2010/05/01 by Pablo Piccato · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Latin American Cultural Politics #Politics and Society in Latin America #Religion and Society in Latin America
paper · doi:10.1080/03071021003795055
openalex publication_date 2010/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
“Public sphre” is often used by historians of modern Latin America without much concern about its theoretical and methodological implications. Some historians have used it as a model to fit evidence about public debates and politics during the modern period, yet few have engaged it as a theory with deeper methodological and conceptual implications. This article will review the historical literature that has applied Habermas's ideas to Latin American history. Focusing on a few particularly important books, the article will examine potential avenues for research and comparisons. Rather than becoming a new orthodoxy for the study of the region, the theory of the public sphere is establishing a dialogue among historians interested in intellectual phenomena and political discourse (most of them centered on the history of liberalism after independence) and those historians whose interest in social formations have framed their study in terms of hegemony and class domination. The article will argue that a critical use of Habermas's ideas (one that is more systematic about the gender and class exclusions built into the bourgeois public sphere, and that problematizes the connections between the specific development of capitalism in peripheral regions and their embrace of European political traditions) could yield useful results in terms of new research and an inclusive synthesis of recent literature interested in politics, culture and hegemony in Latin America.