The new intellectual history and its repercussion in Latin America

Abstract

The entire historiography of Latin American ideas revolves, from its origin, around a particular question. In so far as it is usually assumed that local authors have made no important contribution to universal thinking, the question that its study raises is how to turn relevant and culturally significant intellectual objects of little density whose meaning is not inscribed in their own words. All historical narrative on the matter entailed a practical answer to this question. Nevertheless, in recent years the emergence of the so-called “new intellectual history” radically reshaped the types of approach peculiar to the old tradition of the history of ideas, and this will also have important repercussions on the way in which it is currently practiced in our region. This article explores the new conceptual horizons opened by the series of reformulations that the discipline has recently undergone. These theoretical-epistemological transformations, which made intellectual history into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas in the field of the humanities and resulted in the definition of new objects and types of approach for the discipline, demand a revision of our forms of understanding local intellectual history as well.

Key words: history of ideas, intellectual historiography, concepts, Latin America.