Rilla, Jerónimo; (2025) The Leviathan of the Pampas: Sarmiento’s Facundo as a State Personification. Global Intellectual History 10.1080/23801883.2025.2542361. (In press).

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Abstract

In Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), the Argentine intellectual Domingo Sarmiento examines the life of Facundo Quiroga, a fierce gaucho and caudillo, seeking to explain why European reason and civilisation yielded to organised barbarism in the Pampas. Whereas scholars have noted Sarmiento’s engagement with the Great Man theory, his deployment of classical personification to construct Facundo’s character remains understudied. This article argues that personification served to render a new political entity, the caudillo state, intelligible and to galvanise opposition against it. It traces Sarmiento’s idiosyncratic appropriations of personification – from Louis Blanc, Hugh Blair and Abel Villemain to Volney, and Eugène Lerminier – while also uncovering the overlooked influence of English intellectuals like Philip Harwood and John Stuart Mill on his thought.

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