10 - Early Liberalism

Summary

This chapter is primarily interested in exploring the origins and development of liberalism during the revolutionary and early republican period of nineteenth century Spanish America. It first considers the peculiarities of the Spanish crisis of 1808 in the context of the Atlantic crisis of the European monarchies and also evaluates the assimilation of the Enlightened agenda by the Catholic Spanish political culture. The second part the chapter introduces the relevance of the idea of emancipation and considers the characteristics it adopted in the Spanish World as a keystone of the constitutional cultures that flourished in the area. The last part of this chapter shows the limits of a theory of emancipation in Catholic societies and how the new republics (and the Spanish liberal monarchy as well) had to deal with limits to constituent power posed by the assumption that the Spanish were societies with a “national God.” Depending on the solutions proposed and adopted to the limits of emancipation different branches of liberalism developed, debated among them and very often went to civil wars.