Hegel, Latin America and the failed Aufhebung of coloniality

Abstract

For some time now, scholars have been discussing the scope and implications of imperialism, Eurocentrism, and racism within the Hegelian discourse. Our paper follows this same line of enquiry in an attempt to understand the role of the colonial matrix in Hegel's juridical and political thought, as well as the Hegelian affirmation of a necessary overcoming of the colonial moment. Our hypothesis is that colonial expansion does not function merely as an escape valve to the congenital maladjustments of capitalism, but it is situated at the speculative heart of modern consciousness, enabling the self-reflection of European society. Thus, beyond the institution of the colony in its strict sense, the Hegelian text accounts for a coloniality immanent to the very civilizing dynamics of civil-bourgeois society that persists even in the very movement of the independence of the new American nations. The normative horizon of nineteenth-century imperialism not only dictates the forms of colonial domination, but also organizes the modalities and graduality of the emancipation of the new countries and their inclusion in the concert of nations of the modern capitalist world. In this panorama, the Latin American condition is an anomaly. In contrast to what happens in the United States, the independences of the South of the continent show a deficient suppression-overcoming of the colony, which results in a structural instability of the institutional forms of modern rationality. In this sense, the Hegelian diagnosis of Latin America allows us to think about the reproduction of the civilizational paradigm in post-independence State construction, as well as the structuring function of the colonial fracture within liberal democratic societies. In order to reconstruct the Hegelian assessment of Latin America, we will begin our work by investigating Hegel's characterization of colonialism in his Lessons on the Philosophy of Right and on the Philosophy of History. Firstly, we will analyze the inherent relation between the colonial institution and the regime of capitalist production, which goes far beyond a simple external and indefinite reproduction of accumulation and shapes the very self-definition of modern capitalism as a historical principle. Second, we will reconstruct the differentiation made by Hegel between two very different models of colonization, one based on the expansion of territorial dominion in favor of a determined political and religious identity - which is paradigmatically expressed in the conquest and evangelization of America - and the other based on the globalization of a social logic - mercantile and capitalist - which formulates its mission based on the task of civilizing the peoples of the world. Finally, we will address the passages in which Hegel describes the Latin American political conjuncture as the scenario of a permanent vacillation of republican institutions and of a constant return of an unsublimated violence under the civilized forms of social rationality.