2024 Theses Doctoral

Against the Empire of Theory: Mexico and the Language of Political Economy in the Age of Alamán (1790-1853)

Frith, Eric

This dissertation is an intellectual history of the language of political economy in Mexico. It examines a period from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, through the writings of six individuals. I refer to political economy as a “political language” in the sense established by the Cambridge School of intellectual history, as a set of “idioms, rhetorics, forms of speaking about politics, distinctive language games, each one of which has its own vocabulary, rules, language, preconditions and implications as well as tone, and style.”

My project is not a history of the Mexican economy or economic policy. Rather, it explores the persistent preoccupations, assumptions, and repertoires of image and metaphor that consciously or unconsciously informed debate, shaped political struggle, and drew the boundaries of the thinkable and sayable in the still-emerging sphere of the economy, while also drawing attention to the ways that political economy remained tightly interwoven with political and moral programs and values. Following the Polanyian premise that the economy is as much a cultural field as politics is, and that as culture, political and economic discourse are inseparable at the root, the dissertation as a whole makes a contribution to expanding Latin America’s “new political history” and “new intellectual history” into the realm of the economic. It also broadens the Cambridge School’s history of political thought and political economy to include Mexican interlocutors, who confronted the key political, economic, and philosophical questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a different setting in historical space and time.

Mexican thinkers creatively engaged the foundational issues of European political economy: commerce and monopoly, luxury and political virtue, industrial development and the role of institutions. But they also challenged established dogma and raised new questions: the significance of conquest and ongoing violence to the social order and national development; the woes of excessive inequality; the problem of latecomer development; and the questionable applicability of universalized theory. At a crucial moment in the transformation of Atlantic society, the language of political economy in Mexico was a vibrant site of creativity and contention that remains relevant today.