61. Bartolomé Herrera: On the Sovereignty of the Intelligence
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
Armando Montoya Jordán [+]
University of Granada
Rafael Augusto Campos García-Calderón [+]
Description
Bartolomé Herrera (d. 1864 CE) was a Peruvian Catholic priest, jurist, diplomat, and a strong advocate of political traditionalism with fervent philosophical ideas about the nature of law and politics. He conveyed the concerns of Peruvian Catholic scholasticism—a sort of Catholicism deeply rooted in the tradition of the Spanish Church, particularly in Jesuit theology—against the backdrop of the political and juristic vicissitudes that would configure the formation and subsequent foundation of Peru as a nation-state project inspired by the political ideologies of French republicanism. In this context, Herrera represented the voice of an important sector of Latin American society in the face of the challenges posed by the establishment of bourgeois ideological models in the emerging continent on the one hand, and the subsequent moral degradation that this entailed for traditional Catholic values on the other. As such, the work of Herrera did not only mean a turning point in the history of ideas, but also in the political development of Peru itself. If anything characterized Herrera’s teaching, it was his yearning to create a new political elite capable of overcoming the ravages of the liberal anarchy that had been established since the founding of the republic. To a large extent, Herrera’s political and religious thought took ideas from French Doctrinaires—a stream of eighteen-century rationalist thought that opposed the guiding principles of both absolutism and liberalism—in order to uphold the supremacy of common sense or the judgement of reason—in an attempt to align them with the political needs of the Catholic Church. Herrera’s political conception of the sovereignty of the intelligence, which is the focus of the present chapter, was in fact a political concept first articulated by the Spanish counter-revolutionary thinker Juan Donoso Cortés. Like Donoso Cortés, Herrera argued for the indivisibility of political power which is represented by the intellectual skills of the most capable. According to him, only such intellectual elites could adequately understand the divine natural order, an idea than in turn would shape his own doctrines concerning the legitimate right of those best prepared to rule over others.