by David Vertty
Though the return of political economy in historical studies is now widely acknowledged, intellectual historians have only begun to assess one of its most promising fields of inquiry: the central role that Latin America has played in building innovative approaches for both of those disciplines. Whether as a point of encounter for global connections or as a space of intellectual production, Latin America offers a fundamental geography to reflect about the intersection between intellectual discourses and the worlds of political economies which make them. And yet, within literature on the global turn of the discipline, most intellectual historians from the Global North have remained inattentive to this region, either due to disciplinary boundaries, language barriers, or even persisting hierarchies of knowledge. As approaches of going beyond the paradigm of “misplaced ideas” have shown, this omission seems no longer tenable.
In what follows, I offer a sketch of how the intersection between intellectual history and political economy has developed in and around Latin America, focusing on prospective avenues of research and methodological lessons we can draw while navigating the challenges posed by the intertwining of both fields. Specifically, this historiographic essay suggests that Latin America has often anticipated and, at times, revolutionized key concerns at the heart of global intellectual history and histories of political economy. My aim is not only to place Latin America as an unexplored case of study that might present substantial innovations regarding canonical histories of ideas and of political economy, but also to show how historians who study the region have produced original approaches—mainly by addressing the structural conditions that have made political economy central to Latin American history and its historiography. As intellectual history continues to broaden its scope, aiming at a truly global perspective, Latin America becomes an increasingly necessary point of reference.
From the early nineteenth century to the neoliberal turn and the end of the Cold War, Latin American thinkers have engaged directly with questions of development, modernity, inequality, and social transformation—often with rich and thought-provoking insights tied to the region’s uneven position in the global system. Latin America’s structural place in global economic flows only further demonstrates its intricated history in developmentalist and modernizing projects, the imbrication of the state, and the official and intellectual shaping of economic life. The consequences produced by these changes are particularly relevant for intellectual historians. The study of economic categories and debates, for instance, sheds light on wider political and philosophical discourses. This also explains why Latin America offers fertile terrain to develop interdisciplinary approaches that draw on different historiographical traditions—from the history of economic thought to the social history of ideas, or even conceptual history. By adopting historical processes of creative transformation in the region, these perspectives invite historians to innovate traditional interpretations of regional archives and debates, as well as classical methods and theories.
One significant example appears in the adaptation of Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte to the study of political-economic discourses in the Ibero-American world. While Koselleck’s original framework was rooted in specific European, mainly German, historical transformations, scholars across Spain and Latin America —particularly the Iberconceptos network—expanded this novel framework of conceptual history to accommodate more diverse categories and temporalities. These networks, which operate through Padua, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City specifically exemplifies how conceptual history can generate original political-economic studies grounded in both regional specificity and global theoretical dialogue. Most recently, Iberconceptos promoted the creation of a research group focused on economic concepts, the scope of which opens multiple scholarly avenues, including: the study of epistemic communities articulated through economics departments, the role of economists as intellectuals, or the historicization of fundamental economic concepts—such as debt and labor—within longue durée and transnational frameworks.
More contemporary work—including that of Matias X. Gonzalez—has further enriched this approach by situating Latin America within broader international histories of labor, the social, and the communal. Notably, this literature often draws on the Italian reception of Begriffsgeschichte, combining sources like Otto Brunner’s work on premodern social and economic structures with the thought of French sociologists such as Marcel Mauss. These projects not only offer a more complex view of nineteenth century political economies but also open up the possibility to rethink categories such as “community” or “nation,” as well as historical forms of solidarity and crisis—including the contemporary reconfigurations of welfare regimes. Additionally, scholars like Javier Fernández Sebastián—a leading figure in the reception of conceptual history in the Ibero-American region—have advocated for the compatibility of Begriffsgeschichte with the work of Quentin Skinner or J.G.A. Pocock. Although some scholars have raised pertinent questions regarding this proposal, it is true that the work of Pocock or Richard Whatmore––who deals with issues like commerce or markets—has received less attention than more widely known debates on republicanism associated with the so-called Cambridge School. As intellectual history turns to political economy and units of analysis transcending national boundaries, perspectives from these different “traditions” may prove extremely useful.
Figures like Domingo Sarmiento or Andrés Bello, usually framed as Latin American nation-builders, are now seen as participants in a global conversation, producing texts directly embedded in relationship to discussions on Enlightenment political economy and debates on natural law or sovereignty. A redefined version of contextualism may be deployed to explore the region’s political-economic discourses, the meaning of texts such as Principios de derecho de gentes or Facundo, and their transnational interlocutors. This creative transformation of conceptual histories becomes all the more evident in a Latin American context layered with different temporalities, only further prompting renewed historical horizons of intellectual histories of population, migration, administration, and territorial control emerging in nineteenth century Latin America. This, in turn, even sheds light on Pocock’s own concerns with these phenomena in the Atlantic world.
Moving into the twentieth century, following the interwar crisis and the postwar developmentalist moment, Latin American thinkers took center stage on international debates––ranging from political economy to cultural identity––as an effect of the region’s increased importance in global interactions. While the work of Raúl Prebisch and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC / CEPAL) has received growing attention, an intellectual history of Latin American interventions in the making of the international economic order of the past century is still absent. In the few cases in which research has been pursued, scholars have developed frames of analysis that help us to navigate the interrelation between political economy and intellectual history in Latin American intellectuals. Beyond “dependentist” or cepalino circles, figures such as Gilberto Freyre and Celso Furtado have articulated visions of national development blending cultural, political, and economic discourses. Freyre, a Brazilian social scientist of the 1900 generation—like Prebisch—provides an illustrative case: early in his career, he subscribed a celebratory discourse on racial heterogeneity reminiscent of intellectuals like the Mexican José Vasconcelos, and closely tied to Latin American responses to the “decadence” discourse in interwar Europe. As Melissa Teixeira has shown, Freyre’s historical revisionism would become the cornerstone to some of the ideological foundations of Brazil’s corporatist model. The trajectory of these intellectuals is hard to understand without considering transnational dialogues and imbrications of cultural or philosophical debates with political and economic projects.
