The question of “the ideological origins” of independence revolutions as an issue. A rereading through Tradición política española e ideología revolucionaria de mayo, by Tulio Halperin Donghi

Abstract

One of the central topics in the Latin American history of ideas is that of the ideological origins of the independence revolutions. This issue has led to a series of disputes regarding the filiation of the ideas that supported the emergence of the revolutionary discourse. Through a rereading of Halperin Donghi’s Tradición política española e ideología revolucionaria de Mayo, this paper intends to show that the urge to establish the precursory ideas of the revolutionary discourse is misleading since there is no way of knowing the precise origin of a particular idea. Furthermore, in case it were possible, it would be irrelevant to understand the nature of that discourse. Instead, the point is to understand how those ideas, whatever their origin, became rearticulated in connection with problems that were completely different to those from which the ideas at stake emerged. The present paper outlines the series of transformations that the key concepts of traditional Hispanic thinking went through and how they opened the doors for the unfolding of a type of discourse that distanced itself from the frameworks of that thinking.