Public sphere in Latin America: a map of the historiography
2010; Routledge; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03071021003795055
ISSN1470-1200
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Cultural Politics
ResumoAbstract "Public sphre" is often used by historians of modern Latin America without much concern about its theoretical and methodological implications. Some historians have used it as a model to fit evidence about public debates and politics during the modern period, yet few have engaged it as a theory with deeper methodological and conceptual implications. This article will review the historical literature that has applied Habermas's ideas to Latin American history. Focusing on a few particularly important books, the article will examine potential avenues for research and comparisons. Rather than becoming a new orthodoxy for the study of the region, the theory of the public sphere is establishing a dialogue among historians interested in intellectual phenomena and political discourse (most of them centered on the history of liberalism after independence) and those historians whose interest in social formations have framed their study in terms of hegemony and class domination. The article will argue that a critical use of Habermas's ideas (one that is more systematic about the gender and class exclusions built into the bourgeois public sphere, and that problematizes the connections between the specific development of capitalism in peripheral regions and their embrace of European political traditions) could yield useful results in terms of new research and an inclusive synthesis of recent literature interested in politics, culture and hegemony in Latin America. Notes 1Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA, 1991). I am indebted to Tom Klubock, Thom Rath, Federico Sor and Mary Kay Vaughan for their comments on earlier drafts. This article was also discussed at the Columbia University's Department of History graduate faculty workshop and at the New School's workshop of Latin American Studies. I thank Karl Wennerlind, Herbert Sloan, Claudio Lomnitz and Paul Gootenberg for their comments. 2The danger, of course, is that of creating 'un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el tamaño del imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él'. 'El rigor de la ciencia' in Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas II 1952–1972 (Barcelona, 1996). This map will have Mexico as the centre. It is a result of my background and I hope it can be excused as a geographical convention. 3See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, 1987), 37. Juan Carlos Portantiero, 'Foundations of a new politics', Report on the Americas, xxv, 5 (1991), 19; Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemonía y estrategia socialista: Hacia una radicalización de la democracia, trans. Ernesto Laclau (Buenos Aires, 2004). 4For Alan Brinkley, 'Democrats need to turn much of their attention away from culture and back toward class.' See Brinkley, 'What's next? The mourning period is over. Now, four simple guidelines for becoming a majority party', The American Prospect Online Edition, January 2004. See also forum on the election in The Nation, 20 December 2004. Available online at: http://www.thenation.com/issue.mhtml?i=20041220. See Jürgen Habermas, 'Discourse ethics: notes on a program of philosophical justification' in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, 1990). For the normative implications of the public-sphere model, see Nancy Fraser, 'Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy', Social Text, nos 25/26 (1990). See also Thomas A. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, first MIT Press paperback edition (Cambridge, 1981), chap. 1; Jürgen Habermas, Ciencia y técnica como 'ideología' (Mexico City, 1993). Implicit in Habermas's idea of 'communicative rationality' is 'the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech': Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1984), 10. 5Arthur Strum, 'A bibliography on the concept of Öffentlichkeit', New German Critique, lxi (1994). Habermas refers to 'seminal theories', like those by Freud and Marx, that 'inserted a genuinely philosophical idea like a detonator into a particular context of research' resulting in 'hybrid discourses' that may be criticized from the academic establishment but could generate 'new research traditions'. Jürgen Habermas, 'Philosophy as stand-in and interpreter' in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, op. cit., 15. 6The OED provides two examples of the term, both dated 1992. See entries for 'maternalize' and 'nonsensification', Oxford English Dictionary (available online at: http://www.oed.com/). For the parallel with Weber see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988), 10. 