Liberal Literati (original) (raw)

LIBERAL IDEAS AND PATRIMONIAL PRACTICES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICA

published in Francisco Colom González & Angel Rivero (eds.): The Traditions of Liberty in the Atlantic World. Origins, Ideas and Practices. Leiden – Boston, Brill, 2016, pp. 169-197, ISBN: 978-90-04-29964-1

This work tries to explain the socio-cultural basis of the 'patrimonial' type of liberalism that spread through the Iberian world after the American and the French Revolutions. The overthrow of the King of Spain and the escape of the Portuguese sovereign to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars radically changed the relations of the Iberian metropolis with their overseas colonies, which eventually led to their independence. In this context, liberal ideas not only legitimized the termination of the colonial bond, but also bolstered subsequent attempts to create modern state institutions on both sides of the Iberian Atlantic. However, even if political power was constituted and upheld differently in each country, some practices - like patronage networks, patrimonialism and praetorianism - were widespread and recurrent. The ritual invocation and political functionality of liberal ideas in this particular context demands for a deeper social and cultural explanation, for however instable or contradictory nineteenth-century Iberian and Latin American politics were, they were systematically worded in the language of liberalism. It is here maintained that such patrimonial practices were a result of the material circumstances under which decolonization and state formation took place, but that they also enjoyed an ingrained legitimacy deriving from the normative universe of the pre-liberal era.