The Intellectuals and the Crisis of Modern Peruvian Nationalism: 1870-1919
T HE MODERN HISTORY of Peru dawned in the last decades of the nineteenth century. During the crucial decade of the 1870s, a crucial decade owing to the magnitude of its political and economic events, articulate social groups, mainly in Lima, began to discuss critically Peru's backward and stagnant institutions. Constituting the educated elites, these groups clamored for change, for the need to unify and modernize Peruvian society. Thus modern-tempered social criticism appeared in Lima at a time of national crisis. Like nationalism in other lands modern Peruvian nationalism evolved out of an era of troubles and change. Intellectuals, first as individuals and later as organized groups, made up the most vigorous social group pointing to the crisis of the 70s. This essay is an attempt to explain their social participation as a historical process. Inasmuch as that process involved a deeply felt ideological preoccupation with the idea of the nation, it may be called "the crisis of modern Peruvian nationalism. " But the crisis of modern Peruvian nationalism involved more than criticism of society in ideological terms; it also involved the personal crises-moral, intellectual, and political-which individual intellectuals faced as a result of their social criticism. Willy-nilly, social criticism turned the intellectuals into not only critics but also militant opponents of the "men of power" who governed Peru. Traumas of conscience, moreover, also beset many intellectuals because of the moral-intellectual implications of their social criticism. The intellectuals' commitment to a modernizing nationalism involved a dual conflict. Partly or entirely, they opposed traditional Peruvian social values which largely rested on authoritarian religious and philosophical assumptions like natural law. Colonial Peru's Christian-scholastic idealism provided not only a religious but also a social catechism for society. Yet the breach between such values and actual social practices could not have been greater, so