In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

185 Conclusion A Hemisphere Created for the Page If, as Jorge Luis Borges asserts, every new writer “creates his precursors ” (crea a sus precursores) (109), forcing a reimagination of the literary past on the part of readers and critics, then the recovery of Simón Rodríguez cannot help but produce repercussions. In the case of a writer so long forgotten, the re-creation of the canon necessary to accommodate his work invites another imaginary history, one in which Sociedades Americanas became a widely cited touchstone for Spanish American social criticism, and in which Rodríguez’s notion of “social education” became as common a term as Miranda and Martí’s “Nuestra América.” Of course such an imaginary history would be false, and so the reconstructed Rodríguez suffers the peculiar fate of being read into a twenty-first-century vision of the Spanish American project to which he did not contribute, a project created at least in part by excluding heterodox voices. Susana Rotker has pointed out that Rodríguez’s definition of social virtue as a deeply felt “sympathy between equals” (simpatía entre iguales) remains “transgressive” (transgresora) a century and a half after his death (“Simón Rodríguez” 57). Rodríguez’s contradictions make it difficult to categorize him within the dominant reading of Spanish American enlightenment as a clash between European ideals and practical realities. An experienced European traveler, Rodríguez insisted on an American privilege of discernment—the privilege to investigate European (and U.S.) history and apply it when necessary without feeling bound to it and without imagining that application as an invasion into an imagined autochthonous reality. With his insistence on imagining human progress according to a vision of enlightenment as a universal project in the broadest sense of the 186 Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar word, that is, as universally human rather than as the result of an imposed European and imperial unity, Rodríguez sees free thought as always and everywhere an original act. Nor does this idealistic notion of human reasonableness necessarily put him at odds with the complication of his time. The list of Rodríguez’s political positions reveals anything but an obsession with an idée fixe in defiance of his surrounding reality. Foreseeing the dire economic consequences of the free trade promoted by Bolívar and others for Spanish America’s artisan economy and agriculture, Rodríguez proposed industrialization with homegrown capital, and a conscious government effort to populate uninhabited lands with Spanish American colonists. An anticlerical, freethinking revolutionary, he proposed religious tolerance rather than “freedom of religion,” concerned that U.S.- or British-style proliferation of sects would erode the Catholic Church’s role as a force for social cohesion. Finally, as a lifelong advocate of a professional teaching corps (an attitude that put him at odds with Joseph Lancaster , one of Bolívar’s favorite reformers), Rodríguez tended to propose his schools as small, locally funded units, which made them more closely resemble Thomas Jefferson’s vision of municipal “wards” than a Jacobin vision of education as a machine for controlling public opinion. If the postrevolutionary period inspired an epidemic of soul-searching in which learned Spanish Americans turned their gazes back across the Atlantic, expecting to find their governmental magic bullet “not as a function of their own reality but in comparison with the European model” (no en función de la propia realidad sino por comparación con el modelo europeo ) even as they searched for an original solution, Rodríguez sought to defuse that model by scripting an America in which enlightenment would be an ongoing pedagogical process (Rotker, “Evangelio” 32). Bolívar , for example, would complain about the gap between republican ideals and the public “material” of which the Spanish American republics were actually made up, invoking Montesquieu and the need to reconcile “the business of the legislatures” with “the spirit of the nation” (Montesquieu 294). What Bolívar was warning against, of course, was the implementation of a federalist system modeled on the United States in a society with a much thinner experience of self-rule. Where the Liberator’s search for a golden mean led him to combine in the constitution of Bolivia a life long presidency with a parliamentary structure, a kind of hybrid between a monarchist and republican conception of government, Rodríguez opted, in both a temporal and a hierarchal sense, for the bottom-up approach of first...

Share