7Habermas links the public sphere with his theory of communicative action at a 'fundamental' level: Jürgen Habermas, 'Further reflections on the public sphere', Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, 1997), 422, 41. Other scholars, mentioned below, have already suggested the need to confront analyses based on Gramsci and Habermas. 8Habermas's initial definition is tentative and contains the diversity of issues outlined above: 'The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people's public use of their reason.' See Habermas, Structural Transformation, op. cit., 27. See also Jürgen Habermas, 'The public sphere: an encyclopaedia article', New German Critique, iii (1974). On the historical character of the definition, see Moishe Postone, 'Political theory and historical analysis' in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, op. cit. 9James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (New York, 2001), 10, 12. 10For similar agendas see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1977). 11Geoff Eley, 'Nations, publics, and political cultures: placing Habermas in the nineteenth century' in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner (eds), Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, 1994); also published in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, op. cit. 12Joan B. Landes, 'The public and the private sphere: a feminist reconsideration' in Landes (ed.), Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford, 1998), 2, 142–3. See also Craig Calhoun, 'Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere' in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, op. cit., 34–5; Seyla Benhabib, 'Models of public space: Hannah Arendt, the liberal tradition, and Jürgen Habermas' in ibid., 92. 13Harold Mah, 'Phantasies of the public sphere: rethinking the Habermas of historians', Journal of Modern History, lxxii, 1 (2000). I owe this reference to Samuel Moyn. 14Habermas, Structural Transformation, op. cit., 27, 55; Melton, The Rise, op. cit.; Daniel Gordon, 'Philosophy, sociology, and gender in the Enlightenment conception of public opinion', French Historical Studies, xvii, 4 (1992), 889, 901; Keith Michael Baker, 'Defining the public sphere in eighteenth-century France: variations on a theme by Habermas' in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, op. cit., 202. 15Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC, 1991); Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Rosemary Morris (University Park, PA, 1994). See also Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, op. cit.; Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990); Sarah C. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Pre-revolutionary France (Berkeley, 1993). 16For a bibliography of the diversity of work, historical and otherwise, inspired by the model see Strum, op. cit. A similar census would probably be impossible today. See also Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 'The public sphere: models and boundaries' in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, op. cit., 108. For an example of these possibilities see Madeleine Hurd, Public Spheres, Public Mores, and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor, 2000). 17See a discussion of the implications of this from the point of view of Mexican history in Pablo Piccato, 'Introducción: ¿Modelo para armar? Hacia un acercamiento crítico a la teoría de la esfera pública' in Cristina Sacristán and Pablo Piccato (eds), Actores, espacios y debates en la historia de la esfera pública en la ciudad de México (Mexico City, 2005). See also Hispanic American Historical Review, lxxix, 2 (1999); Pablo Piccato, 'Conversación con los difuntos: una perspectiva Mexicana ante el debate sobre la historia cultural', Signos Históricos, viii (2002). 18François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid , 2000), 117; Francois-Xavier Guerra, México: del Antiguo Régimen a la Revolución (Mexico City, 1988). 19Carmen McEvoy, La utopía republicana: Ideales y realidades en la formación de la cultura política peruana, 1871–1919 (Lima, 1997), 11; Carmen McEvoy, 'Seríamos excelentes vasallos y nunca ciudadanos: prensa republicana y cambio social en Lima, 1791–1822' in Ivan Jaksic (ed.), The Political Power of the Word: Press and Oratory in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (London, 2002), 37. See also Richard A. Warren, Vagrants and Citizens: Politics and the Masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic (Wilmington, 2001), 170. After independence, 'Lo radicalmente nuevo es la creación de una escena pública': Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, op. cit., 13, 23, 87. This parallels Benedict Anderson's claim that 'the convergence of capitalism and print technology … created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation', and his focus on American Creole identities as early examples of this process. