Positivism on the move: translators and publishers in Mexico and Argentina from 1850 to 1950 (original) (raw)
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Historians have demonstrated that Auguste Comte"s philosophy became an eclectic positivism after its introduction to Latin America. The factors that help explain this eclecticism include positivism's connections with the writings of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and John Stuart Mill; the simultaneous circulation of print materials in their original language as well as their translations; and the emergence of an international publishing market in the late 19th century. This paper studies the flow of positivist ideas in Mexico and Argentina from the perspective of publishers and translators during a period when states were organizing their fundamental structures and education policies .
From Positivism to ‘Anti-Positivism’ in Mexico: Some Notable Continuities
Over roughly the past fifty years, a general consensus has emerged in the scholarship on Latin American thought dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth. Latin American intellectuals widely adapted the European philosophy of positivism in keeping with the demands of their own social and political contexts, effectively making positivism the second most important philosophical tradition in the history of Latin America, after scholasticism. However, as thinkers across Latin America faced the challenges of the twentieth century, they grew increasingly disappointed with positivism, so that “anti-positivism” stands out as a defining feature of Latin American philosophy in the early twentieth century. In this essay, I challenge this widely accepted narrative by demonstrating considerable continuity rather than simple rupture between positivism and “anti-positivism” in Latin America. I focus on Mexico, where both positivism and the reaction against it are generally taken to have been strongest, or at least most politically significant. After tracing the history of positivism’s transformations in Mexico from Auguste Comte (1798-1857) to Gabino Barreda (1818-1881) to Justo Sierra (1848-1912), I show how Mexico’s leading “anti-positivist” philosophers—José Vasconcelos (1882-1959) and Antonio Caso (1883-1946)—draw substantially upon their positivist predecessors.
Rather than the emergence of a philosophy or a new paradigm, positivism reflects the intellectual atmosphere that defines the twentieth century epistemological field. Although in Latin America positivism coexists with ideologies such as Vitalism, Decadentism and Spiritualism, it becomes the dominating “mental matrix” between 1880 and 1910 (Terán 1987). This dominant position is owed, on the one hand, to its ability to function as the key narrative to national interpretation, and on the other, to its power of articulation with specific institutions of the educational, legal, sanitary and military areas, which makes it a real discursive practice in Foucault’s terms: an apparatus that connects discourses, institutions, knowledge and practices. Positivism is both a program and a description of the end of the century’s epistemological field; an explanation of the world and a means of producing this explanation; an epistemological change accompanying specific political and social processes, and the transformation of the institutions which enable these processes.
Ascension and decline of positivism in Argentina
GLOSSAE. European Journal of Legal History 17 (2020), 2020
The criminological positivism reached the Argentinean coasts after Lombroso, Ferri and Garofalo exposed to the world the need to end the classic criminal law. At first, the new Italian trend was received with joy by a good part of the Argentinean penalists, but in reality, the practical application of its postulates was conspicuous by its absence. Throughout this article, we will study how criminological positivism became a reference doctrine in the Argentine legal world, and at the same time, we will explain the reasons that caused it to become nothing more than a memory around the 1930s.
Revista Pensamiento Educativo, 2011
This article examines the influence of Positivism on Latin American educational thought. It argues that while this influence is significant for the number of institutions that it inspired, little attention has been paid to perhaps the most elaborate presentation of positivist educational ideas: Valentín Letelier's Filosofía de la Educación (1892). Building on national experience concerning the development of education, Letelier used Positivism to reform the curriculum of secondary education and was a primary force behind the foundation of the Instituto Pedagógico (1889). His view of the school can be summarized as a philosophy based on a rational and systematic hierarchy of the sciences, which he applied to the educational field. As a result, the curriculum reflected a progression from the study of the most general to the most specific sciences. The training of professors at the Instituto was geared precisely to steer students to achieve a systematic and comprehensive view of society based on scientific criteria. Letelier's work created a new sensitivity, and provided a significant link to subsequent efforts to reform national education.
Nation-Building through Education: Positivism and its Transformations in Mexico
Latin American and Latinx Philosophy A Collaborative Introduction, 2019
Many 19th century Latin American intellectuals adapted the philosophy of positivism to address the pressing problems of nation-building and respond to the demands of their own social and political contexts, making positivism the second most influential tradition in the history of Latin American philosophy, after scholasticism. Since a comprehensive survey of positivism’s role across Latin American and Latinx philosophy would require multiple books, this chapter presents the history of positivism and its transformations in Mexican and Chicanx philosophies, proceeding chronologically and focusing on these representative thinkers: Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Gabino Barreda (1818-1881), Justo Sierra (1848-1912), José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Antonio Caso (1883-1946), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004). We pay special attention to how positivism was used to build the Mexican nation and reconstruct Mexican identity through education, creating philosophical debates about the relationships among science, religion, morality, education, race, economic progress, and national development. These debates continue to resonate as we think critically about the respective roles of scientific education—then called “positive” education, now “STEM” education—and moral education in the curricula used to educate a country’s youth while reconstructing their ethnoracial and national identities.
This chapter maps the fabrication and appropriation of positivism on a global scale. It particularizes and provincializes positivist universalism. Providing a comparative study of Auguste Comte’s and John Stuart Mill’s conceptions of positivism, it also shows how their disciples pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry that encompassed nature and society, a new science to enlighten mankind and ameliorate their living conditions. Positivists envisaged one world united by science, but their efforts spawned many. Our fresh approach to global intellectual history demonstrates that positivism was no ready-made message recycled across the globe: initially grafted in response to the local problems of English and French societies, positivism was deracinated, tweaked, and adjusted while being re-elaborated by activists from Rio de Janeiro and Bengal, Istanbul and Vienna.
The legacies of positivism were contradictory: promising to reconcile the study of nature and culture, positivists invented natural science as a distinct field whose superiority over the humanities they asserted. Positivists devised a secular worldview but were deeply steeped in practices of spiritual regeneration, praising religion as an agent of social cohesion. Positivists sought to reconcile their universalism with the promotion of cultural diversity, but often ended up suppressing co-citizens of other languages and creeds. While Comte’s disciples demolished Western civilizational superiority and castigated imperialism, colonialism, and Christian missions, Mill’s followers often justified empire as the highroad to global representative democracy. Positivism reinvented science, basing it on observable causal regularities of similarity and succession, and it transformed politics by predicating governance on the findings this new science yielded. This chapter provides insights into all of these points.