Elena Plaza’s essay is a product of the current approach in Venezuelan historiography to reassess the turn-of-the-century positivist generation, of which José Gil Fortoul was a distinguished representative. Because of their overall political identification with the Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorial regime (1908-35), the Venezuelan positivists, as a whole, have been viewed as a group of reactionary intellectuals, and their scholarly works bitterly criticized or simply dismissed as the antiquated ideological tools of a bygone age. This was the case even for Gil Fortoul, whose most important book, the three-volume Historia constitucional de Venezuela, remained, for many years, the only major general history of Venezuela written in the twentieth century.
In her attempt to explain and understand Gil Fortoul’s thought, as applied to his interpretation of history, Plaza uses various lines of investigation: the historical and cultural context in which the author lived; the theoretical sources that influenced him as well as the use he made of them when studying Venezuela’s past; and the discussions and debates between 1907 and 1909 that stemmed from the publication of the Historia constitucional.
In this respect, Plaza’s work helps fill a void in Venezuelan historiography. Her thorough study of the sources cited by Gil Fortoul contributes, particularly, to broadening the scope of what positivism really meant in Venezuela as a method of analysis: not merely the application of the doctrines of Auguste Comte or Herbert Spencer, but the eclectic use of a wide range of current works on the social sciences as a whole. Gil Fortoul did not seek philosophical consistency, but was primarily interested in redefining parameters for the interpretation of his country’s past and present conditions. For Plaza, positivism thus represented a true intellectual revolution for Venezuelan historical thought.
