The Vanguard of the Atlantic World challenges the history of nineteenth-century politics and state building in Latin America by redirecting the scholarly gaze toward ideas and writers left out of the traditional political narratives. The recent historiography of Latin America has reevaluated the role of popular movements in the period’s turbulent politics, challenging the view that condemned the Latin American republics as oligarchies dominated by creole elites where the masses served only as cannon fodder. Historians have shifted the narrative by demonstrating that indigenous villagers, Afro-mestizos, urban artisans, and Argentine gauchos engaged in politics with an eye to advancing their interests in coherent and consistent ways.
While most of the literature on the subject has sought to identify the “popular” actors and their impact on state formation, James E. Sanders’s volume challenges the traditional framework from the perspective of intellectual history. Since later generations of Latin American thinkers discarded the...
