‘Liberals in the Nineteenth Century in the Mediterranean and Latin America’

Liberals in the Mediterranean and Latin America in the Nineteenth Century

Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies

Wednesday, 25^th February, 3pm-5pm, Armstrong Building (ARMB.1.05), University of Newcastle.

Dr Talitha Ilacqua (Durham) and Prof. Jens Hentschke (Newcastle)

Dr Talitha Ilacqua

Friendship, Grief and Transnational Liberal Politics in the Italian Risorgimento

How important a role did personal relationships play in the creation of transnational liberal ideas between France and the Italian states in the early- to mid-nineteenth century? For the French philosopher Victor Cousin and his Parisian salon filled with exiled Italian patriots, it was crucial. This paper suggests that Cousin’s decades-long commitment to a Piedmontese liberal plan for Italian unification was a personal funeral tribute to his late friend Santorre di Santa Rosa, an Italian patriot who died in 1825 after leading the Piedmontese revolution of 1821. By means of a conscious politics of mourning, Cousin and Italian patriots married the personal and the political to influence each other’s political ideas and actions. The result was a refined moderate theory on which Piedmont-Savoy unified the Italian peninsula after the 1848/9 revolutions. Overall, this paper has two goals. First, it aims to reflect on the significance of friendship, love and grief in the creation of transnational liberal theory in the first half of the nineteenth century. Second, it intends to stress the all-too-often neglected importance of emotions for the codification liberal ideas.'

Prof. Jens Hentschke

Liberalism in Latin America

Is there such a thing like an authentic and coherent Latin American liberalism, or can we just talk about derivations from European and North American models? What were the origins and evolving practical purposes of liberal thought in the region, and when, in what form, and against whom did it materialize and institutionalize? Which groups represented these ideas and how socially inclusive were they? Are there notable similarities and difference between ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ in Hispano-America and Brazil? How can we explain the late 19^th c. mergers of (conservative) liberalism and positivism(s), liberalism and Krausism, and the phenomenon of liberal Krauso-positivism? This talk will try to address these questions.