Hybrid approaches that mix intellectual biographies with histories of institutional practices, state-building projects, and sociopolitical imaginaries have become central to understand the development of twentieth century Latin American political economy. As the Cold War further intensified the fusion of intellectual and institutional histories, scholars like Christy Thornton or Margarita Fajardo have pursued interdisciplinary approaches to explore how Latin American diplomats, economists, and social scientists helped to shape global institutions like the IMF, the United Nations, or the World Bank—not just as recipients of their policies but as active theorists and architects. Conceived as future-oriented theory, their work has called for a broader conceptualization of the Latin American “intellectual,” one that should encompass the actions of bureaucrats, technocrats, and experts within historiographical analysis.
These future-oriented insights also contribute to redefining the study of a more recent period marked by the rise of social scientists as intellectuals within multilateral or hemispheric agencies. Indeed, the recent historical turn toward the so-called “Third World” in political economy, for instance, has echoed historiographical displacements within Cold War studies. Incipient as that movement is, crucial aspects of this history have barely been explored using the methodological insights mentioned above. Topics like the Mexican substitution of importations policy await a deeper analysis to account for its intellectual foundations, institutional axis, and how their figures negotiated it locally and globally. More broadly, recent attention to failed proposals of reform of the International Economic Order indicates that the global intellectual history of the 1970s awaits contemporary reconstruction.
Today’s historiographic pivot to liberalism has also prompted scholars to reconsider the end of the twentieth century’s historical complexity beyond a mere dramatic shift from Keynesian consensus to neoliberal hegemony. Some are now debating the extent to which neoliberal reforms may have reflected pre-existing logics of technocracy, state-led modernization, or populist appeals in Latin American. Indeed, Latin American political economy has become not only a peculiar case in point but also a valuable site for critical reflection, insofar as neoliberal and modernization reforms—which, as in the case of the “Baker Plan,” imposed fiscal reforms on Latin American countries to address the IMF’s debt crisis—may have been built on the foundation of developmentalism. Such questions challenge typical periodization to shift toward more fine-grained histories of this transition.
Recent work on welfare states in the US and Latin America has, thus, set the stage for a more accurate examination of the contemporary world. Intellectual history might benefit especially from approaches that analyze the seemingly inconsistent intellectual evolutions of economists and government officials who once championed state-led industrialization or protectionism, only to later embrace most of the repertoire inherent to neoliberal reforms. Read against broader recalibrations due to debt crises, inflation, and changing international norms, the history of political economy no longer appears as a struggle simply between ideologies but as a complex—often transnational—movement of actors across academic, bureaucratic, and political worlds.
Only an interdisciplinary approach would really capture the intellectual histories of the shifting roles of debt, austerity, or international financial institutions. In doing so, we may better locate the re-signification of local and global vocabularies. Borrowing from a long durée analysis, for example, we can see how the political and economic languages associated with the Mexican Revolution were reframed to align with the neoliberal and modernization reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Far from writing a history of ideas detached from this world, engaging with such topics only highlights the deep connection between intellectual production and its material contexts of government coalitions, academic discourses, print media, and labor movements.
It seems increasingly evident that mixed approaches drawing on both political economy and intellectual history can help us grasp the historical nuances behind global transitions by the end of the twentieth century. For historians working on contemporary issues, this interdisciplinarity may even prove necessary. In the twenty-first century, the rise of nationalist and far-right platforms, ecological crises, and renewed cycles of commodity extraction have rekindled older debates about sovereignty, development, and dependency. Issued from complex sociopolitical realities, these debates are irreducible to policymaking because they are laden with competing conceptions of political devices along with a diverse array of actors and conditions.
Ultimately, Latin America’s relationship with political economy offers more than just a mere collection of case studies. From the early modern emergence of political-economic vocabularies to twentieth-century “dependentist” and technocratic visions, from Cold War governance to contemporary analyses of extractivism or informal labor networks, Latin America calls for a reinvigorated interrogation of Eurocentric assumptions as well as a simultaneous reexamination of intellectual history’s own methods and disciplinary boundaries. Latin America is not a passive recipient of ideas from the Global North—whether in political economy or other realms. Studying this region—and integrating it into broader global frameworks—does not simply show how “misplaced ideas” work outside their contexts of production but also reveals the internal contradictions of an older approach still locked in a global history of the Global North. In following these new threads of intellectual and conceptual history, Latin America offers a productive site of reflection for the history of political economy. Nurtured by growing networks of international academies and institutions, Latin American intellectual history promises a novel set of theoretical approaches and methods while offering the means by which to creatively challenge those methodological tropes inherited by the classical histories of ideas.
This think piece is part of a forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
David Vertty is a PhD student at the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on modern European and Latin American intellectual history, with particular attention to the cultural and theoretical exchanges between the two regions. He has worked primarily on France and Mexico, exploring the reception of surrealism in Latin America and the development of postwar French intellectual currents.
Edited by Matias X. Gonzalez.
Featured Image: ECLAC Building in Chile, Orly Winer, 2013. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Leave a Reply