Elías Palti continues to be the outstanding historian of Latin American intellectual history. Misplaced Ideas? collects and elaborates his most theoretically challenging arguments about the field. It will be a must-read for scholars of Latin America and the wider world in historiography and philosophy both.

The book is divided into two parts: theoretical and historiographical approaches. The former comprises Palti’s critical account of the historicist and phenomenological strands of Latin American Philosophy from the 1960s, as well as his intervention in the ‘misplaced ideas’ debate, focused on the work of Roberto Schwarz. The second part is made up of two essays about the intellectual historiography of Latin American independence: Palti’s critiques of the ‘ideological origins’ debate, and of the ‘new political history’ associated with François-Xavier Guerra since the 1990s.

Two introductory essays help frame and give coherence to the main sections. The first chapter recapitulates Palti’s account of the ‘History of Ideas’ tradition in Latin American historiography, from its emergence with Leopoldo Zea in the 1940s through to the revisionism of Charles Hale in the 1960s. And the prologue clarifies the methodological throughline of what is a heterogeneous book: Palti’s overarching endeavour in Misplaced Ideas? is to put forward a historical method that excavates the conceptual grounds of Latin American thought – ‘to reconstruct the intellectual constellation within which the question of the existence of a distinct Latin American thought became conceivable’ (p. xv); what Palti calls by the time he gets to the conclusion an ‘archaeological approach’ to intellectual history (p. 184). The main foil for this method is the ‘History of Ideas’ approach that Palti identifies in various settings, whereby a focus on the semantic over the pragmatic dimension of language engendered various ahistorical tendencies, based on an ahistorical category of ‘ideas’ as such.

Each individual essay in the book deserves a review of its own, but recurrent merits include Palti’s capacity for generous critique and his commitment to the global significance of Latin American thought. There is occasional over-simplification, such as in his descriptions of the Marxist tradition, and his source base for claims about Latin America as a whole is at times too narrow geographically. But Palti’s skill at discerning the actual historiographical contribution of different authors shines throughout. He repeatedly unveils how putative revisionisms – including Hale’s and Guerra’s – actually reproduced the conceptual paradigm of the traditional History of Ideas in Latin America. The book is full of expert close readings of varied scholars, including Zea, Hale, Tulio Halperín Donghi, Schwarz, Arturo Andrés Roig and Enrique Dussel. The essays on the ‘misplaced ideas’ and ‘ideological origins’ debates remain essential, and Palti’s critique of the ‘new political history’ tradition of Guerra is especially welcome, too. It would also have been interesting to see him expand his critical discussion of Latin American Philosophy to include its most prevalent representative today, ‘Decolonial Theory’.

In effect, Palti’s main proposition in Misplaced Ideas? is for the introduction of the North Atlantic ‘Cambridge School’ tradition to Latin American intellectual history. This is evident from his methodological authorities: John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, Bernard Bailyn and, behind them, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. In addition, Palti draws on adjacent scholars from the linguistic turn of European intellectual history during the second half of the twentieth century, such as Reinhart Koselleck. Palti does recognise a number of Latin American scholars – including Schwarz, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco, Donghi and Santiago Castro-Gómez – as valuable models or antecedents for his favoured approach, but their methodological significance is nevertheless articulated and organised by the Cambridge School framework.

But as Palti points out (a little unfairly), tracing a text’s influences can be a relatively simple form of analysis. In this instance, the value of the Cambridge School is a more complex – and pressing – question. Palti puts forward the best possible case for introducing this analytical tradition to Latin American intellectual history, and he identifies several clear merits. In terms of method, the shift from a focus on ideas to one on speech acts is important for historicising intellectual activity insofar as it underpins Palti’s break with the model-deviation paradigm that has characterised the history of ideas in Latin America. Rather than justify Latin American intellectual history in terms of a search for local deviations from European models of thought, Palti argues that the regional problems experienced with concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’ disclose the fact that ‘those concepts are, themselves, problematic’. Thus, studying the dilemmas of these concepts within Latin America ‘can serve as a basis for raising problems whose relevance transcends the merely local context, making up the very conceptual and methodological frameworks on which the discipline [political–intellectual history] is currently founded’ (p. 186).

In terms of content, too, Palti demonstrates how the Cambridge School’s republican turn in the historiography of the age of revolutions in the British Atlantic world ought also to be extended to the Spanish Atlantic. In this way, historians of nineteenth-century Latin America can move beyond the established, ahistorical antinomies of liberal/conservative and modern/traditional. It is here that Palti points to Donghi’s Tradición política española e ideología revolucionaria de Mayo (1961) as a model for late-colonial and early-republican history understood as ‘the tracing of complex ideological processes’ – ‘a history of [conceptual] effects’ – rather than as a ‘static perspective of the colonial past’ (pp. 136–9).

In proposing that Latin Americanists make their own republican turn, however, Palti curiously overlooks how and why Bailyn and Pocock excluded the region from their own putatively ‘Atlantic’ accounts of republicanism in the first place (i.e., paradigmatic Eurocentrism). And this points to a deeper issue with Misplaced Ideas? Palti is too uncritical of the North Atlantic sources of his historical method. The Cambridge School is the only tradition of historiographical thought in the book to which Palti does not apply his powers of historicising, methodological critique. And this oversight is unsurprising, for a reason Palti sets out in the prologue. North Atlantic conceptual history forms the conceptual ground of Palti’s own thought, and ‘every system of thought necessarily rests on a set of premises that are, themselves, unthinkable within that very system’ (p. x). Yet there are certain premises of the Cambridge School system of thought it would be wise to steer clear of in Latin America.

Indeed, the introduction of the Cambridge School approach to Latin American intellectual history ought to be far more selective than Palti suggests, and to make use of critiques of that tradition which he overlooks: for example, Manjeet Ramgotra’s demonstration of how the Cambridge School tradition of republican historiography – partly due to the historical conditions of its emergence in the West amid post-WW2 decolonisation – has been empirically and conceptually blind to specifically anticolonial forms of republicanism in the Global South (Ramgotra, ‘Postcolonial Republicanism and the Revival of a Paradigm’, The Good Society, 26: 1 (2017), pp. 34–54). And the category of anticolonial thought is similarly marginal in Palti’s account of the core concepts of modern political experience, despite the prominence of that category in modern Latin America. Moreover, at a deeper, heuristic level, the uptake of the Cambridge School method in Latin America needs to be balanced by the materialist alternatives to that tradition of intellectual history. Plenty of intellectual–historical scholarship – all of it overlooked by Palti – has pointed to the stifling effects of the Cambridge School’s narrowly linguistic account of intellectual activity and context. Andrew Sartori’s work is a vital resource here (Sartori, ‘Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy’, in Samuel Moyn and Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 110–33). And Joseph Femia’s use of Gramsci to critique Skinner is also useful, and could help bring the Gramscian tradition of Latin American historiography into this conversation (Femia, ‘An Historicist Critique of “Revisionist” Methods for Studying the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 20: 2 (1981), pp. 113–34).

Thus, whereas the Cambridge School method has the potential to enrich Latin American intellectual history, it cannot do so alone, and it cannot do so unchanged. Palti’s project for a new conceptual history in Latin America is formidable, but it ought to improve upon the significant errors of that tradition as it has developed in Europe and North America hitherto.