Positivism and Its Critics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Auguste Comte's positivism, systematized in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) and summarized in its "order and progress" motto, found exceptionally fertile ground in Latin America after the independence wars of the 1810s-20s left new republics searching for a secular, scientific basis of social order to replace the discredited authority of the Catholic monarchy. In Mexico, Gabino Barreda (1818-1881), who had studied under Comte in Paris, founded the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in 1868 under President Benito Juárez, organizing its curriculum around Comte's hierarchy of the sciences and his "law of three stages" — theological, metaphysical, and positive — as the framework for training a new secular elite. Positivism became still more explicitly a state ideology under Porfirio Díaz (ruled 1876-1911), whose técnicos, nicknamed the científicos and led by figures such as Justo Sierra (1848-1912), justified an authoritarian, export-oriented modernization on ostensibly scientific grounds, treating social hierarchy and limited democracy as objectively necessary stages of development.