
was simply absurd. As Francisco Suárez has stated, “a body without a head
is mutilated and monstrous.”16 The constitution of a political community
necessarily entailed relations of authority and obedience.17 Before the insti-
tution of a political power, we have merely a plurality of dispersed individu-
als, not a community, properly speaking. As Halperin Donghi remarks,
“[For Suárez] the multitude can be considered from two different points of
view: as a mere aggregation, with no order or physical and moral union, or
as a political body. Now—and we find here again a postulate derived from
an authoritarian concept of political relationships—, the political body
demands, as one of its essential conditions, the presence of the political
power” (33).
Royal authority was thought to belong to the realm of natural right,
the need for it inscribed in nature itself. Political power and the community
were simultaneously constituted—“it is only thanks to the king that the
political body exists” (53)—and the latter could not be detached from the
former. Thus, even though it is certainly true that the revolutionaries took
the idea of the social pact from the neo-scholastics, it would be absurd to
see that postulate as a precursor idea of revolution. We must keep in mind
that neo-scholastic thinking, even though it made reference to the idea of
the legitimacy of tyrannicide, “was a discourse of power” (37), not of revo-
lution.
In addition, there is a second fundamental difference between the neo-
scholastic and the Enlightenment concepts of the social contract. Although
both imposed limitations on power, the limitations that the former postu-
lated were not associated with the idea that the monarch should follow or
obey popular will. Popular will had no normative force in the politics of
the ancien régime (the fact that people want something does not make it
right or just; justice was considered to be a set of objective norms, estab-
lished by God himself and imprinted in the very nature of things). Royal
power was limited only by the nature of the ends it pursued. The social

16
Francisco Suárez, De Legibus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas,
1971), book I, chap. 8, paragraphs 8–9.
17
See Palti, An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth
Century to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), chap. 1.

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 Palti ✦ Beyond the “History of Ideas”

contract at that time functioned as a reminder that power should be exer-

cised by the monarch on behalf of the welfare of the community and not
on behalf of his own welfare. Yet we find here the point of the first torsion
of this traditional discourse, which will eventually lead to revolutionary
discourse. It is here that the first conceptual displacement in this history of
effects is produced.

THE FIRST CONCEPTUAL DISPLACEMENT:

THE SECULARIZATION OF THE ENDS

To Halperin Donghi, the figure of Juan de Solórzano (1575–1655) exempli-

fies the first in the series of torsions that occurred within traditional political
discourse throughout the centuries of the colonial regime. As he writes,
“Solórzano participates in another fundamental feature of Spanish political
thinking in the era of the Baroque: the exalted and never resolved contra-
diction between ideals and historical-political reality” (55).
The neo-scholastic thinking of the “second generation” must be
inscribed within the context of the disintegration of the universalist ideals
of the old empires (which Philip II had seemed to briefly incarnate), which
resulted in a fundamental reconfiguration of the political discourse of the
medieval Christian tradition (let us take note of the fact that Halperin Don-
ghi does not say that Solórzano affirmed this, but he expresses an objective
change in the conditions in which political discourse took place). At this
point, the ends with which the concept of the social contract had hitherto
been associated were reinterpreted in increasingly secular terms; they were
no longer transcendent (the realization of the kingdom of God on Earth)
but profane: “the common wealth was now defined as the felicitas civitatis
as well as that of the citizens as such” (36).
It would be inaccurate to see the spread of Enlightenment ideas in the
eighteenth century as a contestation of the absolutist concept of power, or
in contradiction with the principles of the Catholic monarchy. Rather, it
served to reinforce the authoritarian character of it. With the Enlighten-
ment, the kind of knowledge associated with the exercise of power lost the
self-evident nature that the traditional idea of justice possessed, thus more
radically escaping the doxological field (popular opinion).18 Yet, it indeed

18
On this topic, see Palti, “El absolutismo monárquico y la génesis de las ‘soberanı́a
nacional,’ ” in Conceitos e linguagens: Construções identitárias, org. Márcia Naxara and
Virginia Camilotti (São Paulo: Intermeios, 2014), 33–50.

