Juan-Jacobo’s Paradox: Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in Spanish America

• In Event: Latin American Political Thought in the 1800s: Ideas, Identity, and Institutions

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s impact on Spanish American political thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is often discussed alongside the Enlightenment’s influence for their eventual effect on the region’s wars of independence (1808-1826). Recent historical scholarship has complicated this causal story. The question of how to think about a distinctive Spanish American political thought, and Rousseau’s role within it, remains in need of expansion, nevertheless. Attending to the influence of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) deepens our understanding of how Rousseau shaped the region’s political thought. Rousseau's critique of the arts and sciences, and his “paradox” of civilizational development, became controversial among Spanish intellectuals in the eighteenth century, whose refutations spread to American readers in the Spanish colonies. Both Rousseau’s Discourse and the counterarguments from his Spanish interlocutors framed the political imaginary of American readers by contributing to their prolonged engagement with the concepts of barbarie and civilization.

Author

• Nayeli Leandra Riano, Georgetown University