Varela Yepes, Jorge Andrés; (2025) Shaping representative government: the divergent paths of liberal thought in Colombia and Chile, 1818-1853. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The Latin American republican experiments in the early nineteenth century were, until not so long ago, overlooked in global histories of democracy. Moreover, Latin American nineteenth-century political thought was portrayed as derivative. Historians have reassessed these visions by suggesting that Latin American republics were at the vanguard of political modernity. In dialogue with this revisionist literature, this thesis explores the paths followed by Colombia and Chile in their early republican history. By analyzing how their political thinkers debated and conceived representative institutions between 1818 and 1853, this thesis explores the intellectual trajectories that led to the formation of, I argue, two contrasting models of political modernity for Spanish America. They differed in two essential aspects: they disagreed on what it meant to have a free body polity, and on the institutional arrangements needed to preserve liberty. Nevertheless, both models aimed at protecting individual liberties and preventing the rise of arbitrary power. In this sense, they were both conceived within the framework of liberal thought. By using a wide variety of printed sources, the chapters in this thesis reconstruct the challenges, debates, and political contexts that led Colombian liberal thinkers to envision a government based on the republican liberty of self-government and the primacy of Congress as the institutional guarantor of liberty. In the case of Chile, its conservative elites were wary of self-government and opted instead to allocate the protection of individual rights to a landed aristocracy acting as an intermediary power between the executive and the people. I demonstrate that these two models engaged in a transnational debate by the mid-nineteenth century. This thesis contributes to the comparative history of liberalism, to the national histories of both Colombia and Chile, and to global intellectual history.

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