The Traditions of Liberty in the Atlantic World
Francisco Colom and Ángel Rivero (eds.)
I -‐ A Brave New Colonial World
-‐ Philip Resnick: New Worlds, New Jerusalems
-‐ Rubem Barboza Filho: Brazil and the Languages of Modernity
-‐ Anthony Pagden: Empire, Nation and Republic in the Transformation of the Modern Hispanic World
II-‐ Revolting for Independence
-‐ Ambrosio Velasco Gómez: Ibero-‐American Republican Humanism and the Intellectual Roots of Mexican Independence
-‐ José María Hernández Losada: Decorum in the Spanish American Revolutions of Independence
-‐ Cicero Araujo: The American Independences and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime Republic. A comparative view of the United States and Brazil
III – Varieties of Liberalism
-‐ Michel Ducharme: The Tradition of Liberty in Canada at the End of the eighteenth Century
-‐ Ángel Rivero: The Portuguese Revolution of 1820. Constitutional Politics, Liberalism and the Atlantic World
-‐ Francisco Colom: Patrimonial Liberalism. The Political Culture of Ibero-‐American Liberty
Abstracts
-‐ Philip Resnick: New Worlds, New Jerusalems
Philip Resnick sees the study of North America as bearing some analogy with the analysis of other continental ensembles, most tellingly Europe, and the early religious underpinnings of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. He questions whether North America in the deeper cultural, historical, or political sense even exists. And if it does, what might this North American identity consist of? The paper then proceeds to explore two key themes: first, the notion of a ‘new world’, and how this has shaped the three currently existing North American countries; second, the notion of ‘new Jerusalems’, that is, the imagination of the new world as a land of redemption. This chapter finally points to congruent experiences and unifying links in the historical development of the three countries.
-‐Rubem Barboza Filho: Brazil and the Languages of Modernity
According to the conventional narrative of Brazilian history, the historical heritage of the three colonial centuries had to be annihilated for the sake of the full modernization of the country.
The oblivion of the Baroque heritage, which was sanctioned by the conventional opposition between backward and modern societies, resulted in the sacrifice of several generations of Brazilians for the sake of an idealized country of the future by the modernizing elites. Barboza Filho reacts against this ‘demophobic’ perspective by seeking to demonstrate the democratic potential of the Brazilian Baroque culture. In order to achieve this, he devises a three-‐tiered perspective of modernity as interplay between what he calls the languages of
‘reason’, ‘interest’ and ‘affection’ and portrays the results of their combination throughout Brazil’s independent period.
-‐Anthony Pagden: Empire, Nation and Republic in the Transformation of the Modern Hispanic World
The territorial conglomerate, or ‘composite monarchy’, over which the Hapsburgs, and later the Bourbons ruled, and which since the late eighteenth century has been referred to as the
‘Spanish empire’, was imaginatively sustained as a single body of public law adopted by the Empire and embodied in the person of the monarch himself. In this design the monarch acted as an agent of distribution and communal justice rather than as undisputed political authority.
The Spanish Monarchy had been an expansionist power since it ceased to be linked to a single unitary territory. As many contemporaries believed, once a state embarked on a policy of expansion, its survival depended on the continuity of this expansion. The problem with this was that the end result of exponential growth only led to fragmentation and final collapse of the Monarchy. To many outsiders, however, the Monarchy’s real difficulties appeared to be due less to its political fragmentation and its inability to continue absorbing new territory, than it did to its adherence to the ideological strains which supposedly provided its coherence i.e., the close identification with the Catholic religion and the quest for military supremacy. At the
end of the eighteenth century, the failure to create any kind of transatlantic political order which could accommodate both the Spanish Monarchy’s view of itself, and the Criollos wish for a larger measure of autonomy, led to a crisis in the Empire and the birth of new nations.
Considering such historical background, this chapter delves into the diverging political forms and ideology developed in Spain and its former colonies and the creation of two very different kinds of republican projects in British and Spanish America.