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London, 1983), 46. Concepts like el pueblo or lo público also had a history that illustrated the incorporation of traditional and modern notions, as explored by Annick Lempérière in 'Reflexiones sobre la terminología política del liberalismo' in Carlos Illades, Brian Connaughton and Sonia Pérez Toledo (eds), Construcción de la legitimidad política en México (Zamora, 1999). 20Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, op. cit., 30. See François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978). For Palti, Guerra's use of Habermas lacked a 'strong' critique of the public-sphere model and failed to recognize Raymond Kosseleck's work as a necessary antecedent. Furet and Cochin were decisive in Guerra's work to strengthen that critique, without embracing 'las teorías multiculturalistas "posmodernas"'. Elías José Palti, 'Guerra y Habermas: ilusiones y realidad de la esfera pública Latinoamericana' in Erika Pani and Alicia Salmerón (eds), Conceptualizar lo que se ve: François-Xavier Guerra historiador, homenaje (Mexico City, 2004), 466. 21See Dena Goodman, 'Public sphere and private life: toward a synthesis of current historiographical approaches to the Old Regime', History and Theory, xxxi, 1 (1992), 8, 12. Guerra's explicit rejection of Habermas's Marxism in Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, op. cit., 86n, 87, 14. For studies inspired by Guerra's insights and a closer connection to local contexts, see Francois-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière (eds), Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica: Ambigüedades y problemas: Siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico, 1999). For the public sphere as part of the politicization of new national societies, see Pilar González Bernaldo, 'Sociabilidad, espacio urbano y politización en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (1820–1852)' in Hilda Sabato and Alberto Rodolfo Lettieri (eds), La vida política en la Argentina del siglo XIX: armas, votos y voces (Buenos Aires, 2003), 199. 22Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, op. cit., 12, 101. Such characterization of the socio-economic impact and causes of the revolutions of independence is challenged in John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, 1988); Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford, 2001). 23Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, op. cit., 17, 91, 234. The Habermasian focus on 'a new, autonomous, free, and sovereign public' implies a marked alternative from Furet's Tocquevillian emphasis on associations and modes of sociability as the base for a modern public opinion. Chartier, Cultural Origins, op. cit., 16–17. 24Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, op. cit., 52, 99. Guerra's emphasis on culture fits well with older visions of 'Latin American culture' as something clearly identifiable; for Edmundo O'Gorman, this common identity meant that the influence of the United States is negligible in the emergence of a Latin American political culture. Edmundo O'Gorman, 'Hegel y el moderno panamericanismo', Letras de México, ii, 8 (1939). See Charles Hale, 'Edmundo O'Gorman y la historia nacional', Signos Históricos, ii, 3 (2000), 17, 24. Absent is a problematization of neo-colonialism as an informal and subordinate mode of entering modernity. See Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC, 1993). 25McEvoy, La utopía republicana, op. cit., 11. 26McEvoy, 'Seríamos excelentes vasallos', op. cit. For similar insights, to be examined below, see Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC, 1996). 27McEvoy, 'Seríamos excelentes vasallos', op. cit. 28Rafael Rojas, La escritura de la independencia: El surgimiento de la opinión pública en México (Mexico City, 2003), 17, 34, 35, 62. 29 ibid., 35. See also Fernando Escalante, Ciudadanos imaginarios: Memorial de los afanes y desventuras de la virtud y apología del vicio triunfante en la República Mexicana: Tratado de Moral Pública (Mexico, 1993). For recent studies of monarchist sentiment in Mexico see Erika Pani, Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio: el imaginario político de los imperialistas (Mexico City, 2001); Elías José Palti (ed.), La política del disenso: La 'polémica en torno al monarquismo' (México, 1848–1850) … y las aporías del liberalismo (Mexico City, 1998). If in the end the new nations rejected liberal monarchism, explains Rojas, it was because of the revolutionary logic of insurgency and the consequent loyalist response, but not because of any inherently democratic feature of the new public sphere. Rojas, La escritura, op. cit., 49. 