José María Samper (1828-1888) was born in the provincial town of Honda, Colombia. A prolific author, he combined his writing activities with politics, journalism, and teaching. In his earlier career, Samper became prominent within a young generation of radical liberals who advocated universal and direct suffrage, the separation of church and state, and the abolition of the standing army. In 1855, In what was perhaps one of the first usages of the expression “Latin American,” Samper proposed the formation of a federation of Spanish American republics to defend their emerging “democracies” and their interests from the ambitions of the European monarchies, the Brazilian Empire, and US expansionism (Reflexiones sobre la federación colombiana, 1855). “Colombia” was the name Samper gave to his proposed union. Later in his life, however, Samper tempered the radicalism of his youth and moved closer to the Conservative Party. Yet in the convention that adopted the 1886 centralist, “conservative” constitution, Samper’s interventions revealed that he continued defending key liberal principles. Samper’s selected passages in our volume come from his earlier liberal phase.

Andrés Bello (1781–1865) was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Early in his career he occupied various administrative positions in the government of the Captaincy General. In 1810, the newly inaugurated Junta of Caracas appointed him secretary of the commission sent to Great Britain to request support for the new government. He remained in London for nineteen years. He lived in Santiago for the remaining thirty-six years of his life, serving as government official, senator, and rector of University of Chile. He was in addition a poet, a literary critic, and a jurist. His most important works include Principios de derecho de jentes (1832), Gramática de la lengua castellana (1847), and the Civil Code of the Republic of Chile (1855). A towering intellectual figure in Spanish America, he has only recently been translated into English. The current selection concerns a specific development in Ecuador but involves a central principle of international relations where Bello took a strong position against foreign intervention, especially from emerging states that sought the political and military assistance of stronger ones. The polemical tone of the article is typical of the press debates in Chile in the 1840s.

Of humble origins and mixed race, Bernardo Monteagudo (1789–1825) was born in Tucumán, in the River Plate (Argentina today). He graduated in law from the University of Chuquisaca and soon became involved in the wars of independence against Spain, first in Upper Peru and then in Buenos Aires, where he stood out for his radical republicanism, which he originally displayed as a polemicist in newspapers. Embroiled in the internal conflicts of the revolutionary movement in the River Plate, he was forced into exile in 1815. In 1817, he joined the army of José de San Martín, which drove the Spaniards out of Lima in 1821, when Peruvian independence was declared. Monteagudo became San Martín’s right hand and was practically in charge of governing Lima while San Martín continued the fight against the royalist forces elsewhere. Monteagudo’s authoritarian rule provoked wide resentment and, following two days of riots, he was expelled from the city in 1822. Written a year later as a defence of his actions in government, his Memoir offered a systematic examination of the conditions that, in his view, made democracy unworkable in Peru.

José Victorino Lastarria (1817–1888) was a Chilean writer and politician closely aligned with the opposition to the three consecutive governments of Joaquín Prieto (1831–1841), Manuel Bulnes (1841–1851), and Manuel Montt (1851–1861). A liberal, he later turned into a Comtean positivist. As a politician, he served in the Congress and later in government as diplomat and cabinet member. A prolific writer, he was the author of Recuerdos literarios (1878), one of the best, if biased, accounts of Chilean intellectual life in the nineteenth century. He was also the author of La América (1865), Lecciones de política positiva (1874), and numerous contributions to the press. The fragment included here is the introduction to his work on the legacies of the colonial past, which he presented at the first anniversary of the inauguration of the University of Chile (1844). He promoted a view of history that saw in the past the guidance for shaping the present and future, meaning specifically the demolition of colonial institutions and ideas. This presentation became a part of a significant debate on the writing of history in the 1840s.

Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865) was a Chilean writer and political activist educated at the Instituto Nacional. He rose to notoriety when he published an essay, the “Sociabilidad chilena” (1844), condemning the role of both the Catholic Church and the legacies of colonialism in Chile. He was brought to trial for violating the laws regulating press freedoms. As a result, he left Chile for Europe, where he established contact with Edgar Quinet and Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais and witnessed the European revolutions of 1848. Returning to Chile, he founded the Society of Equality in 1850 and participated in the uprising of April 1851, which led to his exile in Peru, Europe, and Argentina, where he died. His principal works, in addition to “Sociabilidad,” are La América en peligro (1862), and El evangelio americano (1864). The essay included here is representative of his views regarding the radical contradiction between Catholicism and republicanism, which was in turn an expression of his views on the struggle between despotism and freedom.

An anonymous and rarely cited text, Fe política de un colombiano was consulted by the editors at the John Carter Brown Library, whose catalogue attributes it to Eloy Valenzuela (1756–1834), a Catholic priest from Santander, Colombia. However, it is highly unlikely that Valenzuela, who was close to Simón Bolívar at the time of publication, penned a pamphlet which appeared to be criticizing (though not in explicit terms) the Convención de Ocaña, convened by Bolívar to replace the existing 1821 Constitution. The main message of the Fe política was against the concentration of power in the executive, then perceived to be Bolívar’s purpose in convening the Ocaña Convention. On April 1, 1826, the Gaceta de Colombia registered its publication stating that “the author … was born in one of the departments of the antigua Venezuela.” Its author might have been Javier Francisco Yanes (1776–1846), particularly as in his Manual político del venezolano, Yanes used the Fe política without attribution, in a book that is seemingly generous in acknowledging the work of others. But if the Gaceta de Colombia was right, this would rule out Yanes’ authorship as he was not born in Venezuela but in Cuba.

José Antonio Saco (1797–1879), a native of Bayamo in Cuba, studied philosophy under the notable Félix Varela and succeeded him in the philosophy chair at the University of Havana. He edited the journals El Mensajero Semanal and the Revista Bimestre Cubana, where his writing against the slave trade caused his exile in 1834 – he only returned to Cuba for a brief period in 1860–1861. He traveled extensively in Europe collecting the documentation for his Historia de la esclavitud (1875–1879). He was elected to the Cortes in Spain but, after 1837, Cuba was excluded from representation there. Saco also became conspicuous for his opposition to the annexation of Cuba to the United States. The current selection was written in the wake of Narciso López’s failed invasion of the island in 1851 and reveals a keen awareness of the international situation and the hard choices facing Cuba in the nineteenth century.

Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), was originally from the province of Tucumán, in today’s western Argentina. Alberdi was part of the Generation of 1837, a literary salon highly influenced by European Romanticism. The increasingly dictatorial rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas forced the group to go underground and eventually to exile in neighboring Uruguay. After the siege of Montevideo in 1843, Alberdi went to Europe and settled subsequently in Chile. As a writer and political commentator, Alberdi was instrumental in the overthrow of Rosas and in the promulgation of the Constitution of 1853. Under the rule of Justo José Urquiza as head of the Argentine Confederation, Alberdi became a diplomatic representative in Europe. His most important work is Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la república Argentina, which as the title indicates became the leading draft of the Constitution of 1853. Due to his experience in Europe, he was also a keen observer of international affairs. The selection included in this volume represents a strong argument in favor of a community of nations whose principal aim was the eradication of war, which he considered as a crime against humanity.

Miguel Antonio Caro (1843–1909) was notable among the most systematic conservative thinkers in Spanish America. He was born in Bogota in a socially prestigious and politically influential family. Caro rose to prominence for his scholarly work on grammar, his translations of Virgil, and, above all, for his defense of the Catholic Church and his critical stand against the radical governments that ruled the country after 1861. He was appointed to his first public post in 1880, as director of the National Library, by the then president, Rafael Núñez, a liberal who broke with the radicals to lead the Regeneración Movement in Colombia. Caro became the closest ally of Núñez, and one of the main architects of the 1886 Constitution. Caro succeeded Núñez after his death (1894) in the presidency of the country. His vast intellectual production, however, preceded his rise to power, including a critical study of Bentham’s utilitarianism. In 1871, he founded El Tradicionista, a newspaper whose pages advocated the protection of the Catholic Church by the Colombian state, and where his series of articles against religious tolerance, the basis of Caro’s piece in our volume, were first published.

