Modernity and tradition in relation to the River Plate enlightened opinion before the of the Hispanic revolutions

Abstract

The work proposes to revisit the modernity/tradition opposition based on some discourses about the South America on the eve of the beginning of the revolutions in Latin America that François-Xavier Guerra points out as a milestone in the process of political modernity. Such writings, still inserted in a traditional colonial scenario, present new attitudes for the moment, providing indications to consider the existence of an already imposed tendency to desacralize authority, in the way described by Roger Chartier for the French Eighteenth Century context, resulting of the circulation of ideas. These writings put into dialogue with recent historiography on political languages and the history of the literate themselves, constitute a background for thinking, following Guerra, about the duality of modernity and tradition in the analysis of historical processes.
It is not intended to address the problem of defining whether such discourses constituted public opinion or not, a topic that exceeds this presentation, but to introduce the question of what these opinions show in terms of modernity/tradition and if such a distinction is operative in all cases.