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produced a more fundamental departure of the seventeenth-century ratio-

nalism by imbuing political discourse with a more marked empiricism: “the
essential change resided in the revalorization of the data of experience”
(45). And, although this first redefinition was perfectly suited to the abso-
lutist ideal (actually it reinforced its absolutist nature), eventually it would
pave the way to a second twist in the traditional political discourse that
would bring about far-reaching political consequences.

THE SECOND CONCEPTUAL DISPLACEMENT:

DETACHING THE NATION FROM THE STATE

As we have seen, the break from the universalist ideal of the old empires
did not affect the concept that the limitations the social contract imposed
on political authority were not related to the origins of this authority in the
people, but to the ends to which political power was conferred, which
became increasingly secularized. In Spain this process accompanied, in turn,
a profound impression of the rapid decline of the empire. At this juncture,
there seemed to be an abyss between those ends and actual reality, the roots
of which were then sought in the past. This fact already entailed a funda-
mental change in how society and power were conceived, since it implied
the emergence of the concept of a new entity: the nation, which then
became distinguished from the monarchical state and became an entity unto
itself.
This phenomenon resulted from a historical–conceptual displacement
that then was taking place. In the eighteenth century, Spaniards started to
think of (ministerial) despotism as the fundamental cause of the decline
of the empire. It was held responsible for the abandonment of the king-
dom’s “traditional constitution.” This view accompanied, in turn, the de-
velopment of the school of “historical constitutionalism.” The origin of
this school is usually given as Melchor Gaspar de Jovellanos’s inaugural
discourse at the Spanish Academy of History in 1778. The school’s main
goal was to explore the national past in search of the traditional Spanish
constitution that despotism allegedly had dislocated and this school
intended to recover. This gave rise to a new type of treatise, organized
around a new object of inquiry: the nation and its past, which thus made
itself present on the level of political discourse. Thereby the terms of the
entire debate were rearticulated. As Halperin Donghi remarks, from then
on, “the figure of the King was no longer identified with the entire nation;
the latter was now placed on a higher and broader plane” (97).

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 Palti ✦ Beyond the “History of Ideas”

We see here the second displacement in traditional political discourse.

At this moment, the nation gained a substantive presence of its own. It
found the means for its articulation at the margins of political power. And
this broke the logic of the absolutist state. As Halperin Donghi describes,
“Fatherland and nation are notions that represent a radical innovation in
traditional political thinking, insofar as they are seen, in an increasingly
emphasized fashion, as entities able to subsist at the margins of the state’s
organizations” (100).
The first displacement in traditional political discourse that Halperin
Donghi traces, as we saw, had to do with the redefinition of the ends of
political power, which became increasingly interpreted in secular terms.
The second torsion was even more radical, since it involved the emergence
in the political arena of a new subject: the nation, which possessed a will of
its own and, presumably, the power to impose it even against the will and
action of the political authority. The nation was now assumed to pre-exist
the monarchy and, as a consequence, to eventually subsist after its fall.
Lastly, it amounted to erect two sovereignties on the same level of reality:
monarchical and national sovereignty. At that point, if the revolution was
not necessarily fated to be produced, the horizon in which it became even-
tually conceivable had been opened.
This new concept of the nation, which introduced a heterogeneous ele-
ment within the frameworks of absolutist political discourse, resulted, in
turn, from the efforts of local oligarchies to control the advance of state
intervention, especially in local finances and the administration of justice
(the two faculties traditionally reserved to the local authorities).19 In the
context of this struggle, local oligarchies invoked the people and the will of
the people, on whose behalf they claimed to speak. This process was similar
to that of seventeenth-century England as described by Edmund Morgan in
his classic work The Invention of the People.20 Analogously, we can point
to “the invention of the people” or “the invention of the nation,” in the
Spanish empire, entities which then became detached from political power
and, more importantly, found their own organs of expression at the mar-
gins of the state apparatus.
The paradox here is that the absolutist state also invoked “the people,”
or even “the nation,” in order to justify its own actions against local oligar-
chies. In effect, public officials invoked “the nation” in claims that they

See Palti, An Archaeology of the Political, chap. 3.

19

Edmund Morgan, The Invention of the People: The Right of Popular Sovereignty in
20

England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 49–50.

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meant to liberate it from oppressive local oligarchies. Eventually, this

nation, now detached from the state apparatus and politicized by the very
action of the state, would come to confront that same state and to declare
it artificial. Opposed to the state was now a new entity: the nation, which
would be posited as the only “natural” one.

