by Benjamin Gaillard-Garrido
Since Francois-Xavier Guerra’s Modernidad e independencias (1992), the historiography on the Age of Revolutions in Latin America has undergone significant changes. No longer are works predominantly characterized by conceptions of politics as epiphenomenal. No longer do they present static and deferential accounts to Eurocentric histories as exemplified by the likes of Heraclio Bonilla, Karen Spalding or José Carlos Chiaramonte. These latest contributions have even restored the political agency of Latin American historical actors. Scholars like Guerra, Cristina Soriano, and Marcela Echeverri—in conversation with cultural anthropologists and, to a lesser extent, subaltern studies—have thoroughly re-opened the space for political action and historical agency. After decades buried under the weight of structuralist approaches, the political has come back and remains front and center. But in what form has it returned?
For all their exceptional contributions, these recent approaches have proven unable to define political modernity in critical terms. Guerra’s now-classic work, for instance, helped re-open the space of the political. However, by reasoning in terms of tradition versus modernity, he maintained that politics became truly possible only with the deposition of Fernando VII in 1808. Many subsequent works have unmoored the emergence of political modernity from its conventional 1808 watershed. Yet, they have fallen short of developing a critical notion of political modernity, remaining either trapped within a conception of the political as measured in terms of representative government, equality before the law, and some form of participatory democracy—variants of political liberalism—or refusing to rigorously theorize it.
1808—and historical contingency, more broadly—undeniably played a decisive role in the emergence of political liberalism, the spread of popular sovereignty, and the rise of modern politics. However, immediatist arguments, which prioritize historical contingency as the reason for the emergence of political modernity in Latin America, cannot adequately account for the world of political thought in which some of the fundamental notions used to articulate visions of society before, during, and after 1808 could first acquire social traction and become viable epistemic means for comprehending Latin America’s various life-worlds. If, as Marcela Echeverri argues, “liberalism and monarchism were not necessarily antithetical and reform and revolution were deeply connected from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century” (emphasis mine), one needs to take seriously the theoretical work this archival evidence necessarily implies.
One of the major conundrums in this literature, thus, concerns continuity and rupture. How should historians think about rupture and novelty beyond emphasizing historical contingency and beyond depending on a political conception of liberalism? How can we account for the political sphere in a way that neither fetishizes nor treats it as simply derivative of some prior fundamental structure in an epiphenomenal sense? A turn to a critical theory of social form can help us make sense of these historiographical impasses, in and beyond Latin America. Here, an understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy as a critical social theory is central.
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As new readings of Marx have shown, political economy is better understood as a “science of social abstraction.” “Social abstraction” names the process through which relations between individuals in a given group or society become, in the words of Andrew Sartori, “based most fundamentally not on structures of affective solidarity or on intentional or conventional modes of relating, but on the objective systemic effects of the production and exchange of value-bearing commodities operating beyond the conscious intentions of historical actors.” These social practices, most fundamentally tied to the production and exchange of commodities, are thus commercial in nature. Selling one’s labor is a prime example and, in peasant households, offsetting the costs of labor through self-exploitation is another. During the transition to modernity, the cohesion of a given society becomes based, predominantly but not exclusively, on such abstract forms of interdependence, as seen in places like France and England, as well as Mexico, Egypt, and New Granada. In this reading, political-economic discourse arose to grapple with the implications of these specific, socially abstract practices that mediate forms of human sociality.
Most crucially to these new readings of Marx: The concepts that political economy names—like “value” and “labor”—are not simply linguistic abstractions or mere ideations. These specific abstractions are real. Said elsewise: These concepts exist as true in practice. They constitute the social itself. As such, one cannot strictly confine the concepts of political economy to a detached “economic” realm of social relations. Rather, these concepts function as “determinations of existence” that mediate elements of human thought and practice. More pointedly, these new readings of Marx posit a co-constitutive relationship between modern political-economic abstractions and modern political-theoretical abstractions. Political-theoretical notions like “equality,” “freedom,” or “civil society” may possess histories that predate the process of social abstraction. As soon as their object of reference becomes social abstraction, however, these concepts acquire a historical specificity that is peculiar to societies under the yoke of capitalism or societies transitioning towards forms of capitalism, as shown by Marx regarding concepts like “value,” “money,” or “commodity.” This critical Marxist perspective thus understands liberalism—whether political or economic—as an ideology bound first and foremost to social practices of commodity exchange. This observation—the co-constitutive relationship between political-economic and political-theoretical abstractions—holds serious implications for historicization. Quite simply put: Our understanding of social abstraction directly affects our historical understanding of the political writ large.