30José Antonio Aguilar, 'Dos conceptos de república' in José Antonio Aguilar and Rafael Rojas (eds), El republicanismo en hispanoamérica: Ensayos de historia intelectual y política (Mexico City, 2002), 63. See McEvoy, 'Seríamos excelentes vasallos', op. cit., 43. 31For the 'tradición republicana' as the centre of a long-term political history of Mexico that stresses local and corporative representation over democracy and equality, see Alicia Hernández Chávez, La tradición republicana del buen gobierno (Mexico, 1993); Antonio Annino, 'Ciudadanía versus gobernabilidad republicana en México: Los orígenes de un dilema' in Hilda Sábato (ed.), Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones: Perspectivas históricas de América Latina (Mexico City, 1999). For a similar perspective (the intellectual history à la Cambridge, invoked by Aguilar), see Gordon, 'Philosophy, sociology, and gender', op. cit., 883–5, 888, 891. 32Elías José Palti, 'Las polémicas en el liberalismo argentino: Sobre virtud' and Aguilar and Rojas (eds), 'Republicanismo y lenguaje' in op. cit., 167. 33Elías José Palti, La invención de una legitimidad: Razón y retórica en el pensamiento mexicano del siglo XIX (Un estudio sobre las formas del discurso político) (Mexico City, 2005). 34Elías José Palti, 'La transformación del liberalismo mexicano en el siglo XIX: Del modelo jurídico de la opinión pública al modelo estratégico de la sociedad civil' in Sacristán and Piccato (eds), Actores, op. cit.; see also Carlos Illades and Kuri Ariel Rodríguez (eds), Instituciones y ciudad. Ocho estudios históricos sobre la ciudad de México (Mexico City, 2000); Brian Connaughton, Carlos Illades and Sonia Pérez Toledo (eds), La construcción de la legitimidad política en México (Mexico City, 1999). On France and public opinion see Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, op. cit.; Mona Ozouf, 'Le concept d'opinion publique au XVIIIème siècle' in L'Homme régénéré Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1989); Farge, Subversive Words, op. cit. 35Palti, La invención de una legitimidad, op. cit., 301; Elías José Palti, 'La Sociedad Filarmónica del Pito. Ópera, prensa y política en la República Restaurada (México, 1867–1976)', Historia Mexicana, lii, 4 (2003); Palti, 'La transformación del liberalismo', op. cit. Guerra, however, noted the importance of discussion to reach the 'verdad social' in a process that links private and public realms and contradictory interests. Unanimity, as in Palti's scheme, is only reached later: Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, op. cit., 270–1, 73. For similar processes in Argentina, see Palti, 'Las polémicas', op. cit. The 'judicial' mode of public opinion provides a useful framework for the recent interest in the history of rhetoric from its colonial, mostly religious uses, to the nineteenth-century uses of oratory in the building of nationalism. See Jaksic (ed.), op. cit. 36See also Elías José Palti, 'Introducción' in La política del disenso, op. cit.; Palti, 'La Sociedad Filarmónica del Pito', op. cit.; and Elías José Palti, 'Los diarios y el sistema político mexicano en tiempos de la República Restaurada (1867–1876)' in Alonso (ed.), Construcciones impresas, op. cit. On the increasing interest in the history of the press in Latin America see other chapters in the same volume; also Jaksic, op. cit.; Florence Toussaint Alcaraz, Escenario de la prensa en el Porfiriato (Mexico City, 1989); Miguel Ángel Castro (ed.), Tipos y caracteres: la prensa mexicana (1822–1855): memoria del coloquio celebrado los días 23, 24 y 25 septiembre de 1998 (Mexico City, 2001); María Cruz Seoane, Oratoria y periodismo en España del siglo XIX (Valencia, 1977); and Moises Guzman Pérez, 'Practiques de sociabilité et de lecture en Nouvelle-Espagne: L'evêche de Michoacán (1870–1910)', Bulletin de l'Institut Pierre Renouvin, xvii (2003). 37Jorge Myers, 'Las paradojas de la opinión: El discurso político rivadaviano y sus dos polos: El "gobierno de las luces" y la opinión pública, reina del mundo' in Sabato and Lettieri (eds), La vida política en la Argentina, op. cit., 80, 88, 93; José Elías Palti, 'Recent studies on the emergence of a public sphere in Latin America', Latin American Research Review, xxxvi, 2 (2001). On the political role of reason see McCarthy, Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, op. cit. 38See Silvia Arrom, 'Una nueva sociabilidad femenina: Las señoras de la caridad de San Vicente de Paul, 1863–1910', paper presented at the V Seminario Internacional Sobre la Experiencia Institucional de la Ciudad de México: 'Las Sociabilidades en la ciudad de México del siglo XIX a la Revolución, Mexico City', 23 June 2005; Guzman Pérez, op. cit.; Carlos A. Forment, Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900 (Chicago, 2003); and Carlos Herrejón Peredo, 'Sermones y discursos del primer imperio' in Illades, Connaughton and Pérez Toledo (eds), op. cit. After independence, the influence of Rome became strong again, to become hegemonic only late in the nineteenth century. On Palafox and the Jesuits see Charles E. P. Simmons, 'Palafox and his critics: reappraising a controversy', Hispanic American Historical Review, xlvi, 4 (1966). 