Justo Arosemena (1817–1896), better known today as the “father of Panamanian nationalism,” was one of the most notable constitutionalist jurists in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In 1855, Arosemena published El Estado Federal de Panamá at a time when New Granada (Colombia today), of which Panama was part, was following a radical federalist trajectory – that year, he was elected as the first president of the Federal State of Panama. As a leading figure from one of the nine states that formed the Estados Unidos de Colombia in 1863, Arosemena’s voice carried weight. In the following years, he was appointed to several diplomatic posts to represent Colombia in the United States and in other Latin American countries. His credentials as a constitutionalist of hemispheric dimensions were marked by the publication of his Constituciones políticas de la América Meridional (1870), expanded and reedited in 1878 as Estudios constitucionales sobre los gobiernos de América Latina, from which we have selected the passages for our volume.

Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) was a Mexican intellectual and statesman born in Guanajuato, where he witnessed the massacre of Spaniards during Miguel Hidalgo’s revolt in 1810, an event that would forever mark his conservative thinking. He studied at the Colegio de Minas in Mexico City, continuing his education in Freiburg and Göttingen. Alamán occupied several government positions, most importantly at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, until his death in 1853. He was the author of the Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República Mexicana, from which the editors have taken the current selections, and Historia de México desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon la Independencia en el año de 1808 hasta la época presente (1849–1852).

Francisco García Calderón (1883–1953) was one of the most prestigious Spanish American intellectuals during the first decades of the twentieth century, when he was considered “the best interpreter of the continent’s realities.” A Peruvian national, he was born in Valparaíso while his father (then provisional president of Peru) was held prisoner by the Chilean government following the negotiations that ended the War of the Pacific. The family returned to Peru in 1889, and settled in Lima, where García Calderón grew up. He studied philosophy and letters at the Universidad de San Marcos, graduating in 1903. He soon rose to prominence among a new generation of intellectuals, particularly when the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó wrote the prologue of his first book De litteris (1904). In 1906, he moved with his mother and siblings to Paris, where he spent the next four decades of his life. His book Les démocraties latines de l’Amérique was first published in French with a preface by the French president Raymond Poincaré, in 1912. While some fragments of the book appeared in Spanish in 1951, the full first Spanish version was published by the Biblioteca Ayacucho in Caracas in 1979.

Andrés Molina Enríquez (1868–1940) was born in Jilotepec, Mexico. A lawyer and journalist, his work as a public notary made him familiar with land-related conflicts during the Porfiriato. He spent time in prison during the provisional government of Francisco León de la Barra (1911). A leading spokesman for agrarian reform, Molina considered it necessary to resort to authoritarian means to control the conflicting interests that pervaded Mexican society; hence his apparent support for Porfirio Díaz’s policies as well as the paternalistic approaches of revolutionary Mexico. He occupied several important technical government positions until his death in 1940. The current selection is taken from his Los grandes problemas nacionales, which was in turn based on his articles for the periodical El Tiempo. As is the case with many other intellectuals of the period, Molina’s analysis of social issues is laden with racial assumptions.

Carlos Arturo Torres (1867–1911) was a journalist, teacher, and statesman. He was born in the Colombian town of Santa Rosa de Viterbo and studied in Tunja, Bogota, and the United Kingdom. After travels in Europe, he taught international law in Bogota, and founded such papers as La Crónica, El Nuevo Tiempo, and La Civilización. He was sent to diplomatic missions in France, England, and Caracas, where he died. He also served as minister of both treasury and finance. Undoubtedly, Idola Fori was his most influential work. He borrowed from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, who discerned four “idols” that obstruct the truth, including the idols of the forum and the market. Idola Fori was originally published with a prologue by José Enrique Rodó, with whom he has often been compared, and with whom he shared ideas about history and culture. Torres’ work, however, is more deeply grounded in politics, and shows his engagement with contemporary debates about the role of the state, major ideas about economic development, and the tension between individualism and collectivism.

