This is a book about Iberian and Latin American elites' attempts to think through the momentous changes they were experiencing in the late eighteenth and, above all, the early nineteenth centuries—the “tiempos críticos” of the book's title, marked by the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia in Europe and the wars of independence in Latin America. Historical ruptures confront people with intellectual as well as social and political challenges, and the rupture with which the book is concerned was particularly dramatic. It was in fact so dramatic that, to many, time itself appeared to acquire a sort of historical agency. “El tiempo es progresista, más verdadero progresista que los hombres,” the Spanish politician Joaquín Francisco Pacheco wrote in 1840, while the Colombian José María Samper believed that the new Hispanic American republics were being “impulsada[s] hacia la libertad y el progreso por el espíritu del tiempo” (pp. 96–97; emphasis in...
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