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Now, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Latin American societies, one finds a relatively high degree of monetization, increasing commercial exchange, an expansion of mercantile capital, and an increased separation between historical actors and their means of production. The question, thus, becomes: Does “commercialization” necessarily point to the existence of the abstractions so peculiar to capitalism in the Age of Revolutions Latin America? Skeptical readers might readily object: The variegated processes of accelerated commercialization and the advance of capitalism comprise different historical developments. However, the element that should signal a transition to capitalism is how and when abstract labor becomes a prevailing social relation. Whereas one might say labor already operates as a significant social relation in any commercialized society, labor, under capitalism, becomes socially mediating of, rather than socially mediated by, other social forms of relation such as kinship, corporate, or other directly political ties. As soon as man’s productive activity, in its abstract sense, becomes the general social form, how that productive activity becomes exploited—say, cash-renting, crop-renting, or debt peonage—arises as a logically secondary problem.
To the extent that modern political theory—whether liberal or illiberal—developed to explain abstract forms of social interdependence, this revised understanding of the emergence of modernity in Latin America helps reframe the problem of continuity and rupture in terms of changes in social form, rather than in terms of political culture, the emergence of political liberalism, or the spread of institutional or modular forms like the nation-state. Of course, the problem of conceptual commensurability between the “West” and the “rest” remains. Many have attempted to resolve this perennial problematic by insisting on and valorizing a purportedly shared repertoire of cultural references between the metropole and colonies. In so doing, however, these arguments often capitulate to the causal primacy of “culture” or “tradition” as the main vehicle of concept formation and dissemination. They seek epistemic salvation in a discursive process that derives, for instance, from an “Iberian,” “Western,” or “Judeo-Christian” heritage.
Not to mention those who insist on a conception of language as the main vehicle of concept formation. This tact ultimately leads back to where they started: A conception of politics as instrumental immediacy but, this time, naively mediated by “languages,” “images,” and “metaphors.” Such nominalist positions hold little to no explanatory power. In fact, they obscure the presence of certain logics, structures, and modes of social relation generally associated with—for instance—liberalism, that were present well before the adoption of the concept to make sense of them. To criticize these approaches is not to dismiss the importance of shared languages or cultural references. My point is rather to say that endowing them with causal priority is not historical analysis but, quite simply, ideology.
If we displace the textual primacy in understanding liberalism as a contingent discourse by way of institutional diffusionism or cultural particularism and reformulate it out of the confines of discursive processes, perhaps, finally, we can critically trace its appearance in a historically novel social object. That is, we can reground its salience in the reorganization of society under the advent of commercial relations. Such an approach is empowered to recuperate liberalism from a Western point of origin, exhausted histories of indexicality, and institutionalist or culturalist overdetermination. In so doing, it also brings to the fore “systemic misrecognition” as its fundamental nature and contradiction, with the added benefit of piercing the putative opposition between global/local and modernity/tradition.
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In short, recent historiography bolsters a conception of politics as immediacy and has insisted on immediacy as the principal method to understand the political. Such an approach ignores the prior levels of mediation that gradually began to mold the social in the late eighteenth century and accompanied the transition to highly commercial forms of society. A critical intellectual and concept history of the Age of Revolutions in Latin America would foreground how late colonial societies were increasingly conditioned by the abstract forms of social mediation that political-economic discourse emerged to grapple with.
