In Pensamiento de la Ilustración, José Carlos Chiaramonte provides an interpretation of the Latin American Enlightenment as well as a selection of social and economic works written during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his introduction, Chiaramonte examines some of the principal historiographical questions concerning the Enlightenment. Did Latin America participate in that intellectual movement? If so, was it anti-Spanish and therefore a cause of Independence? Was the Enlightenment a foreign ideology, or was it a natural development of Latin American thought? The author argues that Latin America did participate in the Enlightenment, but it did so principally through reformist ideas transmitted to the area via Spain and Portugal. In his opinion, the ideas were neither anti-Christian nor anti-Spanish, and therefore cannot be considered causal factors in the movement for Independence.
Chiaramonte minimizes the importance of local ideological development, arguing that reform-minded Bourbon officials introduced selected aspects of the Enlightenment to the New World. In this fashion, the Europeans prevented the spread of radical social and political ideas in the colonies. It is no doubt true that Latin America reacted to Old World ideas and events, but the author ignores recent studies, which demonstrate that the colonies had a strong reformist intellectual tradition and that peninsular officials only enhanced an already active intellectual movement. This is particularly true for Mexico where Roberto Moreno has demonstrated that the Enlightenment evolved through a series of stages and that criollo scholars were influential in shaping the direction and content of eighteenth-century thought. He and others have argued that the first part of the century was a time of internal intellectual development and that reformist Iberian ideas entered the New World at the end of the eighteenth century. Years ago, John Tate Lanning amply demonstrated that Central Americans were familiar with the latest as well as the most radical ideas of their time. They rejected many of them, not because of censorship, but because they evaluated them critically and found many of them unsuited to their needs.
Chiaramonte’s choice of readings underscores his belief that peninsulars played a crucial role in the Latin American Enlightenment. He fails to include early eighteenth-century socioeconomic writings by Latin Americans, concentrating instead on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works. This concentration naturally leads him to overemphasize the role of the European reformers. Despite these criticisms, Chiaramonte’s volume is a useful addition to the growing literature on the Latin American Enlightenment. The introduction provides a good synthesis of the ongoing debate about the nature of the Latin American Enlightenment. And his selections make important works more readily available both to scholars and to students. He includes selections by peninsular reformers, like Abad y Quiepo’s Representación sobre la inmunidad personal del clero, as well as writings by well-known Americans, such as Baquíjano’s Disertación, Salas’s Representación, and Belgrano’s Memoria.
