Abstract

Positivism, the predominant philosophy of Latin America’s elites at the end of the nineteenth century, found its exemplary expression in Brazil’s castilhismo and Mexico’s porfiriato. Argentina, in contrast, seemed to have deviated from the norm of ‘enlightened dictatorships’. After the end of the Rosas tyranny in 1852, authoritarianism had been discredited. Early positivism, as embodied by Teacher-President Sarmiento, could barely be distinguished from liberalism and no single political philosophy was able to exert hegemony. However, the significance of ‘scientific politics’ should not be downplayed. As this article argues, the merger, in the 1880s, of Comtean positivism and teacher training revolutionised education policies that aimed at erasing frontier backwardness and inserting future generations into an export-led economy, oligarchic polity, and homogenous national organism. Normal schools, especially Sarmiento’s Escuela de Parana´, acted as laboratories for the assimilation, merger, and contestation of European, North American, and autochthonous scientific, philosophical, and pedagogical traditions.