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ANDRES BELLO AND THE CHALLENGES OF SPANISH AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

James Dunkerley
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Abstract

Andrés Bello (1781–1865) is generally reckoned to be the foremost intellectual amongst opponents of the Spanish empire in the Americas after the Napoleonic Wars. This paper provides a synoptic account of Bello's development as a scholar, politician and statesman from his early career as a servant of the crown in colonial Caracas, through his nineteen-year exile in London, to his prominent role in the institutional design and management of the young Chilean republic. The paper traces the historiographical treatment of Bello and the application of his cosmopolitan learning to the tasks of nineteenth-century state-building. It is suggested that his trajectory reflected a successful adaptation of liberal precepts to a conservative local social setting within a world order dominated by British promotion of free trade.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 24 , December 2014 , pp. 105 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2014 

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References

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66 In the Filosofía he states, ‘There is for man a future destiny capable of satisfying his aspirations. The human soul survives death’, OC, iii, 221. Lastarria ridiculed Bello for his conviction that a wealthy merchant and his new young spouse had seen the ghost of his first, murdered wife at a banquet, saying he had heard it as evidence in their subsequent trial. Bocaz, Andrés Bello, 204.

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72 ‘Our true Patria is that rule of conduct indicated by the rights, obligations and functions that we have and that we owe each other; it is that rule which establishes public and private order, which strengthens, secures and imparts all their vigor to the relationships that unite us, and forms that body of associations of rational beings in which we find the only good, the only desirable thing in our country. Therefore that rule is our Patria, and that rule is law, without which everything disappears’. ‘On the Observance of the Laws’ (1836), SW, 263.