Ronald Briggs

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

5

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2008

First Page

1

Last Page

20

Abstract

In his Recuerdos literarios, Chilean intellectual José Victorino Lastarria recounts meeting the elderly Simón Rodríguez (1769-1856) in the company of his own elderly mentor, Andrés Bello. The elders were both from Caracas, and each had weathered the Wars of Independence in exile abroad, but on this occasion their discussion of politics was more local than global, as Rodríguez told how he once served a formal banquet to Mariscal Sucre (then President of Bolivia) on bedpans. The normally stern Bello cried with laughter, Lastarria noted, adding that Rodríguez told the story with “el énfasis i aquellas intonaciones elegantes” that he attempted to reproduce graphically in his writings (48-49). When it came to philosophy, Lastarria continues, Rodríguez remained something of an enigma, a reformer who sought to improve the lot of the poor through practical vocational education, but whose real or imagined originality was such that he denied knowing anything about Saint-Simon or Fourier, despite having spent two decades in France. The real answer, Lastarria suggests, is Robert Owen, the English factory manager/owner whose Co-operative Magazine introduced socialism into print in English and whose experiments in the textile town of New Lanark combined industrial production with a similar belief in the power of vocationally-minded education (Lastarria 45-46; Donnachie 135).

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