Bolívar’s Pardocracia

• In Event: Independencia y representación: violencia, historia y memoria

Abstract

The independence revolutions of the early 19th century were haunted by the specter of “race war” and its most ominous instantiation, the uprisings in Saint Domingue that culminated in the massacre of all remaining French settlers in 1805. Using the manifestoes, declarations, and constitutional writings of Simón Bolívar as my source, I will argue that the idiosyncratic political vocabulary Bolívar develops between 1812 and 1828 is best understood as an attempt to translate the inherited languages of political theory into an idiom that responded to New World realities, most importantly to racial slavery, el sistema de castas, and native claims to sovereignty. While intellectual historians have by and large argued over how to weigh the relative influence of Montesquieu, US-American thought, Machiavelli, and the Ancients on Bolívar’s thinking, I argue that Bolívar’s key terms need to be understood as an attempt to absorb and contain prevalent racial fears. I will focus particularly on the term “pardocracia,” a term that should not be understood simply as the “rule of people of color,” but rather as a (racialized) creolization of ancient theories of cyclical patterns of governance.

Author

• Sibylle Maria Fischer, New York University