39See, for example, William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, 1996); Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln, 2004). 40Palti, 'Recent studies', op. cit. 41The exclusive focus on 'progressive scholars', without a reference to Guerra, in Steve Stern, 'Between tragedy and promise: the politics of writing Latin American history in the late twentieth century' in G. M. Joseph (ed.), Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North (Durham, NC, 2001), 41. Guerra's books are not mentioned in that volume and his influential México: del antiguo régimen a la revolución, op. cit., still awaits an English translator. It is not easy to document the absence of a dialogue, but the lack of works bringing together the authors mentioned in these pages might be evidence of this. 42Palti, 'Recent studies', op. cit. and Luis Fernando Granados, 'Calpultin decimonónicos: Aspectos nahuas de la cultura política de la ciudad de México' in Sacristán and Piccato (eds), op. cit. For a critique of the teleology in the model of the public sphere see Francois-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière, 'Introducción' in Guerra and Lempérière (eds), Los espacios públicos, op. cit., 9. The criticism does not apply to Habermas's view of modern rationalism and its teleological implications: Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, op. cit. 43For analyses of the complexities of those links see Peter Guardino, 'Barbarism or republican law? Guerrero's peasants and national politics, 1820–1846', Hispanic American Historical Review, lxxv, 2 (1995); Ariel de la Fuente, Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853–1870) (Durham, NC, 2000). 44For similar criticisms of the public-sphere model from the perspective of intellectual history see David A. Bell, 'The "public sphere", the state, and the world of law in eighteenth-century France', French Historical Studies, xvii, 4 (1992), 912–934; Gordon, 'Philosophy, sociology, and gender', op. cit., 889. Aguilar faults deterministic 'explicaciones que privilegian aspectos culturales': Aguilar, 'El republicanismo', op. cit., 3. 45Rojas, La escritura, op. cit., 181, 70, 85. The marginality of those writers is debatable considering the enormous number of publications they produced and the canonical stature of at least one of them, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. For a useful examination of Lizardi's central place in Mexican ideas about citizenship and identity, see Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican Masculinities (Minneapolis, 2003). 46Rojas, La escritura, op. cit., 45, 33. Who read and how the social context of audiences created diverse readings is a question asked by another growing group of scholars. See Chartier, Cultural Origins, op. cit.; Iain MacCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (London, 1992); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA, 1990); Melton, The Rise, op. cit.; Pablo Piccato, The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (Durham, NC, 2010). 47Habermas, Structural Transformation, op. cit., 18. 48Palti, 'Recent studies', op. cit.; Palti, 'Las polémicas', op. cit. Looking at honour disputes, I would disagree with the thesis that reputation was no longer the concern of the Mexican public in the late nineteenth century: Pablo Piccato, The Tyranny of Opinion, op. cit. See also, for Peru, Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park, PA, 1999), 92. In his critique of Maza's and Habermas's work, Bell notes the importance of subsidized press and courts of law as venues to express the same critical discourse that a strict Habermasian model would locate only in salons and independent newspapers: Bell, op. cit., 919, 926, 928, 937. 49Besides Guerra's works, see Annick Lempérière, Entre dieu et le roi, la république: Mexico, XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris, 2004); Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, 1999); Taylor, Magistrates, op. cit.; John L. Phelan, The People and the King. The Comunero Revolution in Colombia (Madison, 1978); Palti, 'Recent studies', op. cit.; and Antonio Annino, 'El Jano bifronte: Los pueblos y los orígenes del liberalismo en México' in Leticia Reina and Elisa Servín (eds), Crisis, Reforma y Revolución: México: Historias de Fin de Siglo (Mexico, 2002), 209. 