This project traces the development of a literary and pictorial form that articulates political ideas: personification. I show how personification served in early modern times to convey notions of state order and of disorder. The focus is on two European models of state personification. The first, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, which represented the idea of an absolute and sovereign political entity through its original conception as a person. The second is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the public person and, more broadly, the emergence of Marianne as the embodiment of the newly envisioned republic in 18th-century France. In parallel, these concepts of the state are linked to a personified counterpart: America, imagined as a space of barbarism, lacking political organization and seen only as a territory to be transplanted with one.
The project explores an unconventional and previously unexamined trajectory. Its third part traces how the contradiction between European personifications of the state and of America takes on a syncretic form in 19th-century South America. Domingo Sarmiento aimed to describe a creole order that bypassed Europe’s supposedly inevitable civilizational principles and instead systematized barbarism. The figure created by Sarmiento, Facundo, personifies the caudillo order—a distinctive form of leadership emerging from the Pampas. Like Hobbes and Rousseau, Sarmiento understood that this new version of statehood needed to be embodied in a concrete form through personification. Yet, unlike them, he did not frame it in opposition to America. Facundo serves as a paradoxical synthesis and, ultimately, a culmination of this conceptual pairing.
The transatlantic intellectual history developed here traces an original and coherent thread in three key respects.
[1] Philosophy of History: Its main exponents, including Hobbes, Rousseau, and Sarmiento, believe that History has a direction. European political forms will eventually prevail over native American barbarism.
[2] Use of Personification: Each of these thinkers employs the figure of personification to make sense of what they perceive as novel understandings of political order.
[3] Synthesis instead of Replacement: The conclusion of my research in Sarmiento’s Facundo should not be surprising. The philosophy of history that underpins this narrative suggests a necessary resolution to the opposition between European order and American barbarism. However, Sarmiento observes that on the periphery of the American continent, a new political entity is resisting the forces of progress. European civilization does not simply implant itself and prevail; instead, the caudillo state absorbs certain elements of civilization while simultaneously “barbarizing” them. It is precisely because this form of organization defies easy explanation and subverts the expected course of History that Sarmiento turns to personification as a means of representation.