-‐Ambrosio Velasco Gómez: Ibero-‐American Republican Humanism and the Intellectual Roots of Mexican Independence
Until the mid-‐twentieth century, the most accepted accounts of Mexican independence stressed the intellectual influence of the French and American revolutions. The Mexican historian Luis Villoro was the first to question this exogenous account. According to him, the intellectual origins of Mexican independence are mainly rooted in Spanish legal tradition and in the Creole patriotism that developed in the eighteenth century. In spite of his innovative hypothesis, Villoro sets limitations on his endogenous account of this historical process. He argued that political Creolism only aimed at a limited degree of autonomy within the Empire, not at complete independence. For him the real revolution of independence started in 1810, under the guidance of Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos. In opposition to this view, the author maintains that the original ideas that motivated the Mexican revolution of independence can be found in a remoter past, namely in the humanist tradition developed by the ‘School of Salamanca’ in the sixteenth century. These ideas dealt with the controversial legitimacy of the Spanish Conquest and the domination of the indigenous peoples, and they evolved later into the mostly symbolic indigenism of Creole patriotism. Under these circumstances, Scholastic ideas that originally referred to the rights of the Indians gradually transformed into a political ideology with nationalist undertones that managed to impregnate the independence movements of the early nineteenth century.
-‐ José María Hernández Losada: Decorum in the Spanish American Revolutions of Independence
This contribution critically explores the idea of ‘decorum’ in the context of the Spanish
American independences in particular and the philosophy of
government in general. In the Spanish tradition of government, decorum could be best understood in terms of the unity of natural, civil and divine law, at least since the early 16th Century. In this tradition every political change should be fully congruent with the representation of that unity. However, with the Napoleonic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 and the outbreak of the Spanish revolutions of independence, decorum adopted a whole new cultural dimension which has been described as a modern transformation in the sphere of political representation. In the world of the revolutionary
‘Juntas’, organized to resist the French and eventually to enforce emancipation from the Spanish Empire, decorum emerged again as the right and sole answer. This chapter aims at
exploring the cultural and political ideas that made this historical transformation possible and the ways in which the demands of decorum may be understood in our contemporary world.
-‐Cicero Araujo: The American Independences and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime Republic. A comparative view of the United States and Brazil
The purpose of this chapter is to suggest, through the use of the exemplary experience of the Anglo-‐American colonies, some common aspects of the revolutions of independence in the Americas despite their differences in history, social background and political culture. The chapter focuses on a comparison between the Anglo and the Portuguese American cases.
Based on the analysis of the theory and practice of republican tradition in the Ancien Régime, this paper advances the idea that the crisis of independence expressed unresolved constitutional issues resulting from the dislocation between absolutist monarchy and the rise of parliamentary rule, first in England and later in continental Europe.
-‐Michel Ducharme: The Tradition of Liberty in Canada at the end of the eighteenth century By 1825, the British subjects living in the colonies that later became Canada were the only white inhabitants of the Americas who remained subjected to a foreign metropolis. The fact that these colonists did not join the revolutionary movements or adopt grandiloquent founding documents based on a rhetoric of liberty, along with their relative insignificance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may help to explain why they still have not been integrated into any meaningful discussion on the traditions of liberty in the Atlantic world. The evolution of the British North American colonies has been thus portrayed as part of a counterrevolutionary tradition. However, this framework does not help us understand the Canadian experience during the Age of Revolutions. The constitutional and political foundations of Upper and Lower Canada rested indeed on a modern concept of freedom, as well as on a strong sense of allegiance to the British Crown and Empire. This chapter incorporates the discussion of the Canadian political tradition into a wider, Atlantic frame of reference.
-‐Angel Rivero: The Portuguese Revolution of 1820: Constitutional Politics, Liberalism and the Atlantic World
According to a common assumption among many scholars, liberalism was a theory devised in early modernity that was put into practice later in history. Thus, for the expansion of liberalism, it was crucial that the works explaining this doctrine be widely disseminated. In this article the author shows that although political ideas are important for political processes, the context in which they are put to work is also equally important. In this sense, the context of early liberalism was the Atlantic World, and liberal processes like the Portuguese revolution of 1820 or Brazil’s independence in 1822 can only be understood by taking this circumstance into account.
-‐ Francisco Colom González: Patrimonial Liberalism: a Cultural Approach to Ibero-‐American Liberty
In this chapter the author maintains that the peculiar features of liberalism in the Iberian world can be better understood as the unremitting effect of a patrimonial political culture that was endemic to its traditional society. The normative reference of this culture must be searched for in the tradition of Catholic natural law, which for a long time served as the main instrument for the moral and political self-‐interpretation of Iberian society. While still largely traditional, Ibero-‐American societies endured a change towards more competitive and hence conflict-‐
ridden forms of political integration. In this context, liberal institutions and discourse adapted to the patrimonial tradition and patronage practices with which the nation-‐states were erected in the region.
