Prolegomena on the Spanish American Political Tradition

IT IS THE PURPOSE of this essay to raise some questions about a central dogma held by many writers on Latin American politics. A typical interpretation asserts that there is little doubt that the Latin American ideal of government for more than a century and a half has been that of political democracy. I This is largely taken for granted. While few members of the intellectual community now engaged in Latin American research are specifically studying political ideology, it appears to me that many of us, whether beginning with a consensus or a conflict model, implicitly assume Latin American approval of democracy.2 In this we are following a long academic tradition, albeit with new methods. Most North Americans tend to believe that a stable, viable Latin America would be a democratic Latin America. They derive that conviction from scholarly perceptions of early nineteenth-century political thought in Latin America. And this democratic argument is based upon two propositions: that Latin Americans borrowed the form and substance of their government; and that they failed to implant the alien system because they lacked political preparation. Writers who make these assumptions see the United States and French polities evolving out of their past despite certain foreign borrowings of an ideological and institutional nature. By contrast they often portray