Fear of Masses and Right-Wing Imagination: Reactionary Hermeneutics, Conservatism and Mass Psychology in the Southern Cone

Abstract

My dissertation Fear of Masses and Right-Wing Imagination: Reactionary Hermeneutics, Conservatism and Mass Psychologies in the Southern Cone explores the different modalities of reactionary and conservative thought in Latin America, with particular emphasis on Chile. I analyze the history of ideas and the cultural and literary archive of the right-wing imagination, drawing on various disciplinary and theoretical tools such as historiography, political philosophy, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Through my work, I show the importance of the contradictory synthesis between reactionary thought and positivistic ideologies for understanding the emergence of neoliberal societies during the late 20th century. Also, by providing an analysis of the religious disputes inside Catholic thinking and revisionist historiography, I claim that the Chilean cultural experience reveals the possibility of a Catholic path towards modernity, fundamentally inspired by fear of the masses and the restriction to democracy. I draw on the vast archive of right-wing thought, from the debates regarding the type of republicanism that the emergent nations of the 19th century should have adopted (Catholic or not; theological-political or secular), to the contemporary far right, which resorts to atavism, patriarchalism and the psychologization of agglomerations, in a new context of global crisis. I propose a critique of the prevailing interpretation of right-wing thought as primarily economistic, showing its various configurations from Hispanic ultramontanism to the ontology of war that inspired the Chilean Army during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990).

Along five chapters, I investigate a series of situations such as the rise of counterrevolutionary Catholic Hispanism in the 18th century, the debate between the Chilean archbishop Rafael Valdivieso—a disciple of European reactionary thought, and Joseph de Maistre—and Francisco Bilbao in 1843, the importance of Catholic, chiliastic, and reactionary historiography in Chile and Argentina until 1970, the concept of alterity and the invention of the other in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s oeuvre, the influence of European positivist mass psychology in authors such as the Argentinian José María Ramos Mejía and the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha, and finally the importance of authenticism, vitalism, and irrationalism for the ultra-nationalistic Chilean ideology prevalent until today. I also stress how the right-wing thought in the Southern Cone has constantly been a ‘paradoxical right’, seeking non-violent and romantic ways to achieve development, promote capitalism, and resolve its inevitable reverse, social crises. The various local formulations of the conservative and reactionary imagination, I argue, are at the same time attempts to resolve the irruption of otherness—including the resistance of indigenous communities to dispossession, the emergence of the urban proletariat and lumpenproletariat at the beginning of 20th century, and the various subaltern sectors haunting Latin American democracy.