The Moral Republic in the Early Nineteenth-Century Colombia

If the independence was a myth, an utopia, or a frustrated project was one of the questions that this number of Anales wanted to address. In this article, I want to suggest the independence was less a frustrated project or an unachievable utopia, and more a historical experience where central questions were raised: how to construct a political order? Which materials the actors would need to bring (and to bring back) to create it? What symbolic orders have to be considered to construct factual dominations and to create spaces of differentiated authority? In brief, how to produce and reproduce the political domination? I tackle these issues by highlighting one facet of this complex pos-colonial process: the key role of the moral concerns in the construction of the new political order. By doing this, I insist that we need to understand the texture of the political order in the nineteenth century since the anxieties, challenges, and ambiguities of its actors, rather than identify it as the epitome of the “political diseases” that seems to pervade our way to read Latin American nations throughout 19th and 20th centuries. In the first part of the text, I show the importance of the moral concerns in the construction of the republic. The second attempts to understand the republican project and its crossroads while the third section describes the moral order as a republican concern. Finally, the article concludes with a methodological suggestion: we need to historicize the political orders as cultural complexes and, thus, any attempt to understand them would represent an effort to establish the horizon of meaning in which they emerged.

• Fecha de publicación: 2010
• Institución: Universidad del Rosario
• Repositorio: Repositorio EdocUR - U. Rosario
• Idioma: eng
• OAI Identifier: oai:repository.urosario.edu.co:10336/27088
• Acceso en línea: https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/27088
• Palabra clave: The moral republic; Early nineteenth-century; Colombia
• License: Abierto (Texto Completo)