Philosophical Polemics, School Reform and Nation-Building in Uruguay, 1868-1915

This monograph revisits Uruguay’s remarkable transformation from a volatile product of ‘balkanisation’ in the River Plate area into Latin America’s first welfare-state democracy, associated with President José Batlle y Ordóñez (1903–7, 1911–15). Central to the country’s belated polity formation and nation-building was its school reform. The author investigates this, for the first time, from its start in 1868 under José Pedro Varela to the end of Batlle’s second term and argues that continuities in change prevailed over the alleged rupture of 1903, including at the level of normative ideas. Moreover, by placing Uruguay into the broader context of what scholars have called the “Corridor of Ideas” from Santiago de Chile through Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Porto Alegre, this pioneering study also shows how Uruguay acted as a crossroads of intellectuals and a laboratory for the contestation, assimilation, and merger of global and autochthonous political and pedagogical philosophies.