“Ideas” emerge from the bottom up, arising contingently in various locales to meet the needs of specific sociohistorical factions, which are, in turn, connected to local, regional, and global networks. Now imagine a group of philosophers who thought otherwise: the Latin Americanists. Palti studies an odd group of mid-twentieth-century philosophers and historians, mostly Argentinians, who believed that ideas moved from “centers,” top-down as “models,” and that in the “peripheries” these ideas were “distorted” by supine elites. Central to the invention of mid-twentieth century “Latin-America” was the category of “Europe” as the cradle of intellectual models that the elites of Spanish and Portuguese America kept mangling. Political economists developed dependency theories, which philosophically inclined theologians and historians quickly recycled to argue that liberation was imminent in the peripheries.

Dismantling “Latin-America-passive-consumer-of-models” as a grotesque invention in the “history of ideas” should not take long. Those who invented the category of Latin America in the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, thought that “democracy” was not a liberal model first popularized in the United States. Democracy did not emerge from Puritan traditions of self-government, as Tocqueville would have us believe, but rather from the populist redistribution of land among white settlers—who also had the right to own Black slaves. An entire continent that originally belonged to “Indians” and “Mexicans” was quickly and violently taken and freely given away. Democracy can be easily built this way anywhere. Latin American democracy, in contrast, began with the respect of Indigenous rights to lands and citizenship, as well as the emancipation of enslaved people. It was neither Francophile fashion nor anti-imperialism resistance to Walker’s slaving filibusterism in Nicaragua what begot the category of Latin America but rather a mid-nineteenth-century comparative sociology of democracy. Battling centers through secular-cum-religious liberation and mired in philosophical nonsense, twentieth-century Latin Americanists bought Tocqueville’s liberal model wholesale, confirming their own colonialist premises.

Palti offers a philosophical critique of the concept of “Latin American” invented by such figures as Leopoldo Zea, Andres Roig, Rodolfo Kush, Enrique Dussel, and Roberto Schwartz. Palti supersedes Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Crítica de la razón latino americana (2011) by thoroughly dismantling the philosophical foundations of these writers’ rickety buildings. Zea assumed that Mexican Porfirian positivism was an alien gringo, imperial ideology, superimposed onto Mexico’s emancipatory liberalism. Fortunately, Zea was later corrected by Charles Hale, who believed that Mexican liberalism was Hispanic Bourbon absolutism by other means. Poor Mexicans, always catching up. Roig meditated deeply on teleologies of oppression and emancipation in Latin American thought, only to find in the German idealist philosopher Kraus—who never once uttered a word about Latin America—forms of liberating spiritualism to counter pragmatic, instrumental gringo positivism. Kush imagined “Santa Cruz Pachacuti” as the ontological, Heideggerian “Indian” who preceded the subject of Cartesian cogito, and whose very existence was a critique of “Europe.” Pachacuti allegedly stood for “intuition” over “abstraction,” “lifeworld” over “reason,” and “popular wisdom” over “science”—in short, “Latin America” over “Europe.” Dussel did not have Pachacuti but he had the “Latin American poor” with whom to play in endless exercises of philosophical orientalism. If the reader has time and patience, Palti explores the projections of Latin American philosophers onto others and themselves, plumbing the depths of their contradictory uses of historicism and phenomenology, from Kant to Hegel and from Heidegger to Sartre and Levinas. Good riddance.

Palti ends his book by reviewing current debates in Spanish America on the category of “political emancipation” in Atlantic Revolutions. He offers a timely critique of Francois-Xavier Guerra’s influential theories of post-1808 Spanish liberal revolution. Guerra believed that an absolutist ancien régime was superseded by “the political,” namely, constitutional representation and the public sphere. Palti describes this debate through the same lenses of “model” and “distortion” that characterized Latin American philosophy and offers Tulio Halperin Donghi’s Tradición política española e ideología revolucionaria de Mayo (2009) as a way out.

According to Palti, Halperin Donghi saw independence not as transition from absolutism to liberal republicanism but as a process with no unitary “colonial legacy” to be dismantled by revolution. Halperin Donghi took Spanish absolutism in the Indies to be a mutating form, changing from sixteenth-century millenarian Christian universalism to seventeenth-century “secular”, baroque reason-of-state to eighteenth-century Bourbon constitutionalism, in which the nation superseded the king. Cadiz inaugurated a new period of representative constitutionalism by a long prefigured Spanish sovereign nation. In the Indies, that nation had to be invented piecemeal. Palti argues that Halperin Donghi did away with “models,” embracing contingency and avoiding Guerra’s teleologies of the political. But Halperin Donghi’s periodization was itself built on models and teleological assumptions. The biggest one was to assume that the Spanish American state was built from the top down—the antithesis of the British American state, which was liberal and bottom-up. This is Palti’s big English elephant in the room, the teleological model underlying his entire book.