Liberalism between Spain and America: The Political Thought of Andrés Bello

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

Abstract

This paper explores the political thought of Andrés Bello (1781-1865). Despite being depicted as having provided political and cultural independence to Latin America, Bello has thus far remained relatively under the radar among scholarship on Latin American political thought. This is surprising given that he served, for a time, as a tutor to Simón Bolívar; that his contributions to philosophy, poetry, and education established him as the preeminent intellectual figure of the first decades of nineteenth-century Latin America; and his status as an influential Chilean statesman and legislator. The present paper treats Bello as a moderate political liberal in the mode of other philosophers and statesmen of the early post-independence period in Latin America, such as the Mexican thinker José María Luis Mora. Bello’s political thought sought to bridge the gap between the Spanish past and a prospective American future. As Bello writes, having “snatched the scepter from the monarch, … we did not rid ourselves of the Spanish spirit: our congresses obeyed, without knowing it, Gothic inspirations.” Bello’s intention was to cultivate a liberal and republican spirit in the Americas, providing something which the Spanish colonizers had been unable to cultivate, while retaining that which was positive in their Hispanic heritage: namely, their “magnanimity, heroism, and pride.” This meant cultivating a liberalism which was both negative and positive at once: a galvanizing force that could unify a nascent nation around principles of individual liberty.

Author

• Brendon Westler, St. Olaf College