THE THIRD CONCEPTUAL DISPLACEMENT:

THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONSTITUENT POWER

The second half of the eighteenth century thus witnessed a general trend of
exploring the national past in search of the “traditional constitution” from
which despotism had allegedly departed. Certainly, historical constitution-
alism did not simply recover past institutions; at this moment, the (republi-
can) national tradition was (re)invented. More importantly, this fact
became evident for its agents and speakers as soon as the debate around the
“traditional constitution” exploded. We cross here a further threshold, a
third step in this history of effects.
According to Halperin Donghi, a further displacement within tradi-
tional thinking would occur as a result of the royal vacancy after the Abdi-
cations of Bayonne (which were forced by Napoleon, who then designated
his own brother the governor of Spain, triggering the so-called Guerra de
Independencia, a general uprising by the local population). At that juncture,
it was convoked to the Cortes at Cádiz (the Cortes had not been convoked
since the sixteenth century), whose first measure was to assume the sover-
eignty left vacant after the abdications. This meant the institution of a com-
pletely new figure: a constituent power. This new power no longer had
anything to do with the traditional Cortes, other than sharing its name.
The congressmen now assumed the representation of the nation, on
behalf of which they spoke and from which their prerogatives were sup-
posed to emanate. The mission of the Cortes was to restore the traditional
constitution of the nation. Yet it soon became clear that there was no agree-
ment on what that traditional constitution was. Every party had a very
different view. In any case, there was no doubt on one point: whether they
had to create a new constitution or restore the traditional one, or, in the
latter case, determine what that traditional constitution was, it was the
Cortes that would have to decide. Only they were entitled to do so. And
this represented a fundamental political–conceptual innovation.
The very formation of the Cortes at Cádiz meant a break with the
premises on which the ancien régime was based. The constituent power was

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instituted in the name of past traditions but was heterogeneous with the
traditional order. As François-Xavier Guerra remarked, quoting Tocque-
ville (who, in turn, took on an expression by Loménie de Brienne, in refer-
ence to the Estates General): from the very moment the constitution of the
nation became a matter of controversy, the ancien régime had crumbled.21
We find here a fundamental paradox: Spaniards looked back to the national
past only to find in it the power to cancel that past (that is, the Cortes,
which was entitled to create a new constitution, should it so wish). Yet here
we also meet the limit point of the so-called Spanish first liberalism.

THE FOURTH CONCEPTUAL DISPLACEMENT:

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NATION
ITSELF AS A PROBLEM

The constituent power that emerged at Cadiz actually had a limited goal.
The mission of the Cortes was to provide a constitution in order to institute
a new political regime. In fact, it did not eliminate the monarchical system,
but transformed it into a constitutional monarchy. However, the final limit
of the first liberalism did not lie there (a constitution is not necessarily dem-
ocratic), but in another point. The constitution of the state, whatever its
form, indeed required the existence of a subject who could institute it. In
effect, even though there was no agreement regarding the nature of the
traditional constitution of the nation, the revolutionary process initiated in
Spain after the royal abdications already presupposed the presence of that
nation. The spontaneous uprising against the foreign occupier seemed to
prove its existence. The entire discourse of the Spanish first liberalism was
premised on that assumption. Only in the colonies would this assumption
become challenged. Thereby emerged a new problem, which was not per-
ceived as such in the Spanish peninsula: how to constitute the nation itself.
In the colonies, the invocation of a constituent power then assumed a
sense of radical foundation that was absent from the peninsula. Beyond the
character of the ideas themselves, the actual situation imposed there a
Jacobin logic on the revolutionary process. As Halperin Donghi remarks,
the revolutionary ideal would become much more than an ideology in the
colonies; it would turn into the founding myth of the new nations, one

