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- Title
¿Una historia natural del régimen representativo? Saberes ilustrados, raza y constituciones en Tierra Firme (1811-1821).
- Authors
Thibaud, Clement
- Abstract
The authors of the first constitutions of the Spanish-American world, in New Granada, were also scientists who published works on geography, natural history, political economy, population or medicine. Departing from this observation, the article seeks to show how these scholars tried to nurture their constitutional work by naturalist knowledge in order to think the "regeneration" of their society. This ambition entailed the need to destroy the supposedly artificial and despotic hierarchies of the Ancien Régime, based on the genealogical transmission of dignities and infamy, in order to replace them with others that were "natural". This device did not mean the constitutional triumph of equality, since, to take up a formula of Madame de Staël, equality before the law would mean nothing other than the reestablishment of natural inequalities. The article first discusses the works of the "Ilustrados of New Granada" and Humboldt to understand the assumptions of their naturalistic anthropology on the "American man", i.e. the Amerindians, which served to think on certain political topics such as federalism, the rights of man and citizenship during the revolutions of independence. It ends with a re-reading of Bolívar's Discourse of Angostura by showing how this naturalist knowledge influenced Bolivar's constitutionalist thought.
- Subjects
GRENADA; EQUAL rights; NATURAL history; HUMAN rights; FEDERAL government; INDIGENOUS peoples of the Americas; REVOLUTIONS; STAEL, Madame de (Anne-Louise-Germaine), 1766-1817
- Publication
Araucaria, 2022, Vol 24, Issue 49, p499
- ISSN
1575-6823
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.12795/araucaria.2022.i49.24