This book is intended for not only students and academics who undertake research on the history of Mexico during the half-century prior to the onset in 1910 of the Mexican Revolution, but also the parallel community of specialists on the history of ideas, philosophy and science throughout Latin America in this period. Its principal focus is to revisit the influential thesis of the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea that the ideological group dubbed ‘the scientists’ by their opponents were guided by Positivism, particularly as interpreted by Herbert Spencer. It begins by reviewing previous research upon the formation and differentiation of ‘the scientists’, and the black legend which assumes that they legitimised the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Having established what Spencer himself believed and wrote, it analyses the prolific writings of two of the leading ‘scientists’, Francisco Bulnes and Justo Sierra. It explains the eclectic nature of their discourses, derived from the works of not only Spencer but also Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte and other European writers, which reached Mexico in a fragmented fashion. It concludes that, far from forming a homogeneous elite clearly committed to to a conservative insistence, derived from Spencerian Positivism, on political stability and modernisation, ‘the scientists’ had an ambivalent relationship with Díaz.
Racismo en Estados Unidos: desafíos en el mundo contemporáneo