Vicente Rocafuerte (1783–1847) was born in Guayaquil, in today’s Ecuador. Educated in Spain and France, he entered politics early, serving first in his native land as a local magistrate. While in Europe (since 1812) he was elected as one of the Spanish American representatives to the Spanish Cortes. In Madrid in 1814 he witnessed the demise of the parliament after the restoration of Ferdinand VII, devoting himself from then on to the service of some of the emerging nations of Spanish America. As an advocate of republicanism, he opposed the Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide and served as Mexico’s representative in Great Britain and Europe. Back in Guayaquil in 1833, he opposed the regime of Juan José Flores, becoming president of Ecuador between 1835 and 1839, and serving later as president of the Senate. He died in Lima in 1847, while on a diplomatic mission to Peru. The current selection was written while in Mexico in 1830 and represents one of the earliest Spanish American arguments for religious toleration. Rocafuerte was by no means an atheist but opposed the establishment of an official religion for the emerging states.

Valentín Letelier (1852–1929) was a Chilean educator, philosopher, and jurist who, after an assignment in Prussia in the early 1880s, contributed to the reform of the Chilean educational system, particularly through the creation of the teacher-training institute, the Instituto Pedagógico attached to the University of Chile. A committed positivist and leader of the Radical Party, Letelier was a chaired professor of law who became rector of the University of Chile for two periods beginning in 1906. His principal works include Filosofía de la educación (1892), La evolución de la historia (1900), Génesis del Estado (1917), and Génesis del derecho (1919). As a member of Congress, he joined the opposition to the government of José Manuel Balmaceda, signing the articles of impeachment that led to his arrest and exile in 1891, the year of the Civil War that ended with the victory of the congressional forces. The current selection provides Letelier’s rationale for the opposition to Balmaceda and advances a passionate defense of the role of organized political parties in a democracy, the rule of law, and the meritocratic selection of public officials.

Martina Barros Borgoño (1850–1944) was a pioneering Chilean who advanced women’s rights in significant ways, not least in terms of advocating for suffrage, but also in terms of a critical approach to nineteenth-century thinking on gender distinctions. Born in a socially distinguished milieu, Martina Barros encountered John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) at a young age and embarked on the translation and commentary of the source by 1872. Barros’ prologue celebrated some aspects of Mill’s work, but bemoaned others. She acknowledged the role of her husband, the liberal physician Augusto Orrego Luco, in the writing of the prologue, but affirmed that the ideas were her own in her autobiography. Both had previously read Mill’s On Liberty (1859), and shared his condemnation of the tyranny of customs, challenging gender traditions and participating actively in publications and intellectual circles. Her views, however, were far from radical. As she stated in her autobiography, “my aim in promoting the independence and culture of women was not to make them rivals of men, but rather their dignified companions.”

Mariano Otero (1817–1850) was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. A lawyer by training, Otero made early choices in favor of liberalism, advocating a return to the federalism embodied in the Constitution of 1824, although with some alterations, which included the separation of the clergy from politics. He was also concerned about the political instability of the post-independence period. He participated in the liberal revolt of 1846, was part of the Constituent Assembly of 1847, and was one of the members of Congress who opposed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on the grounds that the conflict was an illegitimate war of conquest. He became Minister of Foreign Relations in the government of José Joaquín de Herrera in 1848. His premature death was due to the cholera epidemic of 1850. In this selection, which he wrote during the Mexican–American War, he tried to explain the causes that led to defeat, tracing them back to the colonial and independence periods, but eloquently rejecting any justifications based on race.

Selected passages from “Nuestros indios” (1904) by Manuel Gonzalez Prada (1844–1918).