Nation and State in Latin America: Political Language during Independence
Fundamentos intelectuales y políticos de las independencias: Notas para una nueva historia intelectual de Iberoamérica Available to Purchase

The two texts under review are not entirely new. Nation and State is an English translation of a book originally published in Spanish by Buenos Aires’s Editorial Sudamericana in 2004. Similarly, four of Fundamentos intelectuales’ seven chapters were published between 2004 and 2009 in various journals and the proceedings from an academic conference. Nevertheless, the English version of José Carlos Chiaramonte’s original Spanish text and the Spanish language assemblage of his previous articles, supplemented with three new ones, are valuable additions to the historiography. The former makes available to the English-reading public a text whose Spanish edition has gone out of print. The collection of essays, in turn, sheds further light on the significance of natural law in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual and political milieu. Together they help us better understand the intellectual and conceptual history of Latin American independence, a subject to which the author, director of...