Latin American Positivism

The claim

Societies pass through theological, metaphysical and positive stages. A new republic should be built on scientific principles, run by those trained in them, and cleared of clerical and metaphysical inheritance.

What it held

Positivism did more in Latin America than anywhere else, including France. Comte's stage theory offered new republics an explanation of their condition — still emerging from the theological stage — and a programme for leaving it: scientific education, industrial development, and administration by trained men.

In Mexico, Gabino Barreda reorganised secondary education on positivist lines in 1867 and the científicos who governed under Porfirio Díaz took their name and their justification from it. In Brazil, positivist officers helped depose the emperor in 1889, and the words on the national flag — ordem e progresso — are Comte's.

The costs became visible. Order was consistently prioritised over progress; the stage theory implied that indigenous populations were backward and licensed treating them as an obstacle; and a philosophy of scientific administration turned out to be a serviceable justification for not holding elections.

The reaction came from within. Justo Sierra and the Ateneo de la Juventud attacked it in Mexico in the years before the 1910 revolution, and Caso and Vasconcelos built their philosophies against it.

How it argued

Educational reform, institutional design and public administration, with philosophy applied directly as policy.

What it was arguing against

Church control of education, colonial legal inheritance, and what positivists regarded as metaphysical thinking generally.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the authoritarian outcome follows from the philosophy or from local conditions. Whether positivism's racial hierarchies were incidental or built in.

Common misconceptions

That it was merely imported. Latin American positivists modified Comte substantially for local conditions, and the Brazilian version included a religion of humanity with actual temples, one of which still operates in Rio.

How it began

Independence had produced republics without a settled basis, and Comte offered a philosophy of order that was not the church's.

What became of it

Discredited by the Mexican Revolution and by the reaction of the following generation, which found it had provided cover for dictatorship.

Lasting influence

Mexican and Brazilian state formation, education systems and the Brazilian flag. Its rejection is the founding moment of twentieth-century Latin American philosophy.

Why it still matters

It is the clearest case of a philosophy of scientific governance becoming a justification for technocratic authoritarianism, which is not a closed subject.

Put another way

A motto on a flag, with the first word doing most of the work.

Where to start

Zea's study. It explains what the philosophy was for and what it did.

The surprising bit

Ordem e Progresso on the Brazilian flag is taken from Comte's formula, love as a principle, order as a basis, progress as a goal — with the love quietly dropped.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Latin American Scholasticism

Influenced

Mexican Hyperion Group

The verdict

The most politically successful philosophy in Latin American history, and the one its successors defined themselves by rejecting.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy