The Relationship Between Intellectual Groups and National States in Latin America during the Nineteenth Century

This paper analyzes how the aesthetic, cultural, political and social perspectives of intellectual movements shaped the social imaginary about modernization and national development in Latin America, especially in Brazil, during the nineteenth century, contributing on the setting of a political culture that had great influence on the consolidation of the Latin American states. The main objective of this research is to analyze the formation of homologies between intellectuals and political-economic elites during those centuries.

In Latin America, this process of alliance between intellectuals and political elites has developed through various stages, but, historically, the nineteenth century was a turning point. Since this period, Latin American states began to constitute themselves as modern orders par excellence, holding administrative control and, above all, symbolic control of the territory and the peoples living there. It’s precisely at this crucial moment that the intellectuals movements, especially the literature and poetry, played a key role on the formation of a political culture that will give the theoretical and ideological foundations of the symbolic domination by state.

Those intellectuals made great efforts to incorporate the ideas that were being broadcast by the European avant-garde movements and rebuild it in favor of the development of a national art and a national culture. An art and a culture that should be the foundations of a national identity.

It was precisely by the activity of these intellectuals and the broadcast of ideas about the modernization and development of their countries, through the formation of an ideology about the means necessary for the constitution of a politically organized society (through a national identity based on art and culture), that the intellectual movements were incorporated by political elites on the process of strengthening of the Latin America states, exerting great influence on the formation of specific national “political cultures".