Towards a Global Intellectual History of Latin American Populism The early uses of the concept

BERGEL, MARTÍN

México

Congreso; XXII Congreso International Conference of Conceptual History ?Beyond Borders. Conceptualizing Boundaries, Crossings and Disruptions?; 2019

Latin American populism has traditionally been viewed as an idiosyncratic product of the continent, a phenomenon that would express typical and distinctive features of the region's political culture (such as caudillismo). At the same time, contemporary debates associate the critical perspectives of populism with liberal or conservative traditions. This work aims to challenge both visions. Through a reconstruction of the first uses of the concept in Latin America by the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui and the Cuban Julio Antonio Mella (that is, two of the most important Marxist intellectuals in the region), we will seek to show how "Latin American populism" is a notion that arises in connection with contemporary phenomena such as the Volkspartei of Stresemann in the German Republic of Weimar, the ephemeral French literary current self-styled "populist", and especially the critical positions of Lenin on Russian populism. It is within the framework of these global semantic networks that the populist reference emerges in Latin America. But in addition, those early uses are placed in the context of criticism of the APRA of Haya de la Torre, which in turn in those years is inspired by the national-popular interpellation modules put into circulation the Chinese Kuo-Min-Tang (Haya de la Torre will write that the APRA was called to be "the Latin American Kuo-Min-Tang"). In short, this paper aims to establish that the concept of populism was born in Latin America within the framework of the fluid international circulation of the ideas of the first postwar period; and that its first uses, in which the attributes that would later be stabilized in the notion (such as caudillismo, demagogy or a romantic idea of the people) stand out, come from the intellectual currents of the left.