Pedagogy of the Third Type: Simón Rodríguez and Demotic Republicanism

• In Event: Educating Against the State: Critical Pedagogies in Context

Abstract

During his Venezuelan exile, the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner left a completed manuscript on the politico-educational project of the nineteenth-century pedagogue and mentor of Simón Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez. In light of Rozitchner’s reading of Rodríguez’s thought, this paper readdresses the centrality of popular education in the making of the early republicanist tradition in Latin America. Against the background of the bicentennial celebrations of Latin American independence, I argue that Rodriguez’s republicanist pedagogical project offers, if not an “incomplete project,” another horizon to rethink the question of radical enlightenment (Jonathan Israel) as embedded in demotic government, beyond sovereign forms of rule that flourished immediately after the outbreak of the American civil wars. Thus, this paper attends to Rodriguez’s programmatic educational texts written in the mid nineteenth century, engaging with his critique of monarchy as unitary rule (arche). I show that, through a converging reading of Spinoza, Simón Rodríguez's critique of the arche (the principle of governance and origin) makes possible imagining an analytics of method where neither teacher or pupil are subordinated by a hierarchy of knowledge, but are determined by a common non-logophonocentric transmission that attends to affects and habits. Indeed, Rodriguez’s republicanism understood habits in a space of common intelligence as a way to resist any instance of subjective voluntary servitude. This reading of Rodriguez’s pedagogy also seeks to put his work in the tradition of radical pedagogy against the state or the national-popular, and in doing so bringing to light the political potential of early nineteenth-century republicanism.

Author

• Gerardo Munoz, Princeton University