21
See François-Xavier Guerra, “La polı́tica moderna en el mundo hispánico: Apuntes
para unos años cruciales (1808–1809),” in Las formas y las polı́ticas del dominio agrario:
Homenaje a François Chevalier, coord. Ricardo Ávila Palafox, Carlos Martı́nez Assad,
and Jean Meyer (Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1992), 178.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2018

which would be now located in the place of the past with which the revolu-
tion intended so brutally to break.
Revolutionaries in the colonies thus faced a much more radical chal-
lenge than their Spanish counterparts. Initially, the former, like the latter,
claimed that after the fall of the monarchy, sovereignty returned to the
nation. But they would not take long to discover that, in Spain’s American
possessions, there were no nations that pre-existed the monarchy and could
assume sovereignty. According to the porteño revolutionary leader Mari-
ano Moreno, at the origin of colonial societies lay not a social contract but
an act of sheer violence. As a consequence, there were no pre-existing
nations here which could be invoked. And the process of territorial disinte-
gration that followed independence threw this problem to the forefront of
political debate. At this juncture, there was no way to determine what con-
stituted the nation, what its boundaries were, which collective subjects were
entitled to claim sovereign rights, which could claim possession of an
autonomous will. (The inhabitants of the viceroyalties? Of the Intenden-
cias? Of each city? Or, the population of the kingdom as a whole?)
This gave rise to a process of territorial disintegration that soon seemed
unstoppable. Every province, and indeed every city, claimed to possess sov-
ereign rights to constitute itself as an autonomous national entity. This
meant the dissolution of the subject of sovereign imputation; the subject
had become indiscernible, turning into the center of a properly political
dispute (in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the term). And the social contract dis-
course had no answer to this. It presupposed a criterion of demarcation
(how to delimit who could freely contract with each other and legitimately
constitute a nation of their own), but was radically unable to establish one,
given the abstract and generic nature of the subject.
Lastly, the issue that emerged then was how the constituent power
itself should be constituted. This was a paradox implicit in every constit-
uent congress: it must invoke the existence of the very entity which it sup-
posedly came to constitute; that is, the nation that had invested it and from
which its privileges emanated. But only in the colonies did this paradox
become evident as such. The revolution should invent, along with a new
political power, the very subject that should constitute that power. Here we
get the fourth and last torsion in the traditional conceptual universe, the
point at which revolutionary discourse took its final form, and, paradoxi-
cally, the point at which it began to dissolve, eventually paving the way for
a new reconfiguration of political language. Finding an answer to this para-
dox was the main concern of the nineteenth century, of what Foucault

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 Palti ✦ Beyond the “History of Ideas”

called, in The Order of Things, “The Age of History.”22 The burden of

constituting the nation would then be transferred from the subjective to the
objective realm. This would now be the task of History (with a capital H),
the new entity that then emerged as such (a conceptual transformation that
Reinhart Koselleck analyzed under the label of Sattelzeit).23 At this point,
the entire set of antinomies that the absolutist state had established (and
which eventually led to its own dislocation) would finally collapse to make
room for the emergence of a new conceptual constellation.24

CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

Halperin Donghi’s recreation of the process that led to the revolutions of

independence in Latin America illustrates why the issue of ideological ori-
gins must be overcome, leading us, in turn, to break with the framework of
the history of ideas founded on “models of thinking,” “ideal types,” as well
as the set of oppositions that result from it (like those between “liberalism”
and “republicanism,” or “negative liberty” and “positive liberty,” etc.).
This view can only result in a classificatory grid that secludes historical
research within a framework of limited options, which are already estab-
lished beforehand (and, therefore, always yield predictable results). As we
saw, Halperin Donghi’s approach transcends that framework, breaks with
the whole debate around ideas or models of thinking, and seeks to trace
ideological processes—that is, how a given discursive field itself becomes
successively reconfigured. And this translates the whole issue from the sub-
jective side (the ideas of the subjects) to the objective plane of historical
reality. We find here the crucial methodological transformation his work
introduced in political–intellectual history; rather than questioning a partic-
ular interpretation of the issue, it meant the dislocation of the very episte-
mological ground on which the entire tradition of the history of ideas was
erected: a philosophy of consciousness. In effect, the kind of displacements
he traces, although of a conceptual nature, are not merely changes in the

22
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage, 1970).
23
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985).
24
We find here operating the kind of dialectic described by Koselleck in his 1954 doctoral
dissertation (published in 1959). As he stated in it, “Absolutism necessitated the genesis
of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment conditioned the genesis of Revolution.”
Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
(Oxford: Berg, 1988), 8.

