The Intellectuals and the Crisis of Modern Peruvian Nationalism

1870-1919

Bibliographic Data

ID2804789
AuthorsJesús Chavarría (0000-0001-5864-2899, corresponding author)
Year1970
Volume50
Issue2
Pages257
Publication date1970-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2513026
OpenAlexW4239966257
LanguageEN
Citations received8

T HE MODERN HISTORY of Peru dawned in last decades of nineteenth century. During crucial decade of 1870s, a crucial decade owing to magnitude of its political and economic events, articulate social groups, mainly in Lima, began to discuss critically Peru's backward and stagnant institutions. Constituting educated elites, these groups clamored for change, for need to unify and modernize Peruvian society. Thus modern-tempered social criticism appeared in Lima at a time of national crisis. Like nationalism in other lands modern Peruvian nationalism evolved out of an era of troubles and change. Intellectuals, first as individuals and later as organized groups, made up most vigorous social group pointing to crisis of 70s. This essay is an attempt to explain their social participation as a historical process. Inasmuch as that process involved a deeply felt ideological preoccupation with idea of nation, it may be called the crisis of modern Peruvian nationalism. But crisis of modern Peruvian nationalism involved more than criticism of society in ideological terms; it also involved personal crises-moral, intellectual, and political-which individual intellectuals faced as a result of their social criticism. Willy-nilly, social criticism turned intellectuals into not only critics but also militant opponents of men of power who governed Peru. Traumas of conscience, moreover, also beset many intellectuals because of moral-intellectual implications of their social criticism. The intellectuals' commitment to a modernizing nationalism involved a dual conflict. Partly or entirely, they opposed traditional Peruvian social values which largely rested on authoritarian religious and philosophical assumptions like natural law. Colonial Peru's Christian-scholastic idealism provided not only a religious but also a social catechism for society. Yet breach between such values and actual social practices could not have been greater, so

Economic history · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American Cultural Politics · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America

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