Reinventing Modernity in Latin America

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Since the 1930s, Anglo-American scholars have been grumbling about the paucity of good works treating the intellectual history of Latin America. Despite a slowly growing literature and a consensus that the region has nurtured some of the world's most imaginative artists and writers, few historians today feel compelled to rectify the situation, preferring to leave the subfield to their colleagues in literary or cultural studies. The reasons for this resigned neglect are multiple. The vogue of intellectual history - that most American of historiographical inventions - had already passed by the time academic research on Latin America took off in the 1960s and 1970s, and subsequent decades brought only increased epistemological and moral-political skepticism about the historical study of ideas. The decision to focus on intellectuals could also provoke charges of elitism or irrelevance, especially given Latin America's long-standing problems of socioeconomic inequality and political instability. Finally, many scholars born outside the region and trained in a single spe-cialty simply felt unqualified to tackle such a vast and erudite subject.Over the last decade, Nicola Miller has led the charge to reopen the study of Latin American intellectual history in the English-speaking world. In so doing she has earned a place among the great practitioners of the field such as Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Luis Romero, Leopoldo Zea, Richard M. Morse, and Charles A. Hale. In the Shadow of the State (London, 1999) established Miller as a perceptive and critical historian of twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals, dispelling the myth of the pensador whose search for national identity compensated for a weak civil society. Her rather pessimistic account, in which artists and writers from the 1920s to the 1970s failed to achieve sufficient distance from the state, has now found its complement in an affirmative study of four thinkers from earlier in the century: José Enrique Rodó (Uruguay, 1871 - 1917), Juan B. Justo (Argentina, 1865 - 1928), Alfonso Reyes (Mexico, 1889 - 1959), and José Carlos Mariátegui (peru, 1894 - 1930). Though recognizing that these disparate figures comprised no unified group or generation, Miller contends that their writings collectively promoted an alternative Latin American vision of modernity, one that rejected both the technocratic, Westernizing modernization project of the contemporary liberal elite and the growing antimodern essentialism of conservative nationalists.This argument unfolds over a series of extended essays on the individual authors, each of which highlights a different Latin American revision of European thought: Rodó's humanizing critique of pure instrumental reason, Justo's attempt to envision a fully democratic public sphere, Reyes's rejection of history as linear progress in favor of creative synthesis, and Mariátegui's flexible adaptation of Marxist revolutionary theory to local circumstances and the problem of culture. The case-by-case approach naturally has advantages and disadvantages. Among the former, Miller's in-depth focus on each author allows her to put into practice her generous contextual method, which situates ideas in "both the conditions of their production and the history of their reception" (p. 9), and which puts canonical texts back into relation with lesser-known works and contemporary public debates. The chapter on Rodó stands as a fine example of this kind of intellectual history and will likely become the standard complement to Ariel (1900) in the classroom. Miller's close examination of individual thinkers also helps her dispel the easy labels foisted upon them (elitist, Hellenist, Hispanist, indigenista, etc.) by revealing the contingencies and local circumstances that shaped their intellectual development. We learn, for instance, that Mariátegui the indigenista spent only three weeks in the Peruvian highlands, but lived in Italy for nearly three years.The disadvantages of Miller's approach include the difficulty of making sustained comparisons across cases and a tendency to privilege personal, national, and even trans-historical contexts over broader turn-of-the-century Latin American intellectual currents. The book provides a cumulative rather than integrated portrait of the four thinkers' distinctive vision of modernity - an "archipelago" (p. 15) of positions that "aimed to integrate critique, autonomy, progress, and universalism with spiritual quest, social solidarity, hospitality, and an ethic of authenticity" (p. 9). To her credit, Miller acknowledges that most of these Latin American alternatives to the dominant Western bourgeois scientific-rationalist-evolutionist view of modernization had European analogues (if not roots); her point is not to isolate an autochthonous regional revision of modernity but to demonstrate Latin America's unique contributions to a larger transatlantic conversation. Sometimes the historical dimensions of this discussion get lost in Miller's attempt to show how her protagonists anticipated later European theorists or debates now current in Latin American cultural studies. By contrast, she says surprisingly little about the conventional categories of early twentieth-century Latin American thought, namely idealism and modernismo. Nevertheless, this study breaks new ground and challenges the next cadre of intellectual historians to assimilate its multilayered discussion of the ambivalence - at once universal and particularly Latin American - of becoming modern

Historiography · Intellectual history · Miller · Skepticism · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Latin American Cultural Politics · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

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