Suppressing the Wicked and Ensuring Order: Lucas Alamán’s Burkean Political Thought in Postcolonial Mexico

Abstract

Thinkers and statesmen in newly independent, postcolonial Latin America reflected on what it could mean to be authentically Latin American without being dependent on Spain. This was a major theme in many of the most significant political theoretical writings of the nineteenth century in Latin America. This article turns to the age of a newly independent Mexico in the 1820s and 1830s to explore how the philosopher and statesman Lucas Alamán wrestled with questions of how Mexico might extricate itself from the shadow of Spain and its putatively defective institutions without simply repeating their failure and servilely replicating the practices of the United States. This went hand-in-hand with larger questions regarding the shape of the Mexican nation—and indeed whether there was one in the first place. Yet Alamán does not embrace a manifestly critical disposition toward Spain and Europe as a whole. He instead positions himself as a careful and moderate reformer, skeptical of both the failures of the past and the idealistic promises for the future. He was, in short, a sort of postcolonial Mexican Edmund Burke—the latter having been an important influence on Alamán. Ultimately, Alamán understood his task as being the historical construction of Mexico—one that relied neither on indigenous history, which had been fundamentally erased, nor on Spanish political institutions, which he believed ought to be jettisoned. That is, he sought to establish an authentically Mexican politics.