Document Type
Book
Publisher
Duke University Press
Publication Date
2014
First Page
1
Last Page
339
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Abstract
When Mexican Conservatives offered Maximilian the throne, he assumed that their desire for a monarch meant that the republican experiment in Latin America had failed. Even though he fell in defeat, Latin America’s importance for the development of republicanism and democracy and the shaping of the modern Atlantic world is similarly dismissed today. This refusal to grant the republican experiments in Latin America legitimacy has occluded a powerful alternative possibility for organizing society and understanding the future that emerged in nineteenth- century Latin America. As noted in the prologue, I denominate this alternative “American republican modernity.” In this counter mentalité, Latin Americans did not define a modernity bound to cultured Europe and its civilization but celebrated an imagined modernity located in America, a modernity whose definition was inherently political. Latin America represented the future because it had adopted republicanism and democracy while Europe, under the boots of monarchs and aristocrats, dwelled in the past.1 American republican modernity emphasized republican politics as a marker of modernity. This republicanism did not just involve elite gentlemen’s safeguarding of abstract political and personal rights for privileged individuals; instead, popular groups (to use the nineteenth- century language for the lower class or subalterns) infused republicanism with a democratic challenge and assertions of social and economic rights. Although republicanism began in Latin America as an elite- dominated project, its legitimacy and importance grew due to the demands of popular actors to open the republican nation to people of different classes and racial backgrounds. The force of popular concerns made universalism—the idea that all people, in spite of differences of class, race, or nationality, shared a basic human fraternity and enjoyed rights and citizenship—a central tenet of American republicanism. Although universalism is now viewed with deep suspicion by the postmodern left, it was one of the most powerful tools available to challenge old hierarchies—both on the global scale, between the imperial powers of the Old World and the weak and struggling young nations of the New World, and on the local, between landlord and peasant or master and slave.
Recommended Citation
SANDERS, J. E. (2014). The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw4gb