Three obvious objections: First, the discourse of political economy might, at first glance, not seem to provide a more direct referential relation to historical context than any other discourses. Clearly, recognizing the centrality of political-economic abstractions for increasingly commercial societies like those of the Age of Revolutions in Latin America is not the only way to move forward. However, this path offers a means to historicize concepts and ideas in a more critical light due to the peculiar social purchase that real abstractions hold in modern societies or begin to hold in those transitioning towards modernity. Second, this delineated approach risks veering into a circular form of argument, where social abstraction indicates the presence of modern political-theoretical concepts and modern political-theoretical concepts index social abstraction. Third, what if there’s no explicitly political-economic discourse present? To address these last two objections, rigorous empirical work on the changes in modes of accumulation, forms of exploitation, circulation, and the relationship between historical actors and their means of production—in other words, on the extent of abstraction or absence thereof—is warranted. This effort is all the more crucial in a historical context where the distinction between commercialized and capitalist societies proves particularly blurry.
Interpretations hinging on concepts of languages, culture, and the spread of modular forms of modernity—political liberalism chiefly among them—still prove insufficient in offering adequate causal explanations for sociohistorical change or conceptual dissemination. For instance, one cannot fully account for, say, the late eighteenth-century gradual constitution of a sphere of civil society, an “enlightened” sphere of intellectual exchange, or different forms of patriotic, economic, and scientific association in various parts of Latin America by resorting to material or discursive connections or the spread of modular forms of modernity. Specific conditions of possibility must have preceded the appearance of these new modes of relating. And these conditions, I argue, are related to the spread of social abstraction. To the best of my knowledge, this observation holds in places like Mexico City, Caracas, Cuzco, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and many of their respective hinterlands, but also within Colombia—in places like Socorro, Tunja, Cali, Pasto, and Medellín.[1] It thus remains the anteceding problematic of the historical constitution of the conditions of possibility for the purchase of specific discourses—such as Bourbon reformist absolutism, Enlightened Catholicism, liberal imperialism, and, finally, modern republicanism—that first requires explanation.
A turn to critical theory for intellectual and concept history would allow us not only to better trace the Latin American particularities of such discourses, but also to eschew the assorted diffusionist explanations that have plagued intellectual history. These explanations have homogenized highly sophisticated worldviews by collapsing their arguments into theories of supposedly European origin, and they have approached Latin American institutions as derived from some presumed European template, thus failing to do justice to the creativity of elite and subaltern Latin American historical actors. In this sense, Jorge Orlando Melo is right: In developing their particular political-economic insights, late eighteenth-century viceregal officials, merchants, and writers drew primarily “from their experience and their knowledge of their locality, more than from theoretical considerations or from the treatises of European economists.” This was not for want of intellectual sophistication or insufficient engagement with European thought. First and foremost, Latin American elites and subalterns were active historical actors preoccupied with the practical dilemmas of their specific societies. At some point or another, they might have indeed drawn from the prestige afforded to concepts of supposedly European provenance to lend authority to their writings. But they never needed the “lights” of Paris, London, or Madrid to coherently formulate their claims in the first place. Latin Americans have seriously and creatively grappled with modernity for more than 250 years. We may indeed suffer from various predicaments but misplaced ideas were never one of them.
The author would like to thank Juan David Osorio Vargas, Sinclair Thomson, Alejandro Velasco, Barbara Weinstein, Jack Casey, Waldemar Oliveira, Paula Araque, Tomi Onabanjo, and, in particular, Oya Gürsoy for their critical comments and feedback on this essay.
[1] If I take the case of Colombia, for example, it makes more sense to think about it in terms of different nodes, where a series of connection that go inland meet a series of connection that go out to sea or to other nodes such as Maracaibo, Caracas, or Quito. This observation is not meant to suggest that any of the places listed above were substantially capitalist by the turn of the eighteenth century. Rather, it suggests that, by the 1780s, they were all home to a vibrant, if modest, commercial society in which a directional tendency towards capital accumulation is already present.
Benjamin Gaillard-Garrido is a PhD Candidate in Latin American and Caribbean History at New York University. He focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Colombia and the larger Atlantic, the history of capitalism and political economy, Catholicism and Catholic thought, and critical theory.
Edited by Tomi Onabanjo
Featured image: Carta V – División política del Virreinato de Santafé (1810), Atlas geográfico e histórico de la República de Colombia (1890), public domain, via, Wikimedia Commons.
