Jens R. Hentschke Livres

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.

Hentschkes Studie über Bildungspolitik in Brasilien unter Getúlio Vargas geht weiter über die reine Analyse von nationalen Debatten, Institutionen und Gesetzen hinaus: Das Werk thematisiert sowohl die Wirkung regionaler Politik auf die „nationale Rekonstruktion“ des Landes als auch das beschränkte Ausmaß, in dem die Politik tatsächlich auf regionaler, kommunaler und individueller Schulebene umgesetzt wurde.

Jens R Hentschke’s revisionist study proves that French Positivism which had played a major role in Brazil’s transition from monarchy to republic did not disappear at the turn of the 20th century. It survived at the country’s southern frontier, in Rio Grande do Sul, where governor Júlio de Castilhos had installed a developmental and educational dictatorship and inspired a whole generation of politicians, among them Getúlio Vargas. When, in 1930, Vargas and many of his fellow gaúchos took over central government, Positivism, in its specific interpretation by Castilhos, re-entered the national stage though it increasingly fused with other ideological currents. Gaúchos had an almost unlimited confidence in the healing powers of good institutions. They did not only want to govern their country but rebuild state and nation. Positivism became a driving force behind what Fernando Henrique Cardoso has called an “authoritarian national-developmentalism.” Some of its long-term effects, such as a frenzy for regulation, political engineering of constitutional law, regulated citizenship, and (neo-)populism, can still be felt today.