La historia intelectual latinoamericana en la era del “giro lingüístico”

• Main Author: Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2010-10-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: history of ideas; history of political concepts; intellectual history; linguistic turn; rhetoric
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/60207

Since the 1970s, the historiography of Latin America has been revised and enriched by the slow, yet fructuous, development of “new intellectual history”. By reexamining the role of language, text and context in communicative exchange, this discipline (or perspective) undertakes a profound critique of the traditional history of ideas. Intellectual history studies the language with which ideas are expressed, the evolution of concepts and the uses of rhetoric. Furthermore, it analyses the socio-historical conditions allowing the production of a particular thinking, as well as its mechanisms and spaces of circulation and reception. The article traces a brief history of the discipline’s development in Latin America, its relations with Anglo-Saxon intellectual history and the present state of the art. Even though intellectual history is defined broadly, comprising multiple perspectives, such as “cultural history”, the “history of intellectuals” and the “history of political ideas, a special emphasis will be given to the “history of concepts”, for it is the clearest expression of the hermeneutical turn leading to disciplinary renovation.