Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Spanish America. Debating Historiographic Categories

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the historiographic revolution that the study of the Enlightenment has gone through in the last fifteen years in the Western world and assesses part of the recent bibliography on the Spanish and Spanish American Enlightenments. It is also a critical analysis not only of Jonathan Israel’s perspective on the Spanish American Enlightenment, but mainly, in a more general sense, of the a-critical application of the categories ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Counter- Enlightenment’ to Spain and, particularly, to the Spanish American case. As the Spanish American Enlightenment shows, this was a social and intellectual process with a series of peculiarities or specificities that complicate the indiscriminate application of the aforementioned categories. A critical review of Israel’s interpretation of the Spanish American Enlightenment and especially the ambiguous character of the Spanish American Counter-Enlightenment brings to the fore the need for a more subtle and profound debate on these issues.