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“ideas” of subjects. For example, the detachment of the nation from the
body of the king was not something that someone thought, something that
a given thinker proposed or devised. These torsions involved the reconfigu-
ration of the horizons within which ideas deployed; they embodied an alter-
ation in the conditions for the public articulation of ideas, even though the
ideas of subjects themselves remained unchanged.
To go back to Tocqueville’s expression, quoted by Guerra in connec-
tion to the Cortes at Cádiz, when he stated that from the very moment the
constitution of the nation became a matter of controversy the ancien régime
had ended. Guerra interprets this as affirming that the best expression of
this change was the victory of the liberal party, led by Manuel Quintana, in
the election of the deputies to the Cortes. However, this is not what Tocque-
ville meant, but rather the opposite: even the victory of the absolutist party
would not have altered the fact that from the very moment the constitution
of the nation became a matter of controversy, the ancien régime had ended.
In effect, as Halperin Donghi has shown, the very emergence of a constit-
uent power implied the collapse of the logic that articulated that discourse.
Ideas had not necessarily changed, but the logic that articulated them had.
This distinction is fundamental. It reveals the fact that changes in political
language do not refer to the ideas of the subjects, but to the kind of prob-
lems subjects find themselves confronting at any given moment. Changes in
the soil of problems, rather than in ideas, are what eventually reconfigure
the discursive field. In fact, the ideas of subjects in 1810 probably were not
very different from their ideas in 1800; however, the issues at stake had
mutated, and this altered the entire political discourse. The constitution of
the nation was a problem that could not be conceivable within the frame-
work of the political languages of the ancien régime.
We observe here the fundamental aspect that separates the kind of con-
ceptual history of independence practiced by Halperin Donghi from the
traditional approaches of the history of ideas: the conceptual processes he
analyzes are objective phenomena, independent of the will and even the
consciousness of agents. They refer to a symbolic dimension that is embed-
ded in social and political practices. As a matter of fact, every social, eco-
nomic, or political practice works on the basis of a set of assumptions and
presupposes a symbolic dimension that constitutes it. We set this dimension
in motion in the very performance of this practice, whether or not we are
conscious of how it actually works. To wit, today we are all agents in a
globalized economy; we actively participate in it, but we do not really know
how it works. And these transformations entail a conceptual dimension
that has to do with the set of implicit assumptions here at work. The same

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 Palti ✦ Beyond the “History of Ideas”

thing is true of political languages: we do not know how political language

(and the set of underlying assumptions on whose basis it is founded) has
mutated in the last twenty years any more than we know how the economy
currently works, yet we still participate in it. We find here Halperin Dong-
hi’s fundamental shift in approach to the intellectual history of the revolu-
tions of independence. His approach actually transcends the realm of ideas,
of the representation of reality. Its objects are of a symbolic nature, but this
symbolic dimension belongs not to the realm of subjective representations
of reality, but rather to that which those ideas intend to represent. Unlike
traditionally thought, this symbolic dimension does not circulate in the
brains of the agents (as we saw, they are not necessarily conscious of it). It
forms an integral part of actual practices and exists prior to the interpreta-
tions we make of them.
This is the critical aspect of Halperin Donghi’s methodology. It crosses
through the opposition between “ideas” and “realities” that is at the basis
of the tradition of the history of ideas, rendering that opposition untenable.
And this is what allows his approach to break with the whole issue of the
“ideological origins” and the set of antinomies that are proper to it. The
type of conceptual history Halperin Donghi practices in this book thus
makes evident why the whole discussion about the affiliation of the ideas
of the revolution (whether they were neo-scholastic’s or Enlightenment’s
republican or liberal) is misleading. The ideological origins of the revolu-
tions of independence cannot be defined. And even if they could, that proc-
ess would be totally irrelevant to the kind of conceptual processes we intend
to analyze. In the end, traditional approaches to the history of ideas,
focused as they are on the problem of the intellectual origins of revolution-
ary discourse, cannot conceive of how traditional ideological frameworks
could have led to a result that not only was the opposite of that which they
were intended to produce, but was also inconceivable within them. That is,
more precisely, what Blumenberg meant by a “history of effects” or Wir-
kungsgeschichte. Halperin Donghi’s work illustrates the fundamental shift
this entails in the writing of intellectual history, one aimed not at describing
ideas and models of thinking, but at recovering the intricacies of complex
political–conceptual processes.

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, CONICET.

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