50Víctor Uribe Uran, 'The birth of a public sphere in Latin America during the age of revolution', Comparative Studies in Society and History, xlii, 2 (2000), 425–7, 437, 439. This is the first systematic treatment of the public-sphere model in Latin America published in English. On the age of revolution see Uran, 'Introduction' in Víctor Uribe Uran (ed.), State and Society in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, 2001). For a fundamental statement in this direction see William B. Taylor, 'Between global process and local knowledge: an inquiry into early Latin American social history, 1500–1900' in Olivier Zunz (ed.), Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, 1985). But see Eric Van Young, 'Conclusions' in Uribe Uran (ed.), op. cit., 223, 236. A similar search for the seventeenth-century roots of the English public sphere in Steve Pincus, '"Coffee politicians does create": coffeehouses and Restoration political culture', Journal of Modern History, lxvii, 4 (1995). On trade and politicization, Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's 'Fictitious Prosperity' of Guano, 1840–1880 (Berkeley, 1993). 51See Mark Thurner, '"Republicanos" and "La Comunidad de Peruanos": unimagined political communities in post-colonial Andean Peru', Journal of Latin American Studies, xxvii, 2 (1995); Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison, 2002); Sergio Serulnikov, 'Disputed images of colonialism: Spanish rule and Indian subversion in northern Potosi, 1777–1780', Hispanic American Historical Review, lxxvi, 2 (1996); and Van Young, The Other Rebellion, op. cit. 52Warren, 'Vagrants', op. cit., 3, 19, 17; Malcom Deas, Del poder y la gramática: y otros ensayos sobre historia, política y literatura colombianas (Bogota, 1993), 179, 187; Guzman Pérez, 'Practiques de sociabilité', op. cit. See the seminal Tulio Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra. Formación de una élite dirigente en la Argentina criolla (Mexico, 1979). 53By the twentieth century, wrote Rama, 'the lettered city had itself been transformed … from a handful of elite letrados designing government policies in their own image, into a socially more heterogeneous group that retained a vision of itself as a cultural aristocracy but incorporated powerful democratizing cross-currents': Rama, The Lettered City, op. cit., 112, 142–3, 188–9, 102–3, 104, 113. On transculturation see 'Los procesos de transculturación en la narrativa latinoamericana' (1974) in Ángel Rama, La novela en América Latina: Panoramas 1920–1980 (Montevideo, 1986). The dictatorships of the 1970s, that forced Rama into exile, were an example of the manipulation of public opinion made possible by mass media, but also a source of new literary creativity, as in earlier phases of the Latin American lettered city. 'La censura como conciencia artística' (1979) in Ángel Rama, La riesgosa navegación del escritor exiliado (Montevideo, 1993), 233–48. Although I have found no evidence of any exchange between Habermas and Rama (Habermas's book was published in Spanish in 1981, two years before Rama's death in exile) it is clear that their syntheses shared a concern about the future of democracy. There is no reference to Habermas in Rama's diary. He had taken up German lessons in 1974, to be able to read Walter Benjamin in the original, so we can imagine an eventual coincidence. See Ángel Rama and Rosario Peyrou, Diario, 1974–1983 (Montevideo, 2001), 34. 54Rama, The Lettered City, op. cit., 47, 66. See also José Luis Romero, Latinoamérica: las ciudades y las ideas (Buenos Aires, 1976); James R. Scobie, Buenos Aries, from Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 (New York, 1974). On thinking the nation, Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis, 2001); Antonio Annino and François-Xavier Guerra, Inventando la nación: Iberoamérica siglo XIX (Mexico City, 2003), 1. Writing was also necessarily a means to exclude the plebe through aesthetic criteria. See Graciela Montaldo, Ficciones culturales y fábulas de identidad en América Latina (Rosario, Argentina, 1999), 29. 55Diane E. Davis, 'El rumbo de la esfera pública: Influencias locales, nacionales e internacionales en la urbanización del centro de la ciudad de México, 1910–1950' in Sacristán and Piccato (eds), op. cit. See, in that same volume, chapters by Georg Leidenberger and Luis Fernando Granados for other explorations of the urban dimension of the public sphere, and Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, 'Desabasto, hambre y respuesta política, 1915' in Carlos Illades and Ariel Rodríguez Kuri (eds), Instituciones y ciudad. Ocho estudios históricos sobre la ciudad de México (Mexico City, 2
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